[T]he enthronement showed that the emperor had assumed the reins of government with the benevolent heart of his ancestors. In so doing he has renewed the glory that he inherited from their virtuous spirits and become the basis of the belief we have kept in our hearts and minds for thousands of years: namely, that our majesty is a deity [kamisama] and a living god [ikigami].58
No student of the enthronement can fail to be struck by the zeal with which this message of manifest divinity was proclaimed, and the significant numbers of ordinary Japanese who received it enthusiastically. As for Hirohito, neither then nor later did he ever publicly do anything, on his own initiative, to make people question that he was a “living god” or question the idea that Japan was a “divine country” because he and his people had united as one.59
In his analysis of Yokohama newspaper editorials devoted exclusively to the enthronement that appeared between January 1928 and January 1929, the historian Nakajima Michio identified three themes to which the enthronement gave heightened expression. First, the enthronement was seen as a great opportunity to indoctrinate the people in the national morality, thereby aiding the government’s campaign to control dangerous thoughts.60 To that end the editorialists urged the adoption of the “Oriental principles” of “the father’s way and the mother’s way” (fud bod), premised on the notion that the mother personified love while the father was the “main carrier of morality.”61 The view that men—or at least Japanese men—were morally superior to women was dear to monarchists of the period. But the supreme values in national morality were loyalty to the emperor and filial piety (chk). The emperor’s awards of sake cups to elders over eighty, and the honoring by village and town authorities of persons over sixty years of age, reflected this way of thinking.62
Enthronement propaganda also stressed the compatibility of the kokutai with modern science. Considering that the mainstream position in earlier kokutai debates had underscored the estrangement of the kokutai from modern thought, this represented a remarkable reversal of argument. Now journalists asserted that “modern science” actually validated the kokutai. Scientific studies were daily demonstrating that “the spirit of respect for the gods, reverence toward ancestors, the unity of the monarch and the people, the unity of rites and governance, and the identity of loyalty and filial piety…constitute the most sublime human principles.”63
A third editorial theme of 1928 was that the enthronement of the Shwa emperor had inaugurated a new era in which youthful Japan was poised to become the hub of the entire world and to assume the mission of guiding all peoples.64 An editorial in the Yokohama Beki Shimp of December 1, 1928, titled “Young Japan and its Global Mission,” claimed that loyalty and filial piety constituted a leadership principle for the entire world:
Today’s Japan should indeed not confine itself to its own small sphere. Neither should it remain in its position in the Orient or continue to occupy the place it holds in the world. This is an age in which Japan bears a global mission. It has become the center, the principal, and the commander and is advancing with the times to lead the entire world.65
Nakajima concluded his analysis of the Yokohama newspapers of 1928 by noting that “Japan had not yet entered the age of fascism yet the editorials were already preaching the theme of ‘the eight corners of the world under one roof’ (hakk ichiu) without using that term.”66 The idea of the universal reign of peace in which each nation would take its proper place in the sun and recognize the leadership of Japan had lain dormant in the writings of Tokugawa-era scholars.67 During the opening of Japan in the 1850s and 1860s, hakk ichiu was revived and linked to the new conviction that Japan’s emperor should always be “a charismatic political leader who stands at the head of, and promotes, the process of civilization and enlightenment.”68 The latter idea had influenced Meiji’s image throughout his reign. Starting around 1928 Hirohito and his reign became associated with the rediscovery of hakk ichiu, an expansionist belief that imparted new dynamism to Japanese nationalism.
Clearly the long enthronement process of the late 1920s built up and released enormous popular energy and enthusiasm.69 Because the celebrations were set against a background of literary and artistic representations of an earlier military triumph—the Russo-Japanese War—the enthronement at its point of climax was experienced as a victorious foreign war. Undoubtedly it played a major role in enticing people to the side of the emperor and the state, and in mobilizing self-governing bodies, such as court-sponsored youth groups, the Imperial Reservists Association, neighborhood associations, and right-wing gangs. While that was going on, the Rising Sun flag was also diffused, and the Photography Department of the Imperial Household Ministry made preparations for “bestowing” on the nation’s schools the most important symbol of the new nationalism—the sacred portrait of Emperor Hirohito and Empress Nagako, he in his new supreme generalissimo’s uniform, with decorations on his chest; she beside him wearing a low-cut Western gown with a decorated sash.
Campaigns of national spiritual mobilization continued after 1928, pushing the nation’s pride in Hirohito and in itself to new heights, and making belief in his sacredness the touchstone of political correctness. On December 1, 1928, the Tanaka cabinet issued a Statement Concerning the Guidance of Thought that advocated “promotion of education” and the “cultivation of the concept of the kokutai.” Nine months later another cabinet launched a project dear to the court group since the start of Hirohito’s regency: a national movement to give instruction and guidance to the nation on the danger of antiestablishment mass movements and on “improving economic life and nurturing national power.” The propaganda campaign also sought to “clarify the kokutai and promote national spirit.” With these multiple goals in mind, the Ministry of Education shortly afterward issued a directive to all schools and colleges throughout the country concerning the implementation of the new thought campaign.70
In this way the Shwa monarchy became ideologically empowered through the indoctrination of the masses in the religion of Japanese spirit and deep veneration for—even worship of—the sacred ruler. It cannot be overlooked that these tendencies of Japanese nationalism emerged in the late 1920s, on the very eve of the great world economic slump, when Italian Fascism first registered itself internationally and the Nazi Party began its electoral surge in Germany. These themes and obsessions of Shwa nationalism at first descended mainly “from above” into mainstream culture rather than rising from the common people. As they unfolded they subverted the Meiji constitutional structure while reconnecting with Shinto orthodoxy. The popular enthusiasm engendered by war and imperialist expansion during the fourth year of Hirohito’s reign added new elements and motivations from below, which further transformed the constitutional order. When Hirohito began his reign, emperor ideology was definitely eroding and had become a psychological burden. Hirohito and the court group did their utmost, from the very start, to impart a new lease on life to all the irrational beliefs associated with the throne. They actively encouraged people to look to the emperor as the source of their morality—an omnipotent ruler conjoining political and military power with religious authority.
The political activities of Hirohito and the court group relaunched the monarchy in ways that gave a more militaristic configuration to Japanese nationalism. By embellishing the Meiji past, by celebrating the personality and “virtues” of the Meiji emperor, while simultaneously exalting the Shwa emperor, they erected the springboard for the 1930s cult of emperor worship. Hirohito was its vehicle, and under him, with his active encouragement, the campaign soon took off and transformed Japanese politics, which were already becoming more pluralistic, divisive, and repressive.
Furthermore, during the very period in which political parties were rising to the apogee of their power, Hirohito’s ritual enthronement and deification gave mystical intensity and strength to his double image as living diety (arahitogami) and supreme commander of the armed forces (daigensui). The powerful emotions released by these rites
countered “democracy” and pacifism at home and antimilitary initiatives abroad. Only after Hirohito and his entourage had delivered all these blows to the Taish democracy movement did military officers act out their dissatisfaction with party governments by resorting to aggression in Manchuria.
Whether early Shwa nationalism, grounded in emperor ideology and imperial myths and rituals, can properly be seen as part of a worldwide “fascist” phenomenon remains contested among historians. Deification of the national racial community through its embodiment in a cult figure was a common element. Militarism, dictatorship, and the glorification of war, as well as youth, spirit, moral regeneration, and national mission, were certainly other common elements. And while Japan was always itself and sui generis, and Hirohito was no rabble-rousing, mesmerizing, crowd-dominating Führer or Duce, neither were Germany and Italy identical ideologically or organizationally. On balance, therefore, the ideological similarities among the leading revisionist fascist states during the 1930s, the similar psychological roles played by their cult leaders, as well as their historical trajectories of late development, all seem to be more important than their obvious differences.
6
A POLITICAL MONARCH EMERGES
Starting in 1927 stories of conflict with China over Manchuria returned to the front pages of Japanese newspapers, the Shwa financial panic erupted, and both crises worsened with each passing year. Simultaneously criticism of the monarchy and of capitalism—referred to by opinion makers as the “thought problem”—spread even as the rituals of enthronement were unfolding around Hirohito, implanting in the Japanese a new image of him as a charismatic authority on a par with Meiji.
Equally disturbing to Hirohito, naval officers now presented him with conflicting views on how best to meet the navy’s national defense requirements.1 Adm. Kato Kanji, the leading opponent of the Washington Naval Treaty, began to pressure Hirohito to enlarge the geographic sphere of national defense. Kato argued that “the safety of the empire’s homeland required confronting American naval forces deployed in the western Pacific” rather than in waters closer to home as specified in the 1923 policy.2 Hirohito approved Kato’s report, delivered to him on November 27, 1929, but clung to the arguments of Kato’s opponents, the “treaty faction” admirals. They too wanted a big navy and believed in the doctrine of winning a war by fighting a decisive naval battle; but they insisted that the difference in national power between Japan and the United States ruled out, for the time being, anything but a passive defense of the empire.
At the start of his reign Hirohito avoided facing up to this continuing disagreement in national defense thinking within the navy. Although he maintained a very keen interest in the military side of his public life, he and his entourage preferred to concentrate on domestic affairs. There, they imagined, he would leave his mark in the march of emperors through the ages. Their initial, overriding goals, therefore, were to insert Hirohito’s “will” into the conduct of government, to revive the power of the monarchy, and to strengthen his image as an authority figure equal to Meiji.
In affairs with the West the spirit of conciliation lingered, as attested by Japan’s two main diplomatic projects of these years: the Kellogg-Briand Pact of August 1928, and the London Naval Treaty of April 1930. Yet signs of change, and of movement away from the pacifism and openness of the post–World War I era, were beginning to multiply. On February 20, 1928, representatives of left-wing parties, campaigning for progressive reform, opened a new front against the ruling elites by winning eight seats in the first national elections under the expanded suffrage law. Seventeen days later, on March 15, the government of Prime Minister Tanaka carried out mass arrests on a national scale of 1,568 Communist Party members and activists of the labor and peasant movements.3 In April came the first expulsions of Marxist professors from the imperial universities in Kyoto, Tokyo, and Kyushu. On June 29 the Tanaka cabinet suspended normal constitutional processes and issued an emergency imperial edict revising the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 with respect to the crime of “altering the kokutai,” now made punishable by death.4
For Communist Party members and intellectuals influenced by Marxist thought, the general election and the repression that followed in its wake became the occasion for redefining the new emperor as an oppressor, and for pointing to the social determinants of the throne. At the same time the imperial state was arresting Communists and their supporters, the new partisan slogan “overthrow the emperor system” spread in intellectual circles affected by Marxism. Meanwhile, abroad, on June 4, officers of the Kwantung Army guarding the South Manchurian Railway Zone murdered the local warlord, Chang Tso-lin. The next year, 1929, young Emperor Hirohito condoned the army’s cover-up of this incident, thereby encouraging further acts of military defiance.
The groundwork for the future commission of war atrocities by the Japanese military was also being laid during this period. In 1928 the Tanaka government failed to endorse an international protocol banning chemical and biological warfare. The next year the privy council, responding to pressure from the military, failed to ratify the full Geneva Prisoner of War Convention, signed two years earlier. The privy councillors accepted the argument of the ministers of the army and navy, and of the foreign minister, that the clause concerning treatment of POWs was too lenient and could not possibly be implemented because the emperor’s soldiers would never allow themselves to become prisoners of war.5 This action in particular helped pave the way for later Japanese denials of the validity of international legal conventions for the treatment of prisoners of war and military wounded.6
In diaries and memoirs covering these crucial early years of his reign, Hirohito’s close advisers—Makino, Kawai, Nara, and Okabe—painted a laudatory portrait of the young emperor. They admired Hirohito’s unwillingness to be used by the parties—as if it was not in the nature of the imperial institution to be used—they praised him for his determination to take the supervisory role in politics that his father had been physically unable to perform, and they expressed satisfaction in their own tutoring skills for helping to bring this about. Only General Nara’s account suggests that Hirohito was, at this stage, less than enthusiastic in asserting over his armed forces the control that was required of him by law.
The diaries of the entourage reveal Hirohito’s abiding concern with political action. Discontent with merely looking on passively as history proceeded along its own path, he intervened in the decisions of the party cabinets and the privy council, arbitrated indirectly disputes among the leading political parties, and even forced the parties in the Diet to halt their debates to suit his convenience. Hirohito, influenced by Makino and the palace staff, soon did what Emperor Meiji had never done: scold, and effectively fire, a prime minister, Gen. Tanaka Giichi, president of the Seiykai—thereby nullifying Minobe’s “organ” theory of the state, which the political parties were then drawing on to rationalize their actions.
Having rid themselves of Tanaka and his Seiykai government, Hirohito and his staff gave full backing to Hamaguchi Yk, president of the less diplomatically adventuristic Minseito, installing him as Tanaka’s successor in July 1929. In April 1930, months after Hamaguchi had formed his cabinet, Emperor Hirohito, with the full support of his entourage and Saionji as well, overrode the advice of his naval chief of staff and vice chief of staff, Admiral Kat and Vice Admiral Suetsugu, on the contentious matter of naval tonnage reduction. Although Washington and London had hinted they might form a naval alliance against Japan if it did not comply with the warship ratios worked out at the Washington Conference, Kato and his supporters on the Navy General Staff balked at the final compromise negotiated at London. They refused to accept “any limit on the navy’s heavy cruiser tonnage of less than 70 percent of the individual cruiser strengths of the American and British fleets.”7 Kat’s position, as he explained to protreaty Adm. Okada Keisuke, was that “[t]his problem concerns the fate of the navy, and therefore I want you to be aware that that is more important
than the fate of the government.”8
Strongly supportive of the navy’s blatant intervention in politics during 1930, and sharing Kato’s contempt for party government (and for what Kat called Japan’s “Judaized society” or “the Jewish enemy in our hearts”), were General Araki and Admirals Ogasawara and Tg.9 All four men maintained close ties to civilian ultranationalist ideologues and exerted influence on the Navy and Army Ministries, the Diet, the privy council and the palace (via Prince Fushimi). Their efforts accomplished nothing, however; for Hamaguchi stood firm against Kato, Suetsugu, and Tg and accepted the compromise cruiser tonnage ratios, as court officials had urged him to do. Thereupon the Seiykai joined with the military to publicly attack Hamaguchi and the court entourage, accusing them of having signed the treaty without the support of the Navy General Staff, thereby infringing on the emperor’s “right of supreme command.”
Determined to overthrow the Minseit cabinet, and resentful of the palace entourage for having earlier forced Tanaka to resign, the Seiykai leaders accused Hamaguchi and the “evil advisers” around the throne—Makino, Suzuki, and Kawai—of relying on arms limitations treaties and on the “cooperation” of Britain and the United States to defend Japan’s interests in China. By charging that Grand Chamberlain Suzuki had blocked the formal report to the emperor of the chief of the Navy General Staff, and that the government was pursuing a mistaken defense policy, the Seiykai politicians contributed to an atmosphere that fostered extremism.
Meanwhile literary, artistic, political, and international events were all coming together to create a new mood in Japan. Little had been written on the victorious Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars during the entire Taish period. In 1930, however, the military commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Russo-Japanese War, after having remembered it only five years earlier. In the interim, many emotional articles, books, picture books, and plays had appeared that gave national prominence to the Russo-Japanese War and to the admiral whose “divine action” (kamiwaza) had saved Japan in its confrontation with Russia.10 These stories featured, as “paragons of the military man” and leading “war gods” (as opposed to mere heroes), Fleet Admiral Tg, who was still alive and active, and Comm. Hirose Takeo, who in 1904 had died attempting to seal the harbor in the second battle of Port Arthur.11 In 1930, at the Kabuki Theater in Tokyo, The Fall of Port Arthur, in which General Nogi lost two sons, was enacted. When a Russian general in the play extended his sympathy to Nogi, Nogi replied, “‘I could not have returned to Tokyo with my sons alive. As a father, I am pleased with the death of my two sons for the emperor.’ At this the frenzied crowd cheered wildly.”12
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 22
