To control the agitation, Okada was forced to issue a second statement clarifying the kokutai.21 Based on a draft prepared by the Army Ministry and revised by civil officials after discussions with the vice ministers of the army and navy, this statement declared: “In our country ninety million subjects believe absolutely that the emperor exercises the sovereign powers of the state. On this point no one in government holds the slightest difference of opinion. Consequently the emperor organ theory, which is incompatible with this belief, must be eliminated.”22 In effect Okada twice officially proscribed Minobe’s constitutional theory as an alien doctrine. After his second statement was issued, senior army leaders withdrew their support from further attempts to overthrow his cabinet. By this time the Ministry of Education had initiated the development of a new system of ethics based on Confucian social values, Buddhist metaphysics, and Shinto national chauvinism. A united front of the leading right-wing organizations formed, dedicated to saying “Out!” to American and European thought, and “In!” to the reformation of Japan’s institutions on the basis of Imperial Way principles.
Doctrinally, one of Minobe’s main crimes in the eyes of militarists and political opportunists was his (correct) assertion that the emperor’s right of supreme command was not a responsibility of ministers of state. Its “sphere of application,” therefore, had to be carefully circumscribed by the Diet if Japan was not to have “dual government,” with laws and ordinances deriving from separate sources. In extreme cases, he warned, military power could “control the government and there would be no end to the damage caused by militarism.”23
Minobe did not stop with only admonishing the military for interfering in national affairs. He also interpreted Article 3 of the Meiji constitution (“The emperor is sacred and inviolable”) to mean simply that the emperor was not by law required to suffer judgment for his actions in affairs of state. If the emperor could freely conduct politics of his own volition, “then he could not hope to be nonaccountable, and the unavoidable result would be to harm the dignity of the imperial house.” In other words Minobe assumed that in Japan the constitution imposed limits on the power of the monarch even though he alone was personally nonaccountable. Not wanting the emperor to be an “absolute” ruler saddled with political accountability, Minobe took a stand against the notion of direct imperial rule and the dictatorship that the army leaders were then advocating. Minobe further argued that imperial rescripts issued in matters of state were not “sacred and inviolable” but could be criticized by the Diet and the nation. Only those that pertained to moral issues and were unsigned by ministers of state were immune to criticism.24
Many of the army’s leaders, wanting to have things entirely their own way, opposed Minobe by resurrecting a constitutional theory of divine right that sharply counterposed “sacred” and “inviolable.” They found the explanation of Article 3 that they were seeking in the writings of Uesugi:
[Our] emperor is the direct descendant of the gods and rules the state as a living god. He originally dwelt with the gods and was inherently different from his subjects…. That being so, it is obvious indeed that Article 3 of our constitution has a nature completely different from the same article in the constitutions of other countries.25
Uesugi’s interpretation triumphed because it neither assumed Western-style constitutional monarchy nor infringed on the army’s independence of command authority. Moreover, his view, which highlighted the emperor’s absolutist position, was much closer to the truth of the 1889 constitution than Minobe’s, which sought to justify the transition from rule by the Satsuma-Choshu oligarchy to rule by party cabinets.
However, many extreme rightist believers in “kokutai clarification” were really seeking to abolish the practice of constitutional interpretation per se. While Minobe was suffering for not succumbing to the lunacy of this kokutai debate, and campaigns against him and Okada (considered to be too moderate because he too was unwilling to implement radical reform) were spreading, demagogic attacks on the court entourage also increased. Earlier, anonymous allegations of improper behavior by high court officials had forced the resignations of Imperial Household Minister Ichiki and his secretary, Sekiya. Kawai had also resigned his post and assumed the job of chief of the Imperial Household Accounts Office. Kido, the most politically competent member of the palace entourage, had stayed on as Makino’s secretary and in August 1933 had assumed the additional post of president of the Board of Peerage and Heraldry, with jurisdiction over the imperial family. Now the two “kokutai clarification” movements, one from above and the other from below, precipitated a further reshuffling. Makino resigned at the end of 1935; a few months later Hiranuma obtained his wish of succeeding to the presidency of the privy council in place of Ichiki.26 Ultranationalists, however, were not contented with this shakeup of the palace entourage and weakening of the Okada cabinet. Until the army’s voice in national affairs was further strengthened, and the use-value of the emperor pushed to its peak, they refused to allow the situation to stabilize.
When Chief Aide-de-Camp Honj informed Hirohito of the spreading attacks on the Okada cabinet and the Diet debates on constitutional theories, the emperor—then thirty-four—made no attempt to intervene and end the crazy furor in which he personally was never mentioned. Privately he told Honj that “the monarchical sovereignty argument” was “better.” But in a country like Japan, “the emperor and the state are, generally speaking, the same. So it doesn’t matter which [theory] prevails.” Decades of effort to define a system of parliamentary governance under the Meiji constitution were at stake in this “debate,” yet Hirohito was indifferent to its implications. On the other hand, Honj also alleges in his diary that Hirohito told him: “[I]n dealing with international matters such as labor treaties and debt problems, the organ theory is convenient.”27
These inconsistent statements reveal Hirohito’s attitude: protect members of the entourage, such as Ichiki Kitokur, but avoid commitment to specific constitutional interpretations of his role in governance. After the war, when discussing the attack on Minobe’s rationalist interpretation of the Meiji Constitution, Hirohito observed that:
Under the Sait [sic; Okada] cabinet [in 1935], the emperor organ theory became a topic of public discussion. I once told my chief military aide-de-camp, Honj, to tell Mazaki Jinzabur that I liken the state to a human body in which the emperor is the brain. If we use the words “bodily organ,” instead of “organ” in a social sense, then my relationship to the kokutai is not in the least affected…. In addition there was the question of the “living god.” I am not sure whether it was Honj or Usami [Okiie] who held that I am a living god. I told him it disturbs me to be called that because I have the same bodily structure as an ordinary human being.28
In fact the state was not for Hirohito an entity with an independent life of its own, capable of meeting the needs of ruled and rulers alike. It had to have an emperor who functioned as its “brain.” In this respect Hirohito always stood midway between the modern, rationalist theory of the state propounded by Minobe and the absolutist theory of Uesugi, which, under army pressure, became the official orthodoxy from 1935 onward. Hirohito also found the myth of the living god to be helpful for amplifying his voice in the policy-making process and for strengthening loyalty to himself in the military. Moreover, banning Minobe’s theory was a way of checking any further attempt to revise the Meiji constitution by reinterpretation. So he allowed Minobe—who had denied the absoluteness of the imperial will and taught that the Diet could freely criticize laws and ordinances sanctioned by the emperor—to be purged from public life.29 And the Japanese people were encouraged to behave as if they thought the emperor was a living deity.
Yet Hirohito was by no means personally comfortable with a movement that sought to deprive him of his freedom. He realized, too, that the participation of commoners in antigovernment debates on the clarification of the kokutai could undermine faith in the nation’s privileged elites and diminish his own c
harismatic authority. Nevertheless he did nothing to stop the chattering cult that surrounded the throne from reaching new levels of fanaticism. If Hirohito ever thought his military rightists were thinking and acting wrongly, he never let them know it. What his sardonic exchanges with Honj mainly showed was his eclecticism, his irritation with the army’s attacks on his entourage, and his belief that the constitutional order contrived under his grandfather was compatible with any form of authoritarian government. He had been educated to play an active role in political and military decision making; he intended to do so, and he knew that many of the people denouncing Minobe’s theory wanted to deny him precisely that.
Honj, a stubbornly persistent fanatic, repeatedly pressed the emperor to change his thinking regarding his deification. “Because we in the military worship your majesty as a living god,” Honj opined on March 28, 1935, “it is extremely difficult in military education and command to treat your majesty as only a human—which is what the organ theory [of Minobe] requires.” Hirohito tried to enlighten Honj somewhat the next day. Addressing the text of the constitution, he pointed out that “[a]rticle 4 says that the emperor is the ‘head of state.’ That says precisely what the organ theory says. If you wish to reform the organ theory, you must inevitably reform the constitution.”30
Hirohito’s view of the constitution had been shaped by Shimizu Tru, who opposed the “emperor organ theory” yet also found fault with Uesugi. Like Shimizu, Hirohito straddled these two main interpretations. That he refrained from coming out in defense of Minobe, thereby allowing Uesugi’s absolutist theory to triumph, was only to be expected. Essentially Hirohito stood for protecting and strengthening the imperial house, drastically reducing the importance of elected professional politicians in making policy, and allowing limited reforms only as needed to meet crises. Because he equated himself with the state, and hence the state of the state, as it were, he tended to view all who opposed the established order as standing in opposition to him, and a threat to his sovereignty.
On this last point he was not wrong. Many advocates of direct imperial rule rejected the very notion of a state based on law and sought a dictatorship unrestrained by any constitutional interpretation. Hirohito was never prepared to go that far. The irony is that, in sacrificing Minobe, he and the Okada cabinet sanctioned a war against heresy that not only wiped out academic freedom but also abetted the very military radicalism they sought to control.
III
In late 1934, several Imperial Way officers at the Army Cadet School were arrested on suspicion of plotting a coup. No punishments were imposed in this incident, but the following year two of the same group—Isobe Asaichi and Muranaka Takaji—were again arrested, for having distributed a document charging that officers of the Control faction, such as Maj. Gen. Nagata Tetsuzan, had once authored plans for coups d’état against the government. This time the highest echelons of the army reacted. The accusations by Isobe and Muranaka were condemned as disloyalty, and both officers lost their commissions. Other officers of the Imperial Way targeted for retaliation a stalwart of the Control faction, Military Affairs Bureau Chief Nagata Tetsuzan, who was rumored to be planning a major purge to rid the army of factionalism.
In August 1935—six months into the populist movement to denounce Minobe’s interpretation of the constitution—Lt. Col. Aizawa Sabur of the Imperial Way entered Nagata’s office and used his samurai sword to slash him to death. At that point the struggle within the military over reform of the state and the demand for increased military spending, which lay in the background of the movement to denounce Minobe, took a more dangerous turn.
The anti-Okada forces in the army, still using the slogans “kokutai clarification” and “denounce the organ theory,” now stepped up their attacks on the emperor’s entourage and the hereditary peers. Senior Imperial Way generals arranged to give Aizawa a public court-martial under the jurisdiction of the First Division, a hotbed of Imperial Way officers based in Tokyo. When Aizawa’s show trial opened on January 12, 1936, his lawyers quickly turned it into an emotional indictment of the Okada cabinet, the court entourage, and the constitutional theory of Professor Minobe. They not only won popular support in many parts of the country but even in such unlikely places as the palace, where Hirohito’s own mother, Dowager Empress Teimei Kg, now a woman of strongly rightist views, became an Aizawa sympathizer.31 Before the trial could run its course, however, it was disrupted by a military mutiny in the capital. Army Minister Hayashi’s earlier dismissal of Imperial Way General Mazaki as superintendent of military education, and the issuing of orders for the transfer of the entire First Division to Manchuria, had triggered the largest army uprising in modern Japanese history.32
Around five o’clock on the morning of February 26, 1936, the word storm over the kokutai, which had raged throughout 1935, burst into rebellion. Twenty-two junior-rank army officers, commanding more than fourteen hundred fully armed soldiers and noncommissioned officers from three regiments of the First Division, plus an infantry unit of the Imperial Guards, mutinied in the center of snow-covered Tokyo. They seized the Army Ministry and the Metropolitan Police Headquarters and proceeded to attack the official and private residences of senior statesmen and cabinet ministers. The rebels—1,027 were recruits who had just entered the army in January—assassinated Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Sait Makoto, Finance Minister Takahashi, and the new Inspector General of Military Education, Gen. Watanabe Jtar, a known supporter of Minobe’s constitutional theory. They also killed five policemen and wounded Grand Chamberlain Suzuki, among others. While the assassinations were in progress, other mutineers raided the newspaper offices of the Asahi shinbun and Tokyo nichi nichi shinbun. Shouting, “Traitors!” at the journalists, they overturned type trays and fired their weapons into the air.33
Yet within the first few hours the insurrection began to go awry. The rebel officers killed Prime Minister Okada’s secretary, but Okada and Privy Seal Makino escaped; they failed to secure the Sakashita Gate to the palace, so allowing the palace to continue communicating with the outside; and they made no preparations to deal with the navy. In Yokosuka, naval base commander Rear Adm. Yonai Mitsumasa and his chief of staff, Inoue Shigeyoshi, ordered marines to guard the Navy Ministry building and gathered warships in Tokyo Bay in preparation for suppressing the rebels.34 On the morning of February 28, after fruitless negotiations through sympathetic officers in central army headquarters, the martial-law commander in the occupied area transmitted an imperial order to disperse. Most of the troops returned to barracks, one officer committed suicide, the remaining leaders surrendered, and the uprising collapsed without further bloodshed.35 Martial law in Tokyo, however, continued for nearly five months.
The rebel officers had originally planned to have the army minister, General Kawashima, who was associated with the Imperial Way faction, report their intentions to the emperor, who would then issue a decree declaring a “Shwa restoration.” Despite their radical aim—overthrowing of the political order—the mutineers (like other military and civilian extremists of the 1930s) assumed the legitimacy and intended to operate within the framework of the imperial system and the kokutai.36 They saw the emperor as the puppet of his advisers and, in effect, devoid of a will of his own. Once the lord keeper of the privy seal and the grand chamberlain were out of the way, they believed, the emperor could be counted on to bestow the mantle of prime minister on General Mazaki, the hero whom they trusted to strengthen the military and resolve the China problem.
At the beginning of the insurrection they had a chance of success. The Tokyo military police commander, Gen. Kashii Khei, was an Imperial Way sympathizer; the emperor’s chief aide, General Honj, was the father-in-law of rebel officer Capt. Yamaguchi Ichitaro; and supporters of the mutineers could be found at military bases throughout the country.
According to the historian Hata Ikuhiko, the rebels contacted General Honj both by phone and written message prior to the attack on the Okada cabinet. Honj, the first o
f the entourage to learn of the mutiny, could have warned the intended targets of their danger if he had been so inclined. He did not. By the time Honj came to court at 6:00 A.M. on the twenty-sixth, however, Chief Secretary Kido, Imperial Household Minister Yuasa Kurahei, and Vice Grand Chamberlain Hirohata Tadakata already knew that Sait had been murdered and Suzuki seriously wounded. So too did the emperor. At 5:40 A.M. the chamberlain on night duty, Kanroji Osanaga, had awakened Hirohito and informed him that his old ministers and advisers had just been attacked and an uprising was underway.
From the moment Hirohito learned what had happened, he resolved to suppress the coup, angered at the killing of his ministers but also fearing that the rebels might enlist his brother, Prince Chichibu, in forcing him to abdicate. He put on his army uniform, received Honj in audience, and ordered him to “[e]nd it immediately and turn this misfortune into a blessing.”37 Honj departed, and Hirohito embraced a strategy devised by Kido and presented by Imperial Household Minister Yuasa. Kido had taken swift action earlier that morning when Honj arrived at court, demanding that the chief-aide-de-camp immediately determine how the Imperial Guard Division would respond in the event the mutineers marched on the Palace.38 Kido’s plan was to prevent the formation of a new, provisional cabinet until the mutiny had been completely crushed. At 9:30 A.M., Army Minister Kawashima, who in January had met with Isobe, one of the main energizers of the rebel officers, came to court and performed the role that the rebels had scripted for him: He urged the emperor to form a cabinet that would “clarify the kokutai, stabilize national life, and fulfill national defense.” Taken aback at his army minister’s obtuseness, Hirohito scolded Kawashima and ordered him to give priority to suppressing the mutiny.39 Hirohito also vented his anger that morning on Chief of the Navy General Staff Prince Fushimi, a supporter of the Fleet faction, who came to the palace to learn the emperor’s intentions on forming a new cabinet and was told, in effect, to get lost.40
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 31
