The enthronement culminated during the months of November and December 1928. In November, in towns and cities in every prefecture and metropolitan district throughout the empire, hundreds of thousands of people took part in banquets and award ceremonies; millions of schoolchildren joined in flag parades and lantern festivals. Before the year ended the throne had dispensed millions of yen as an expression of imperial benevolence for the nation’s poor, liberally awarded medals, granted titles, and bestowed posthumous decorations on historical figures from the thirteenth, fourteenth, and nineteenth centuries who were noted for loyalty to the throne.35 Also in the name of the emperor, the government reduced the sentences of 32,968 criminals, including the assassin of Hara Kei; commuted the punishments of 26,684 prisoners in the colonies; and granted special amnesty to another 16,878 prisoners.36 Municipal and prefectural authorities, town and village governments initiated construction projects at all levels that gave unprecedented numbers of ordinary people the chance to participate actively in ushering in the new monarchical era.
For a typical example, in colonial Karafuto almost the entire population of more than 295,000 (including approximately two thousand Ainu and other aborigines) was mobilized to participate in the enthronement.37 When the ceremonies ended, the Karafuto colonial government followed up by undertaking more than five hundred memorial projects, ranging from the construction of public parks and agricultural experimental farms to the building of “a youth hall, sacred storage places for safekeeping the emperor’s picture, monuments for Japan’s war dead, and government office buildings.”38
Activities similar to those in Karafuto went on in a much more restrained manner in colonial Korea, where Governor-General Sait Makoto had tolerated the growth of an indigenous Korean press as part of Japan’s 1920s “cultural policy.” The colonial government began the month with a luncheon banquet at the Kyong-bok Palace on Meiji Day, November 3. Schoolchildren participated in flag-waving (Japanese, of course) and lantern processions. Accolades of the emperor were generously bestowed; more than eight hundred elderly men received gifts from the emperor; a banquet for designated collaborators was hosted at the Korean monarch’s royal shrine; a contingent of dancers was enlisted from Seoul’s Chinese community to perform in street processions. The newly established Keij (Seoul) Broadcasting Company covered the November ceremonies and rituals of accession in the prescribed manner. So too did the colonial government’s official Korean-language newspaper, which had more than twenty-two thousand subscribers or approximately 22 percent of the colony’s three major dailies.39
The Korean public at large, however, was far more influenced by the colony’s three other Korean newspapers, which countered the official coverage with strikingly nationalist articles. They denied space to the imperial pageantry and brazenly put down the imperial celebrations by running scores of articles that called attention to the increased police repression and preemptive arrests of Koreans. On November 9, eve of Hirohito’s deification ceremony, Tong’a ilbo (Oriental daily) reminded its readers of Korea’s own uniqueness by publishing an article on the foundation myth of Tan’gun, progenitor deity of the Korean race and so counterpart to Amaterasu Ōmikami. Also, to make sure its readers did not forget, the newspaper carried notices on “Han’gul Day,” set aside to honor the invention of characters for writing the Korean language.
Thus the magnificent imperial pageantry and rituals of 1928 evoked sharply different nationalist responses, and in Korea revealed the deep tensions that beset the empire. But insofar as vast segments of the Japanese population played a role in these celebratory events and commemorative public projects, and the nation as a whole tuned in to radio descriptions of the rituals at their climax in November, as well as the military reviews of early December, these practices may have shored up waning ideological beliefs and made people more supportive of the state.
IV
The formal ceremonies (termed sokui no rei) of ascending to the throne, based on the myth of Amaterasu Ōmikami, began with an imperial procession from Tokyo to Kyoto on November 6, 1928, and reached a ritual climax in Kyoto four days later, when Hirohito took possession of all three sacred imperial regalia and reported his temporal accession to the spirits of his ancestors. In an afternoon ceremony on November 10 before an audience of about 2,700 civil and military officials and Diet members, Hirohito read aloud the following words to the people of Japan:
Domestically I sincerely wish to bring harmony to the people by kindheartedly guiding them to the good, thus promoting the further prosperity of the country. Externally I sincerely wish to maintain eternal world peace and advance goodwill among nations through diplomacy, thus contributing to the welfare of humanity. You, our subjects, join cooperatively with one another, put aside self-interest, and take on service to the public, thereby allowing me to nurture the great legacy of my divine ancestors and respond to the spirit of their benevolence.40
After completion of the sokui no rei, sacred dances were performed before the emperor’s portable shrine. Two days later, on the night of November 14–15, a “great food-offering ceremony” (daijsai) was held in Kyoto, followed by two consecutive days of banquets.41
The daijsai, the most important and dramatic of the enthronement events, marked the emperor’s deification and confirmed his “descent from the gods.” The idea of the rulers’ sacred divinity lay at the core of emperor ideology as it had in Meiji, and had proved itself to be necessary to the survival of emperor ideology into the middle of the twentieth century. Based on an imperial ordinance of 1909, the daijsai ceremony departed from the ancient form of that religious rite by its heavy emphasis on the myth of the emperor’s descent from heaven and by its connection with his postenthronement ritual visits to the Grand Shrine of Ise and to the mausoleums of Emperor Jimmu and four previous emperors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.42
The daijsai started on the night of November 14 and lasted into the early morning hours of the fifteenth. First the official guests seated themselves inside special structures near the compound where the daijsai was to be performed, while honor guards in ceremonial costume took up their places. Next the Shwa emperor, wearing ritual garments of raw white silk and attended by court ladies and a chef, entered a specially constructed compound, containing three main wooden structures, wherein he re-enacted symbolically the descent from the “plain of high heaven” in Shinto mythology. After purifying himself for the gods in the first chamber, he and his attendants passed through a hallway into two thatched huts in succession, called the yukiden and sukiden. Placed within these innermost chambers were rectangular matted beds—the shinza and gyoza—on which he performed secret rites. The shinza was believed to embody the spirit of the sun goddess, Amaterasu Ōmikami. By reclining on it in a fetal position, wrapped in a quilt, the emperor, according to Shinto theology, united with her spirit, thereby consummating his symbolic “marriage” to his progenitor deity. Afterward, sitting on the gyoza facing Amaterasu Ōmikami, he made the food offerings to her and other deities that completed the process of his becoming a living god or “manifest deity (arahitogami).”
So, staged behind a thick veil of secrecy in the dark of night, the rituals of the daijsai climaxed in Hirohito’s deification, giving him, it was claimed, an attribute that, as emperor, he had lacked until that moment.43 Members of the imperial family and invited guests were unable to watch the ceremony. The press cautioned the general public, which had also been prevented from scrutinizing the “awe-inspiring mystery,” to suspend rational judgment about the shinza.44 On the other hand, the press did not suggest that judgment should be suspended about the amount of money being spent on the enthronement while the nation was in a depression, for that would have been an act of lèse-majesté. At least a few critical placards were made, saying, “Oppose the succession ceremonies! Celebrate the anniversary of the revolution!” There is also a line in a collection of “proletarian” tanka poems published in honor of May Day, 1929, that reads: “The big
hoopla succession ceremonies are costing $7,360,000! They will break the backs of the poor!”45
On December 2, 1928, two weeks after acquiring his god-persona, Hirohito traveled to the Yoyogi Parade Ground in Tokyo to review the biggest display of army and air might in Japanese history. For hours he watched from an elevated stand as more than 35,000 troops, including 4,500 cavalry, marched past in a chilly drizzle.46 Two days later he went on to Yokohama for a Grand Review of the Fleet. A total of thirty-nine submarines and 208 ships, including the giant aircraft carriers Kaga and Akagi, and about 45,000 crewmen took part in this final event, along with 25,000 members of the Imperial Reservists Association, and thousands of minor dignitaries from around the country. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Japanese formed the crowd of spectators in Yokohama. Millions listened to running radio commentary of how the supreme commander reviewed his fleet while 130 naval aircraft flew over the harbor in slow, droning battle formation.
These two huge displays of military power marked the real completion of Hirohito’s enthronement.47 Both were broadcast from Tokyo and replayed throughout Japan by a special nationwide radio hookup, so that the people could hear the “boom of the imperial salute guns, the strains of the national anthem, the tread of the soldiers, the clatter of the cavalry, and the hum of airplane propellers.”48
In his splendid history of the enthronement, Nakajima Michio noted that the grand military reviews were designed to show the people that their sovereign had now acquired all the attributes of his position and become a complete emperor. They emphasized that his abstract, symbolic identity as the nation’s highest religious authority was, in practice, always combined with his concrete image as supreme military commander. Two images, two concepts—but one perception: one emperor performing two distinct but combined roles of equal gravity.
V
So began what became an official and accelerating emperor cult. It worked to enhance the personal image of a ruler who physically was not imposing, and whose demeanor was not godlike, though very controlled. It worked also to strengthen national unity and the subjective ties that bound individuals and groups to the nation through the emperor.49 And if the dogma of the divine emperor required that limits be set on rational thought and debate about the monarchy, then let the limits be set by the policies of repressing “unhealthy thought” (that is, political dissent) and heightening martial spirit.
By late December 1928 the yearlong enthronement festivities had ended. The press less frequently reflected the nationalistic fever associated with them. The Kyoto Palace remained open to the public, though. Enthronement memorial books continued to be published. Officials continued to declare that the emperor and his subjects had been joined as one entity: “one mind united from top to bottom.”
Newspapers continued to editorialize on the mission of “young Japan.” The “thought police” pressed ahead with their work of arresting communists and other dissidents. And many Japanese, because of the enthronement, probably were more strongly than ever convinced of their innate moral superiority as a people and a race. Such thinking would soon have profound repercussions on the political events of the 1930s, tainting the mood of the country with the belief that Japanese culture was spiritually redemptive and a force for the regeneration of the world, while Western culture, on the contrary, was defiling and needed to be purged.50
This political reconstruction of Japanese identity, with renewed emphasis on race-people-nation rather than classes within a nation, must be carefully examined. The new racial consciousness was created in a context of worsening economic conditions and intensified rural class strife, with tenant organizations challenging the landlord regime, on which the imperial system in the countryside was partly based. Tenant disputes rose steadily from 1,866 in 1928 to 3,419 in 1931; industrial strikes also increased, reaching a prewar peak of 984 in 1931.51 And just when social conflict was heating up, along came a clarifying, soothing, heaven-sent racism to infuse Japanese nationalism with a universalizing impulse.
As time passed Hirohito lessened his exposure to the Japanese people. During 1928 he made many tours and visits to the army and navy academies and their graduation ceremonies, the Diet, his private mansions, his relatives, and his ancestral mausoleums—all places where there was little chance of anyone approaching him with a dreaded direct appeal. His travels as supreme commander (daigensui) in connection with special military reviews and exercises continued at a rate of about four to six annually from 1928 to the start of World War II; but his longer, regional excursions (chih junk) in his divine capacity as heavenly sovereign declined abruptly and then just stopped after a visit to Hokkaido in 1936.52 The emperor’s trips in connection with naval reviews and army grand maneuvers served to mobilize the nation and, at the same time, to highlight his divine and militaristic emperor images, not his secondary status as a “constitutional” monarch. Instead of creating intimacy with his subjects in their period of economic suffering, these pseudo-public appearances left him as remote from, and as uncomprehending of, their daily lives as ever.53
On those rare occasions in the first two decades of Shwa rule when the consecrated emperor traveled on civil inspection tours, Home Ministry and prefectural officials regarded his visits as very serious events requiring the most careful advance preparation and allowing for zero human error. When an error occurred, the consequences could be unfortunate. On November 16, 1934, for example, a motorcycle policeman leading the imperial motorcade through Kiry City, Gumma prefecture, was supposed to take a left turn at an intersection. Instead he led the procession straight on, slightly upsetting the itinerary of the tour. Seven days later the erring policeman committed suicide, the governor of Gumma and all the top officials involved in staging the tour were reprimanded, police officials in Gumma had their salaries docked for two months; and the home minister himself was questioned and severely criticized in the Imperial Diet.54
To protect and welcome the emperor, to ensure that the crowds who bowed before him remained silent and controlled, that nothing went amiss while he was in the prefecture, local officials formed special committees, and those serving on them, after praying to the gods for strength and guidance, rehearsed every minute detail of his approaching benevolent visit.55 They mobilized all resources, laid out red carpets for Hirohito to walk on, swept and decorated the streets along which his motorcade would pass, disinfected (literally) and purified (ritually) the limousine in which he would ride, his railroad cars and the imperial locomotive, even the stations where he would stop. Sometimes the railroad tracks along his route were scoured and doused with disinfectants, especially where he was scheduled to alight.
The excessive, almost morbid need to make Hirohito’s way spotless and germless, and his presence invisible (as all eyes had to be looking down, not at him), provides insight into the assumptions underlying Shinto beliefs. Threaded through the emperor’s enthronement rituals, and his travels in connection with them, are many obsessive dualisms: clean against unclean, pure against impure, the self against the other. From these deep conceptual and emotional dichotomies would follow a natural, almost inevitable progression during the 1930s and early 1940s: We Japanese confront the world as a racially pure nation; therefore our wars are just and holy wars, and our victories create “new orders” in East Asia.56
To present Hirohito as deity incarnate, untouched by the evils of the political world, of his court, and of society—as pure, “sacred and inviolable”—required smoke, mirrors, and other magic—or, at the very least, concealment. Here the court group found additional reason to hide from the public Hirohito’s political actions during the Wakatsuki and Tanaka cabinets. If they had been concerned to cover up their own political interventions and those of the preen-thronement regent, they dissembled even more in order to conceal the numerous interventions of the postenthronement emperor. Precisely this combination of secret political maneuvering and public deception, authoritarianism and lack of consciousness of personal responsibility became the
hallmarks of the Shwa emperor and the men of “moderation” who served him at court.
The Shwa enthronement rites, celebrations, and festivities of 1928 affected Japanese political culture at all levels but served chiefly to reindoctrinate those in positions of public responsibility—especially government officials, schoolteachers, and policemen—in the sacred myths of Japan’s origin. Taish’s incompetence had abetted the rise of Taish democracy; Hirohito’s enthronement hastened its demise and revived the theocratic ideal of the fusion of religion and politics. The rites and celebrations of Shwa thus contributed to closing Japanese society once again to the absorption of new Western thought. Above all, his enthronement pronounced that the emperor, ruling as well as reigning, had been made into a living god.
Many dignitaries invited to the Kyoto ceremonies sounded this theme of the emperor’s divinity in a special issue of the popular business magazine Jitsugy no Nihon that appeared in November 1928. Fujiyama Raita, president of the Great Japan Sugar Company and member of the House of Peers, gave expression to it when he wrote: “Witnessing this ceremony, I really felt that our emperor is the descendant of the gods and that our nation always has a god”57 The court ritualist Hoshino Teruoki reiterated:
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 21
