Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

  Hirohito’s attempt to integrate the concept of democracy with Japanese history, thus avoiding a break with the past that the Japanese enemies of democracy could seize on and later use to argue that democracy was a foreign importation, was not the problem. Rather the issue was which past should prevail in the context of the Declaration of Humanity and the political situation at the time. The articulate Left wanted to ground democracy in the post-World War I era of “Taish democracy.” Some were even seeking to link the notion of democracy to the thirteenth-century Buddhist saint Shinran. Hirohito deliberately sought to undercut these more radical notions of democracy. And three decades later he revealed in a press interview that he had “adopted democracy” not because the people were sovereign but “because [democracy] was the will of the Meiji emperor.”61

  The leading Japanese dailies gave front-page coverage to the rescript and ran special sections on the imperial family. Banner headlines across the front page of the Mainichi declared, WE BESTOW AN IMPERIAL RESCRIPT FOR THE NEW YEAR, TIES OF TRUST AND AFFECTION, WE ARE WITH THE NATION.”62 The Asahi shinbun carried Prime Minister Shidehara’s “Respectful Remarks,” written in simple language:

  We are deeply moved with awe before his majesty’s kind consideration. At the beginning of this rescript his majesty cited the Charter Oath of Five Articles that was promulgated in March 1868, and on which the development of democracy in our country was founded. The intention of the Charter Oath became manifest only gradually: First came the Imperial Instruction of 1881 to open a Diet; next, the promulgation of the Meiji constitution in 1889; then the development of parliamentary politics. Our parliamentary politics from the beginning has been based on these fundamental principles. The promise had been made and our parliamentary politics should have developed vigorously. Unfortunately, in recent years the process was held back by reactionary forces…. The benevolent intention of the great Meiji emperor was lost sight of. Now, however, we have a new opportunity to start afresh…. We shall construct a new state that is thoroughly democratic, pacifistic, and rational. Thereby we shall set his majesty’s heart at ease.63

  The prime minister chose his words carefully. “Development of democracy in our country” contrasted, implicitly but effectively, Japanese imperial democracy with American-style democracy. It also made the adoption of democracy a matter of respecting “the imperial will” instead of the will of the people. In this way, Hirohito and Shidehara had indirectly checked MacArthur, who had hoped to make 1945 represent the decisive break in Japanese political culture.64

  Nevertheless, a way now opened for the Japanese people to see their relationship with their sovereign in a different light. The New Year’s rescript made a deep impact and contributed to reshaping the emperor’s image. By emphasizing his qualities as a human being and asserting that the basis of his relationship with the people had always been one of trust and affection, the emperor, in effect, had inaugurated his own “adoration.” Interestingly, the issue of the Asahi that carried the New Year’s rescript and the prime minister’s comments also featured an interview with Hirohito’s brother Prince Takamatsu that related concrete episodes illustrative of the emperor’s character and contained themes that would figure in his re-presentation over the next few years.65

  Popular books and news articles followed during 1946–47, giving the Japanese public what had been denied them by the “military” and other evil types around the throne: a full view of the private life of the “human emperor” and his family. These writings, and the photographic image-manipulations that accompanied them, typically described the emperor as an extraordinary natural scientist, a “sage,” a “personality of great stature,” and, above all, a “peace-loving, highly cultured intellectual” who was “always with the people.”66

  Scholarly writers also joined the campaign for the new “symbol” emperor. Right after Hirohito had disavowed his divinity, an article by the historian Tsuda Skichi appeared in the April 1946 issue of the new postwar intellectual journal Sekai and quickly came to be recognized as the earliest full-blown defense of the new monarchy. Tsuda argued that emperors are compatible with democracy, and that throughout most of Japanese recorded history, power and authority had always been divided between emperor and ruling class. In his view, state and people had been fused from the very onset of Japanese history, or, as he put it, “The Japanese imperial house was generated from within the Japanese people and unified them.” Tsuda’s conflation of imperial house–state–nation was an expression of romantic nationalism that captured nicely the sensibility of the political class in the aftermath of defeat. Yoshida Shigeru echoed Tsuda’s outlook when he asserted in his autobiography: “According to our historical concepts and traditional spirit ever since antiquity, the imperial house is the progenitor of our race.”67

  Tsuda went on to argue that “the great majority of the people” were mainly to blame for having led Japan astray. While the imperial house “always accommodated itself to change and adapted to the politics of every period,” the people did not; they “trusted statesmen who ultimately led the country into its present predicament” and they should “accept responsibility for this” rather than blame the Shwa emperor. He ended his article with a ringing exhortation to “love” and “embrace” the imperial house and to make it “beautiful, secure, and permanent” by their love. For “love is the most thoroughgoing form of democracy.”68

  Tsuda’s widely read and discussed article awakened memories of Prime Minister Higashikuni’s argument for the “repentance of the one hundred million” for Japan’s defeat. His polemic on unilateral emperor love also reminded his readers that the lexicon of Japanese monarchy is rich with concepts and phrases that can easily accommodate a peaceful, demilitarized “nation of culture.” Many of Tsuda’s arguments became pillars of postwar orthodoxy concerning the throne. Defenders of the imperial house generally agreed with him that vertical “love,” directed upward to the emperor, was the key to saving “our emperor.” But for critics of the emperor system the real problem was the degree to which the imperial house could be “humanized,” given the Japanese people’s difficulty in loving the emperor “within the limits of [mere] human propriety.”69

  To grasp the conflict between the postwar defenders of the monarchy and its critics—those who sympathized with the emperor and those who found him repugnant—Tsuda’s response to the Declaration of Humanity should be balanced against the response of Shins, a highly popular, left-wing muckraking magazine that first appeared on March 1, 1946. Its “Statement of Purpose” captured nicely the new spirit of irreverence toward the throne:

  “Influence the people but do not inform them” was the political injunction of the great feudal politician Tokugawa Ieyasu. Ever since Meiji, from its Charter Oath of Five Articles, the emperor’s government has pretended to be carrying out democracy. But we all know that for nearly eighty years, until the moment of unconditional surrender last summer, the emperor’s government followed Ieyasu’s injunction, and has kept the people in ignorance.

  Stressing the need to “liberate the people from this feudal political idea,” the essay expressed a desire to “expose every lie from ancient times to the present” and to examine “the true nature of government under the emperor system” so as to determine whether Japan had really fought a “holy war.” “From such a viewpoint, basing ourselves on facts not excuses, we shall thoroughly examine the emperor system [tennsei] and the structure of capitalism with a view to making some contribution to the democratic education of our fellow Japanese.” 70

  One of Shins’s contributions to undermining emperor worship was its cartoon strips treating the transmogrified Shwa emperor as a butt for humor—a comic victim of his palace guardians, the politicians in the Diet, and even ordinary people. Shins’s running gags on the “human” and “great” emperor highlighted many controversies of the occupation years: the calls for his abdication, the phenomenon of pretenders to the throne (such as the fifty-six-year-old shopkeeper Ku
mazawa Hiromichi, whom the press referred to as the “Kumazawa emperor”), the imperial portrait, and the imperial visitations, which Shins ridiculed by depicting the emperor in a drawing as a “broom.”71 Ironically, despite their debunking aim, these irreverent, leftist depictions of the emperor “humanized,” whether in a frock coat or a business suit, unintentionally reinforced the official government position that he had always been only a normal constitutional monarch, never one who made important decisions on his own.

  VI

  Shortly after the Declaration of Humanity, a directive from Washington on the drafting of a Japanese constitution had requested that MacArthur encourage that “the Emperor institution” be abolished or reformed “along more democratic lines.” MacArthur was now forced to clarify Hirohito’s responsibility for ordering the attack on Pearl Harbor and, at the same time, end his ambiguous new status. On January 25, 1946, he sent a “Secret” telegram to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, then U.S. Army Chief of Staff, stating his belief in the emperor’s total innocence. The MacArthur telegram, based on a memorandum sent to him three months earlier by his Japan “expert” General Fellers, asserted that:

  No specific and tangible evidence has been uncovered with regard to [the emperor’s] exact activities which might connect him in varying degree with the political decisions of the Japanese Empire during the last decade. I have gained the definite impression from as complete a research as was possible to me that his connection with affairs of state up to the time of the end of the war was largely ministerial and automatically responsive to the advice of his councillors….

  No official U.S. document unearthed so far has indicated that MacArthur or his staff investigated the emperor for war crimes. What they investigated were ways to protect Hirohito from the war crimes trial. As early as October 1945, in a brief memorandum intended for MacArthur, Maj. John E. Anderton had laid out the key elements of a defense: “in the interest of peaceful occupation and rehabilitation of Japan, prevention of revolution and communism, all facts surrounding the execution of the declaration of war and subsequent position of the Emperor which tend to show fraud, menace or duress be marshalled.” And “if such facts are sufficient to establish an affirmative defense beyond a reasonable doubt, positive action [should] be taken to prevent indictment and prosecution of the Emperor as a war criminal.”72

  Seeking to shock the Truman administration, MacArthur concluded his telegram to Eisenhower by predicting dire consequences should the emperor face trial as a war criminal:

  His indictment will unquestionably cause a tremendous convulsion among the Japanese people, the repercussions of which cannot be overestimated. He is a symbol which unites all Japanese. Destroy him and the nation will disintegrate…. It is quite possible that a million troops would be required which would have to be maintained for an indefinite number of years.73

  On January 29 MacArthur met with part of the newly established Far Eastern Commission in his Tokyo office to answer questions concerning the position of the emperor. Then on February 1, the Mainichi shinbun published the Japanese government’s draft constitution, produced, under pressure from GHQ, by Minister of State Matsumoto Jji and his committee.74 An English translation of the Matsumoto draft reached MacArthur that same day. Noting that it left the status of the emperor unchanged, he concluded, correctly, that the Shidehara cabinet was incapable of writing a democratic constitution. Unless he himself acted quickly, before the first formal meeting of the Far Eastern Commission (scheduled for February 26), the initiative in constitutional revision could pass from his hands, and the preservation of the monarchy might be endangered by nations hostile to the Japanese throne.

  The general met his dilemma by giving the Government Section of GHQ, headed by Gen. Courtney Whitney, one full week, February 3–10, to write a new draft of a model Japanese constitution. The drafters set to work, intent on realizing the goal of preventing Japan from ever again becoming a military threat to the United States. They concentrated first on reforming the monarchy. The emperor, severed from real political power, became (and was defined as) only a “symbol” of unity. He was made so “symbolic” that neither the man nor the institution could ever again become an instrument for a revival of militarism. But the draft did permit the emperor to perform a few specified imperial “acts in matters of state” “on the advice and approval of the cabinet.”

  Next, the imperial armed forces were eliminated by inserting into the constitution an article—the famous Article 9—renouncing war:

  Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.

  In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.75

  Thanks to the American drafters, guarantees of civil liberties went right into the text of the constitution; women were enfranchised. The modus operandi of the Japanese state was partially reshaped. The draft weakened in theory the power of bureaucrats, strengthened that of the Diet, and enhanced the power of the judiciary. The final product permitted Japan its monarchy, and shifted political power to the Diet and the cabinet, should such a need arise.76

  The model constitution was drafted and deliberated by both houses of the Diet at a very strange moment of crisis in postwar history. The power of ordinary people to act from below to realize their aspirations was still weak. There had been no domestic antiwar movement during all of 1945, let alone a viable Communist movement.77 Yet the mystique of the monarchy had been deflated. Many people no longer held the emperor in exaltation. The antiemperor sentiment of the left was no longer being restrained. Even the communists defined the Americans as an “army of liberation.” Most important, public opinion was shifting rapidly, with former diehard militarists switching overnight into fervent “democrats.”78

  Most Japanese politicians, with the notable exception of the Communists and a few iconoclasts, however, still held the monarchy in reverential awe. Their old guard attitude was in fundamental conflict with the democratic spirit of the American draft constitution. The primary concern of nearly all politicians, conservative, socialist, and liberal, was to preserve the kokutai. In their view that required a politically empowered monarch available for use in an internal crisis. Minor revision might be necessary to prevent public opinion from swinging in favor of abolition of the monarchy. Some of the emperor’s powers might be taken away, but not all; least of all should he be turned into a “mere decoration.”

  At this crucial moment Hirohito was unable to fathom the aspirations of his subjects for fundamental reform of society. On February 12, he told Kinoshita, “Matsumoto seems to want to conclude the constitutional revision while he is still in office. I think I shall mention this to Shidehara. There is no need to hurry. Simply to indicate willingness to revise is enough.”79

  When Foreign Minister Yoshida and State Minister Matsumoto received the American model constitution at the Foreign Ministry on February 13, they were shocked. Committed to preserving the kokutai under the Meiji constitution, they believed that they would be unable to use an emperor unless he was allowed to reign and rule, combining power with authority. Over the next few weeks most members of the Shidehara cabinet changed on this crucial point. The progressive American draft at least retained the hereditary principle and guaranteed the continuance of the throne. In this moment of crisis for the monarchy, only Hirohito himself procrastinated.

  The diary of Ashida Hitoshi, a moderate conservative who served as Shidehara’s welfare minister and chaired an important lower-house subcommittee on constitutional revision, discloses that on the second day of the cabinet’s deliberations on the American draft, February 22, Shidehara reported on his visit to GHQ the previous day: “MacArthur, as usual, started on an oration. ‘I am working from the bottom of my h
eart for the good of Japan. Ever since my audience with the emperor, I have been telling myself I must insure his safety at all costs.’” The supreme commander went on, however, to warn of “unpleasant” discussions for Japan at the Far Eastern Commission in Washington and the uncertainty of his own tenure. As the American draft kept the emperor on the throne, he saw “no unbridgeable gap” between the Japanese and GHQ drafts. Under the latter, he felt the emperor was protected and his authority enhanced because it derived from his people’s trust in him rather than from his ancestry.80

  Shidehara’s cabinet members were unhappy with the “symbol monarchy” and the renunciation of war as a sovereign right of the state. Ashida, however, pointed out that, “the idea that international disputes should be resolved by mediation and conciliation without recourse to armed force was a policy already accepted by our government in the Kellogg[-Briand] Pact and the Covenant [of the League of Nations]. It’s certainly not something new.”81 Clearly Ashida did not think the renunciation of war would prejudice Japan’s inherent right of self-defense, nor did he envision that its codification in Article 9 of the constitution would become a tremendous point of controversy in the postoccupation period. What Ashida and other members of the cabinet worried about was the emperor’s loss of political power.

  Wanting to avoid a hopeless dispute with MacArthur, Shidehara and his cabinet probably would have accepted the American model more quickly had the emperor permitted it. The evidence suggests that Hirohito did not assent. While he delayed, pressure for his abdication increased. On February 27 Hirohito’s youngest brother, thirty-one-year-old Prince Mikasa, stood up in the privy council and indirectly urged him to step down and accept responsibility for Japan’s defeat. Ashida attended that meeting together with the emperor and members of the imperial family, and recorded Mikasa as saying: