Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

  Japan’s Manchukuo-vindicating new national image, as well as some characteristics of its worship of the state, resembled aspects of German Nazism and Italian Fascism. (The latter developed partly out of an Italian search for a counterpart to Japan’s national political religion of emperor worship.)1 With the arrest in 1933 of eighteen thousand dissidents, and the forced recantation of many left-wing leaders, the communist movement in Japan was all too easily suppressed.2 Between 1934 and 1936, what remained of Taish democracy and the institutions of constitutional liberalism were similarly enfeebled by intimidation and assassination. Although racial intolerance and bigotry never became a state policy as in Nazified, anti-Semitic Germany, racial discrimination against other Asians was habitual for many twentieth-century Japanese, having begun around the time of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, with the start of Japanese colonialism. The Anti-Comintern Pact made with Germany and Italy in November 1936 brought in Nazi ideologues who gained many Japanese supporters and injected Nazi-style anti-Semitic arguments into mainstream public discussion—where defamation of Jews was already widespread. Thereafter all Japanese governments shamelessly manipulated the popular image of the Jews, not so much to persecute them as to strengthen domestic ideological conformity.3

  Ethnological studies of the rural areas from which the army recruited most of its troops during the 1930s suggest, however, that despite the best efforts of the Ministry of Education, many country people were relatively unaffected by official propaganda. To them emperor ideology was neither so meaningful nor so valid as their own nativism. Family and village considerations still took precedence over state considerations. Indeed, down to the start of the China war in mid–1937, many villagers displayed only the shallowest acceptance of the emperor’s authority.4 Knowing this, the army always acted on the premise that soldiers were rooted, above all, to their families and villages. The army’s Field Service Code (senjinkun), issued on January 8, 1941, emphasized that “[t]hose who fear shame are strong. Remember always the good reputation of your family and the opinion of people of your birthplace.” And: “Do not shame yourself by being taken prisoner alive; die so as not to leave behind a soiled name.”5

  Significant exceptions to rural ignorance of the emperor’s authority were persons in posts of responsibility in local society. Village officials, schoolteachers, policemen, Buddhist and Shinto priests—the foot soldiers of Japanese nationalism—invoked the authority of the emperor and the power of the state to strengthen their local authority. Their loyalty to and veneration of the emperor often seemed spontaneous and deeply felt. But most villagers did not occupy positions of public responsibility and probably were not devout believers in the emperor. Their patriotism was of a different order.

  In 1935, for example, anthropologists John and Ella (Lury Wiswell) Embree interviewed farmers in the remote agricultural village of Suye Mura on Kyushu Island. When Ella Wiswell’s book, The Women of Suye Mura, appeared many years later, it described a world of hard-drinking, outspoken farm-women, who laughed at the emperor’s pretensions. Wiswell recorded a conversation with a literate woman of the village:

  Having stopped by for a chat, I asked her, “You worship the Emperor like a god (kamisama) don’t you?” indicating the hanging scroll portraying the Imperial couple in the tokonoma [ceremonial alcove in the main room]. “Yes, when we make a ceremonial offering to the gods, we make it to the emperor too. When we pray in front of the gods, it is also in front of the emperor, and to him we offer flowers,” she said. “Why?” I asked. “Well, I suppose it is because he is head (taish) of the country,” she replied. Then she described the figures in the scroll. “There on the left is Jimmu-tenn”, the very first…and on the right is his wife. Then come Taish-tenn and the Empress. Below them is the palace, then the three princes, Chichibu, Mikasa, and Takamatsu-sama. Below, there behind the flowers (she had a tall vase in front of the scroll) are the present Emperor and Empress. They are all great people….” “And who is above them all?” I asked. “That is Amaterasu-mikami…. She is the number-one goddess.” “So, but why are they all in the picture together? What is the relationship between Amaterasu and the present Emperor?” “I don’t know, but they are both there most probably because she is the greatest kamisama and he is the head of the country, the greatest person in Japan.” “Then the Emperor is not a kamisama?” “No, he is just worshiped like a god…, but he is not a real god. He is human, a very great man.”…“If the policeman were to hear us, he would tie me up and throw me in prison. But he can’t hear, can he?” I said I thought we were safe. I left her on the balcony, dusting and drying her lacquer-ware. So much for Emperor worship.6

  Even allowing for Wiswell’s leading questions, this interview, which occurred at the height of the “kokutai clarification movement,” suggests that the effort to prepare the populace for war had not penetrated deeply or widely. Life in the countryside was not yet geared to the political objectives of the army and navy. Nonideological irreverence for the throne and ignorance of, or disbelief in, the foundation myths were realities behind the effort to pump up state Shintoism, and they were hard to overcome.

  By the eve of all-out war with China, Japanese public schools, under orders from the Ministry of Education, were inculcating Shinto mythology as if it were historical fact; emperor ideology had become fused with anti-Western sentiment; and a conceptual ground had been prepared for the transformation of Hirohito into a benevolent pan-Asian monarch defending not only Japan but all of Asia from Western encroachment. Emperor Meiji’s image as a Western-style monarch defending Japan (alone) from Western imperialism was thereby enhanced—and stood on its head. From this time one can see a deepening conflict in official ideology between an emphasis on the absolute uniqueness of divine Japan, and the pan-Asian ideal that stressed a fundamental identity shared by the Japanese and their fellow Asians.

  I

  In the early 1930s Hirohito faced discipline problems in his military and attacks on his court entourage from within the military, from the Seiykai, the privy council, and civilian right-wing organizations. Hirohito’s military critics faulted him privately for “obstructing the army.”7 They called him an incompetent “mediocrity” who was manipulated by his advisers. Others complained, privately, that he gave less importance to affairs of state than to his recreations—marine biology, tennis, golf, and even mah-jongg.8 Young staff officers in Manchuria were irritated by his alleged dislike of war.9 Members of the imperial family were also critical. His brother Prince Chichibu and Princes Higashikuni and Kaya frequently reported that younger officers were unhappy with Hirohito’s expressions of dependency on his entourage.

  The year before, in 1932, Prince Chichibu, next in line to the throne and the brother with whom Hirohito was least intimate, had repeatedly counseled him to implement “direct imperial rule”—even if that meant suspending the constitution. At that time the emperor told Nara of his intention to transfer Captain Chichibu out of the Third Infantry Regiment because he had “become very radicalized” there.10 The regiment, commanded by Colonel Yamashita Tomoyuki [Hobun], was home to many populist young officers, including Nonaka Shiro, who two and a half years later would help plan and carry out the mutiny of February 1936. Acting as head of the imperial family, Hirohito had Chichibu reassigned to Army General Staff Headquarters in Tokyo, then to a regional command in distant Hirosaki, Aomori prefecture.

  In April 1933 Hirohito had tried to curb the young officers’ movement by pressing Nara to have the inspector general of military education, Hayashi Senjuro, an opponent of Army Minister Araki, take appropriate “educational measures” against extremism in the army.11 It was yet another example of rule by three-cushion indirection. Araki, however, was not easily deterred from his support of the young officers. He proceeded to undermine the emperor by calling for pardons for the army cadets, naval lieutenants, and ensigns who (together with one civilian) had been indicted for the unsuccessful coup on May 15, and the murder of Prime Minister Inukai.12<
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  Through the summer newspapers and radio covered the separate army and navy trials of the indicted. As support mounted for these “true believers in the kokutai,” military reservists throughout Japan and the colonies gathered more than seventy-five thousand signatures on a petition calling for a reduction of their sentences.13 On September 11, 1933, a navy court-martial sentenced Koga Kiyoshi and three other naval perpetrators to death, but later reduced their sentences to fifteen years’ imprisonment. An army court-martial handed down even lighter sentences (four years’ detention) to eleven young army officers who had taken part in the coup. The lone civilian conspirator, tried in a civilian court without the benefit of a huge and popular bureaucratic organization behind him, received imprisonment for life. At this time the Japanese judicial process invariably gave perpetrators of mutiny and assassination lenient treatment if they claimed to have acted purely out of patriotism. Ordinary civilian criminals, tried under civilian jurisdiction, rarely got off so lightly.

  Two weeks after the navy court-martial, Prince Takamatsu, who had served aboard ship with some of the criminals, wrote in his diary that their “act of violence” had been:

  …purely motivated…. As military men they wanted to end the corruption of the political parties, the selfishness of the zaibatsu, the paralysis of the farming villages, the decadence of social morals, and the attitude of the nation’s statesmen…. But social problems were not their immediate objective. Rather their primary aim was to convert dissatisfaction and distrust toward the leaders of the navy into perfect order. Many [navy] people regard social reform as secondary…. Since such a thing has happened once, there is a possibility that naval personnel might generate a second May 15 incident….[R]ight now we must restore discipline and order in the navy.14

  Restoring discipline and order in the military became the primary concern of Hirohito and his palace advisers after the formation of the Okada cabinet in July 1934. On the surface the problem appeared two sided: Abroad, the Kwantung Army and the small China Garrison Force in the Peking-Tientsin region had begun plotting to establish Japanese influence in North China, and it was unclear in Tokyo whether they would succeed. Meanwhile radical army officers impatient for reform were fomenting civil discord and extremism at home as a way of gaining power for themselves. The need to impose strong central control became clear during 1935, but both the palace and the Okada cabinet were slow to respond. Officers implementing national policy in the field often disagreed with General Staff officers in Tokyo who participated in drafting policy, while policy planners on the General Staffs feuded with their counterparts in the Army and Navy Ministries and in the Foreign Ministry. The emperor’s task was to stand above this dissension and, without becoming directly involved, foster unity. In 1935 he was still groping for a way to achieve this.

  More particularly, small incidents of anti-Japanese resistance in the demilitarized zone separating Manchukuo from northern China led the field generals to demand that Chiang Kai-shek withdraw his forces from the Peking-Tientsin area. Chiang yielded, and in June 1935, the Chinese side approved the demands of the Japanese army by signing the Ho Ying-ch’in–Umezu Yoshijir Agreement. Five months later an Autonomous Committee for Defense Against Communism in Eastern Hepei Province was established in the demilitarized zone under Kwantung Army supervision. Intelligence agencies in the army soon followed up this diplomatic “success” by inaugurating a second pro-Japanese puppet regime, the Kisatsu Political Affairs Committee in Tungchow, under Yin Ju-keng, a Chinese graduate of Waseda University in Tokyo, whose wife was Japanese.

  Hirohito’s reaction to this arbitrary conduct of diplomacy by military field commanders was to propose to seventy-four-year-old Makino that an imperial conference conduct a full-scale reexamination of policies toward China. According to Makino’s diary entry of June 15, the emperor said, “Even if you question the genr [Saionji] concerning the North China problem, he is far from Tokyo and far from the [government] authorities. I doubt he can provide us with good ideas. It will be effective to have an imperial conference depending on the circumstances [at the time of defining fundamental policy].”15 Yet because of deep divisions among the political elites, not to mention the opposition and chronically poor judgment of Saionji and Makino, no such conference was convened.

  II

  The premeditated efforts of the Kwantung Army and the China Garrison Force to separate North China further hardened Chinese opposition. Japan’s “Monroe Doctrine” for Asia became an immediate source of conflict with the United States and Britain.16 While this was occurring, domestic debate on the kokutai rekindled, gradually resulting in popular distrust of the nation’s ruling elites. For nearly a decade the court group had initiated efforts to “clarify” the national polity—that is, counter antimonarchist thought and impart rationality to the tangle of statements and intellectual arguments pertaining to the nature of the state. The leaders of the army, frustrated by the slowness of political reform, now launched their own campaign to promote an ideal of Japanese nationhood within the concept of the kokutai and the myth of the emperors’ divine ancestry.

  The campaign began in the House of Peers on February 18, 1935, with an attack on Minobe’s “organ theory” of the emperor’s position as the “traitorous thought of an academic rebel.” The speaker was Baron Kikuchi Takeo, a retired general and member of the Imperial Reservists Association as well as the Kokuhonsha—a radical rightist organization that was part of the mainstream of Japanese politics. Kikuchi demanded that the Okada government ban Professor Minobe’s books. A week later Minobe spoke in his own defense, while outside the Diet right-wing groups associated with the Imperial Way officers demonstrated against him.

  In early March, reserve Maj. Gen. Et Genkur charged in the House of Representatives that at least two of Minobe’s books—Kenp satsuy [Compendium of the constitution] and Tsuiho kenp seigi [Additional commentaries on the constitution]—fell within the purview of the crime of lèse-majesté. Shortly afterward, on March 4, Prime Minister Okada yielded to the hysteria by declaring in the Diet that “No one supports the emperor organ theory.”17

  The following month, after the Diet went into recess, Okada and his cabinet ministers asked Minobe to resign his imperial appointments and initiated administrative measures against his writings. The entire government bureaucracy was instructed not to refer to the emperor as an “organ” of state. Officials of the Education Ministry directed prefectural governors and heads of institutions of higher learning to participate in clarifying the meaning of the august kokutai, following up by initiating investigations of books, articles, and lectures by law professors in the nation’s universities. Bureaucratic ministries and offices throughout the nation soon began holding seminars on the meaning of the kokutai and the national spirit. To deliver the lectures and teach the new courses, they enlisted specialists in Japanese racial thought, academic opponents of liberalism, and advocates of Nazi theories of law.18

  In effect, in order to counter the unauthorized, radical movement denouncing Minobe’s constitutional interpretation, Okada generated a government-sponsored, national kokutai clarification campaign, which also declaimed against Minobe’s teachings and banned some of his books and articles. It was this official campaign that Hirohito supported. To control the radicals within the armed forces and resist the kokutai indoctrination movement from below, which aimed at overthrowing Okada, he lent his authority to a government campaign that fostered unbridled fanaticism.

  On April 6, 1935, Superintendent of Military Education General Mazaki, a member of Hiranuma’s Kokuhonsha and a dispenser of secret army funds to right-wing newspapers, had issued an instruction to the army on “clarifying the kokutai.” In it Mazaki reminded one and all that Japan was a holy land ruled over by sacred emperors who were living deities.19 At that point right-wing civilian groups allied with the army formed a League to Destroy the Emperor-Organ Theory and “accomplish the clarification of the kokutai.” Member journalist Ioki Ryz and law prof
essor Nakatani Takeo espoused totalitarian ideas of remaking Japan in the image of Germany. The league’s immediate goals, however, were to remove Ichiki Kitokur from the presidency of the emperor’s privy council and to eliminate the influence of Makino and Saionji. The opposition Seiykai, hoping to overthrow the Okada cabinet, began cooperating with the League.20

  Nationwide antigovernment agitation on the kokutai issue continued throughout the spring, summer, and autumn of 1935. Senior officers of the army and navy, the army-dominated Imperial Reservists Association (with branches in all the prefectures), and an alliance of many small and some large right-wing groups, led the agitation, while religious sects that outwardly had subjugated themselves to the state, such as “Imperial Way motoky,” also joined the campaign. In August, when public procurators dropped the lèse-majesté charges against Minobe because his intent had not been criminal, the antigovernment movement against his theory rekindled. Thereafter the demand grew that there be no dissent from the truth that Japan was a “peerless nation” led by a divine, precious, august ruler, and also that there be no public criticism of military budgets.

  Behind these attacks lay the ideological desire to discredit not a particular interpretation of the Meiji constitution but all constitutional interpretations, whether Minobe’s or his opponents’, that differentiated the emperor from the state. The leaders of the “League to Destroy the Emperor Organ Theory” were fighting to abolish the advisory powers of ministers of state, and to return to a more flexible process of governance in which the voice of the military could be freely translated into national policy. At their head stood the Imperial Way generals Mazaki and Araki, Vice President of the Privy Council Hiranuma, certain Seiykai politicians, and right-wing agitators outside the goverment, such as Ioki. Their underlying demand was for very radical reform, captured in Ioki’s slogan of a “Shwa restoration,” and it made the campaign against Minobe a threat to the Okada cabinet and, indirectly, to Hirohito. When the army and navy ministers mounted the rostrum at a convention of the Imperial Reservists, meeting in Tokyo in late August 1935, and publicly expressed solidarity with this radical anti-Minobe movement, the Okada cabinet realized that a crisis was at hand and it had to act.