Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

  From 1927 onward the court group struggled to place the monarchy within a new ideological framework and, at the same time, find a way to break through the constraints on the emperor’s powers that had developed over the nearly fifteen years of the Taish emperor’s debility. To that end they perpetuated the convenient fiction of the emperor as a “constitutional monarch.” In their own eyes, of course, “constitutional monarchy” was never a device for restricting the emperor’s formidable powers, as it is in the West. It merely provided a protective facade behind which his powers could be freely exercised and even expanded as the situation required, while he remained nonaccountable.15 The main objectives of the court group at the start of the new Shwa era were to help Hirohito exercise real supervision; to act as an electoral college, helping him to choose a prime minister; and to ensure that his purposes were incorporated into decisions of the cabinets. In their reasoning the idea of “the normal course of constitutional politics” required that the will of the cabinet reflect the young emperor’s will.

  This convergence of wills was to be achieved through a process of constant informal reporting (nais) by the prime minister, by other cabinet ministers, and by the military, coupled with questioning by the emperor (gokamon) before any cabinet decision could ever be formally presented to him. This process of maneuvering behind the scenes to obtain the emperor’s consent was how Hirohito effected his purposes in policy making, and in the appointment and promotion of high-level military personnel. It was also how the court group always understood the meaning of the kokutai: For them the kokutai was a political system that allowed the emperor to use his power to rule, never merely to reign.16

  However, in providing direct imperial rule in the age of mass suffrage, with the prime minister as the emperor’s most important adviser, the court group had to be vigilant lest the throne be pulled down into partisan controversy. In the words of Privy Seal Makino, the cardinal rule whenever a political problem arose was that “the matter should never implicate or cause harm to the emperor” (heika ni rui o oyobosazaru koto o daiichini).17 Thus the chief task of the court group from the beginning of Shwa was to ensure that the party cabinets accepted both Hirohito’s supervisory role and the need to shield him from either credit or blame for his actions in that role.

  Essentially the court group reasoned that with a real ruler in the Meiji mold now on the throne, the proper way to govern was for the prime minister to inform himself of the emperor’s intention, through prior and full consultation with him on an informal basis (that is, nais), and then to act to realize the emperor’s wishes. In practice this meant that the court group had to develop situations and networks by which the emperor could influence, and implicitly give his sanction to, a solution, a problem, a policy, or a bill in the Diet before any of his constitutional advisers (his ministers) ever got around to presenting the matter to him in a formal report. That required keeping politics out of the public view. The more the emperor involved himself in civil and military decision making, the more deeply involved he and his closest aides became in deception, and the greater their stake in not ever admitting the truth.

  Under the Shwa emperor, therefore, the operating conditions for correct governance required extreme secrecy and constant simulation, dissimulation, indirection, and conniving on the part of high palace officials; unity, restraint, and profound humility on the part of ministers of state and heads of the emperor’s advisory organs, some of whom were deeply antagonistic and suspicious toward one another; and the embrace by the emperor of the dual morality that princes and politicians have practiced from time immemorial. For this convoluted approach to work, the prime minister had to be willing to consult constantly with the emperor and heed his intentions, even when they might not coincide with his own—but as the living god was the emperor, and vice versa, that was more than appropriate.

  II

  The Fifty-second Imperial Diet, which had adjourned following Emperor Taish’s death, had reconvened on January 18, 1927. Hirohito and his entourage lost no time in trying to influence political trends and make the political world aware of his presence.

  First, on January 19, 1927, the idea of a fourth national holiday was proposed in the House of Peers as if it had originated there rather than in the court. Two days earlier, however, Privy Seal Makino’s secretary, Kawai, had visited Prince Konoe and suggested that both houses of the Diet consider designating a holiday to commemorate the great virtues of the Meiji emperor.18 A short time later, the Diet approved a bill establishing November 3 as Meiji’s holiday (Meiji setsu), and the sanctioning announcement was made by imperial ordinance on March 3.

  The tenth anniversary of Meiji’s death, July 30, 1922, had passed relatively unnoticed by the court and the public, except for visits by the regent to Kyoto and the Momoyama mausoleums.19 Why now the new holiday? Because Hirohito’s enthronement was in the offing, and his entourage needed every device it could muster to invest him with greater charisma and blot out Taish’s image. Hirohito could hardly be sent back in time to participate in great victories that had been won when he had been only four years of age. But Meiji could be transported, via the new holiday, and the appropriate fanfare, to a new generation and era, and Hirohito thereby made to shine brighter, if only by reflected radiance.

  Due to the official mourning for Taish, the first national celebration of Meiji’s birthday could not begin until the following year. The honoring of Meiji therefore would occur during the enthronement and deification of his grandson, the noncharismatic Hirohito, whom the press was describing already as the new “incarnation of Emperor Meiji.”20 Before the year of mourning for Taish had even ended, the public had grown accustomed to thinking of the preen-thronement emperor as the new Meiji, and as the grandson who would perfect his imperial legacy.21

  Later, intending to remind the young emperor of the toil rice cultivation required, and so identify him in the public mind with the plight of rice farmers in a period of agricultural depression, Kawai invented a new court ritual. He suggested that Hirohito cultivate rice within the palace precincts. Hirohito agreed and a field was prepared inside the Akasaka Palace grounds for this purpose. On June 14, 1927, Hirohito received rice plants from different regions of the country and staged his very first rice-planting ritual. Later, after his enthronement, he moved his residence to the palace, and seventy and eighty tsubo (280 and 320 square yards) of dry and wet field, respectively, were reclaimed for the purpose of ceremonial rice planting. A small mulberry grove beyond the wet fields was also prepared for Empress Nagako to engage in sericulture, thereby identifying her with Japan’s most important export commodity, silk.22

  The second series of political interventions by Hirohito and the court group concerned Prime Minister Wakatsuki’s management of the Diet. In early 1927 leaders of the Seiykai and Seiy Hont renewed their attack on the Wakatsuki cabinet over the issues of the Osaka brothel scandal and the Pak Yol affair. Just before their formal motion of no confidence in the government came up for debate, however, Prime Minister Wakatsuki announced a three-day adjournment. He then met secretly with Tanaka of the Seiykai and Tokonami of the Seiy Hont and requested that political fighting stop out of consideration for the beginning of the new emperor’s reign.

  This compromise was brokered by the leaders of the main faction in the House of Peers. Behind it stood Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Makino and Imperial Household Minister Ichiki Kitokur, who deplored the possible dissolution of the Diet and the holding of elections right at the start of a new imperial reign. They wanted the parties to show restraint out of consideration for the new emperor. Makino and Ichiki had been instructing Wakatsuki on political matters ever since he became prime minister. They now told him to meet with the leaders of the opposition and resolve any further political strife in the Diet. The no-confidence motion should be withdrawn and the budget passed.23 In this way they could postpone the first democratic election to be held under the recently enacted universal manhood suffrage law—an electi
on that the parties expected to be very costly.

  When the lower house reconvened after Wakatsuki’s sudden adjournment, the court group prevailed. The main opposition parties withdrew their no-confidence bill, prompting a nonaffiliated member of the Diet to charge that the conference of the three party leaders had been an attempt to stifle free debate. Although political fighting in the Diet based on problems of the kokutai abated temporarily, the parties now understood that they could make more political capital at the expense of their opponents by “protecting the kokutai” than by “protecting the Meiji constitution.”

  Three months later, on April 17, 1927, the Wakatsuki cabinet collapsed: overthrown by its opponents in the privy council rather than in the Diet. Wakatsuki’s fall was brought about by the opposition of Privy Councillors It Miyoji and Hiranuma Kiichir to the moderate China policy of Foreign Minister Shidehara, who had refused to send Japanese troops to China after earlier Chinese provocations against Japanese living in the treaty port settlements. For Emperor Hirohito and the court group, Wakatsuki’s resignation furnished another opportunity to play a determining role. Kawai, Chinda, Ichiki, and Makino conferred among themselves and then with Hirohito, and decided that Gen. Tanaka Giichi, president of the largest party in the Diet, should form the next cabinet. Having established a consensus among themselves, they notified genr Saionji, who immediately agreed to their choice. Thereafter, until the assassination of Inukai Tsuyoshi, five years later, Japanese prime ministers were chosen not by the last genr but by a system of consultations centering on the lord keeper of the privy seal, with Saionji ratifying the choice of Hirohito and the court group after the fact.

  Tanaka formed his cabinet on April 20, 1927—the same day that Gen. Chiang Kai-shek established his Nationalist (Kuomintang) government in Nanking (now Nanjing) and renewed his Northern Expedition to unify China. Japanese foreign policy thenceforth took a decidedly more interventionist turn, as the intensification of the Chinese civil war increased the possibilities for dispatching troops to protect Japanese lives and property in China. The court group, having played the major role in the selection of General Tanaka as prime minister, now tried to impose its own political agenda and goals onto those of the new constitutional government.

  Tanaka was the first prime minister to discover that a strong-willed emperor capable of playing a determining role in politics could make life absolutely miserable for the leader of a political party. Almost from the moment Tanaka became prime minister, Hirohito and the court group took a keen interest in his performance and soon found themselves at odds with most of his policies. They disapproved of the way the Seiykai Party had expanded its power through an aggressive policy of personnel appointments. With his Confucian and bushid education, Hirohito wanted officials appointed solely on the basis of ability, not political criteria or affiliation.

  On June 15, 1927, Hirohito summoned Makino to complain about Tanaka’s personnel policies. Makino also felt that the political parties—the Seiykai in particular—were slighting the young emperor. He promised to speak to Tanaka about it. Disturbed that the parties were using the kokutai as a political tool, and ashamed of their behavior on the floor of the Diet, Makino believed that the emperor’s interest in politics was “the greatest blessing for the state and the imperial house at a time of difficulty in national affairs.” He saw nothing wrong in a politically active emperor, and credited that “achievement” to “our imperial entourage, which has contributed to cultivating his imperial virtues.”24

  Tanaka had difficulty understanding why Hirohito was displeased with his handling of personnel appointments. After all, by placing as many Seiykai Party members as possible in bureaucratic posts, he was merely following a traditional practice in “normal constitutional government,” one that went back to Hara Kei. “We did not increase the number of officials we replaced in a short period of time as compared with what the practice was before,” he reportedly told Hirohito in audience in the summer of 1927.25 But Tanaka’s remark merely irritated Hirohito, who again ordered that the prime minister be set straight.

  III

  Meanwhile the attention of Hirohito and the court group was focusing increasingly on his forthcoming enthronement. The declaration of national mourning for Taish and the staging of the enthronement rituals for Hirohito were conducted in accordance with the Shinto principle of the unity of politics and religion, and a separate tradition of court law, which had priority over the constitution. The rites and rituals of this key moment did not derive from the constitution or from legislation by parliament. The role of the Imperial Diet in these activities was only to vote the funds needed.

  The Shwa enthronement rituals, festivities, and national unity banquets were planned and staged under recession conditions. Nevertheless, to finance these activities at different levels of government, the Fifty-fifth Imperial Diet unanimously passed a budget that, in U.S. dollar terms at that time, amounted to $7,360,000. In cost, scale, amount of advance preparation, numbers of participants, and numbers of policemen assigned to supervise them, these events outshone all previous enthronements.26 But as the times were not considered “normal”—Hirohito had recently been the regent and Taish had been largely hidden from the public—the oligarchic elites who decided these matters felt it necessary to skip over the vacuum of Taish and link Hirohito directly to Meiji. This required rearticulating all the myths about the monarchy. After all, tradition and mythology helped to hold society together, despite its underlying conflicts.

  Technology was also harnessed to the glorification of the monarchy. In 1928, when the enthronement year began, Japan had entered the age of mass advertising and mass consumer culture. For nearly three years, regular nationwide radio broadcasts had been affecting public opinion and values.27

  Symbolically the enthronement was an exercise of power taking place at a time of renewed Japanese military activities on the Asian continent, and of increased reliance by the state on repression to prop up the fragile monarchy. Hence its total impact may best be understood when it is related to the rise of political reaction in Japan. Such reaction was evidenced by the Tanaka cabinet’s repeated dispatch of troops to China’s Shantung Province, and the increase, from 1928 onward, in the number of officials specializing in thought control.

  After revision of the Peace Preservation Law, the government appointed in all prefectures “thought procurators” and “special higher police.” The armed forces established their own “military thought police,” and special Home Ministry police officials were assigned to work full-time on uncovering anti-kokutai “conspiracies” being plotted by communists and other radicals. As a result, from 1928 onward the imperial state assumed a sterner attitude toward its critics. First, communists and leaders of the sectarian Shinto organizations of Ōmotoky and Tenriky, which refused to recognize Amaterasu Ōmikami as a superior deity, were subjected to increased police surveillance and repression; later the surveillance was extended to liberal intellectuals in journalism and the universities.28 Thus the process of manufacturing a new emperor through ritual and propaganda went hand in hand with a major expansion and dispersion of the thought-control apparatus.

  A Grand Ceremonies Commission, with Prince Kan’in as president and Prince Konoe as director, took charge of staging the Shwa enthronement rituals. Serving on the commission were Chief Cabinet Secretary Hatoyama Ichir, Imperial Household Ministry officials Sekiya and Kawai, various vice ministers, and the governor of Kyoto, where the ceremonies were to be held.29 The commission’s task was to ensure that all the events and commemorative projects of the enthronement were carefully scripted so as to reflect the themes of loyalty and service to the new emperor.30 Its main accomplishments, therefore, would be largely organizational and ideological. Checking the process of monarchical demystification and decline, keeping everything controlled that could be controlled, the commissioners reduced spontaneity to a minimum while enhancing, so far as it could be enhanced, Hirohito’s distinctively uncharismatic personal
ity. They also instilled the feeling that Japan was a “divine land” in which the monarch who became one with the gods at the same time bonded with his subjects as their collective “parent.”

  Assisting the commission in this remaking of the monarchy were the still new and relatively independent mass media, mainly radio and newspapers, which rose to the occasion by instructing the nation on the meaning of the unfamiliar rites and celebrations that were planned. Japanese newspapers were expanding their circulation and becoming national rather than local and regional. Their reporters were anxious to ingratiate themselves with the central bureaucracy. So, too, were radio announcers, who, in reporting on the pageantry at Kyoto, were dependent on scripts prepared in advance by the Imperial Household Ministry.31

  For a whole year, press and radio reported the ceremonies and rituals on a daily basis, day and night, throughout the home islands and in the Japanese colonies, as Hirohito and his entourage skillfully implemented the real lessons they had learned from King George V—lessons not about the constraints of constitutionalism but the importance of state spectacle and ritual in enhancing the monarch’s dignity and authority.32 When it was all over, the commission gave the print media unqualified praise for having acted as the new holy scripture of the Japanese state.33 Compliance with the wishes of the state, abject submissiveness to the fashions of the time—these were roles the modern Japanese press would continue to play. Censoring itself whenever it was not censored by authority, the press never became a free voice of conscience for the Japanese nation.

  The enthronement rituals and ceremonies, from their start in January to their climax in early December 1928, helped to manufacture a new imperial image for the young emperor. The rituals began with Hirohito’s dispatch of emissaries to the mausoleums of his four predecessors, and that of Emperor Jimmu, notifying the imperial spirits of his forthcoming enthronement. At the same time the yearlong schedule of ceremonial events at the three permanent shrines within the palace compound was made public. Next, on February 5, the emperor participated in rituals that chose by divination the fields where rice was to be grown to present to the sun goddess, Amaterasu Ōmikami. Through spring, summer, and fall the pace of events quickened. Using the press, radio, and public lectures, government officials and famous intellectuals instructed the nation in the revived themes of emperor ideology, which they often presented in explicit contrast to heterodox sentiments, such as communism and anarchism, that ran counter to official kokutai thought.34