“Various debates are going on concerning the present emperor and also the imperial family. I fear we shall regret it later on if the government fails to take bold action immediately.” His implication was that it would be extremely unfortunate if [the government], dominated by old thinking, took inadequate measures. Everyone seemed to ponder [Mikasa’s] words. Never have I seen his majesty’s face so pale.82
Moreover, that same day, the Yomiuri-Hchi ran a front-page story on the emperor’s “abdication,” based on AP correspondent Russell Brines’s interview with Prince Higashikuni. The article claimed that many members of the imperial family approved of the emperor’s stepping down in order to be free to acknowledge his moral responsibility for the war. It suggested that the emperor was isolated. Only the imperial household minister and prime minister opposed abdication.83 A similar article, based on another interview with former prime minister Prince Higashikuni, appeared in the New York Times on March 4, and indicated that Prince Takamatsu, the second in line to the throne, would probably serve as regent until Crown Prince Akihito came of age.84 The fact that pressure to abdicate came not only from Prince Higashikuni, but from his own younger brothers must have helped Hirohito overcome his reluctance to accept the MacArthur draft. Sibling rivalry in the imperial family, exploited by the militarists during the 1930s, now benefited MacArthur’s constitutional reform.
On March 5 Shidehara came to the emperor bearing the MacArthur draft text and a draft of an imperial message declaring the emperor desired that the constitution be drastically revised. If Hirohito wished to maintain the unequal partnership with MacArthur that guaranteed him protection, it was time to move decisively. As reported by Kinoshita in his diary, “the reason for the big rush” on constitutional revision “was the article in the recent [February 27] Yomiuri in which Prince Higashikuni discussed the problem of the emperor’s abdication with a foreign journalist…. Initially, M[MacArthur] agreed that the Matsumoto draft could be presented to him by [March] 11. [Now] they cannot wait [that long].”85
The next day the Japanese people read in their newspapers an outline of the Japanese government’s draft constitution. They learned that sovereignty would be placed in them rather than in the will of the emperor, and that Japan would henceforth renounce war. On March 9 the Mainichi shinbun published the view of liberal international law scholar Yokota Kisabur. Shown an advance draft of the constitution by GHQ officials, Yokota now opined that the clause renouncing war was equivalent to the idealistic Kellogg-Briand Pact, and that it did not make impossible the use of military force for self-defense, or “in cases involving international cooperation.”86
Diet debate and revision of the constitution took place between April and August 1946. There is no evidence that members of the all-important lower-house subcommittee on the constitution, chaired by Ashida, accepted the interpretation of Yokota that the possibility of using armed force for self-defense and for international security was inherent in the wording of Article 9. The prevailing consensus was total, absolute denial of military force in keeping with public opinion at the time.
The new Constitution of Japan was promulgated eight months after Hirohito accepted the MacArthur draft, and went into effect the next year, on May 3, 1947. By then, the Imperial Household Ministry had become the Imperial Household Office (Kunaifu), and the number of its employees had been greatly reduced. The peerage had been abolished. The National Treasury had taken over the budget of the Imperial Household Office, and the state had taken title to the imperial museums, which now became national museums.87
So the end came swiftly for most of the supporting institutions, practices, and powers of monarchy created during Meiji. Pressured by MacArthur and Shidehara, threatened by talk of abdication from his siblings and his uncles, and fearing the Tokyo war crimes trials, Hirohito resisted for two weeks, then gave in. Bleakly he told Shidehara, “As the matter has gone this far, it can’t be helped.”88 It was exactly the sort of remark he had made at every other critical juncture of his reign: from his assent to the bombing of Chinchow in south Manchuria in October 1931 and the military alliance with Hitler and Mussolini of September 1940, to his approval of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Yoshida Shigeru would later claim in his memoirs that it was the emperor himself who made the “sacred decision” to accept the MacArthur draft. Thereupon the divided Shidehara cabinet saw the light, and agreed to accept it.89 The American author of the chapter on “The New Constitution of Japan” in GHQ’s official history of the occupation also left the impression that the emperor was an enthusiastic supporter of MacArthur’s draft constitution and that he conveyed his enthusiasm to Shidehara, Yoshida, and chief cabinet secretary Narahashi Wataru during an audience on February 22,1946.90
Historian Watanabe Osamu, however, has revealed how the American version of events was based on Narahashi’s account of his alleged imperial audience. In fact, there was no audience culminating in a decisive imperial assent on February 22. Ashida did not record one in his diary, and Yoshida himself denied having had an audience with the emperor that day. Years later Yoshida created his own version of the emperor’s role in order to strengthen Japanese acceptance of the new constitution at a time when it was under attack from former Class A war criminal suspects and once-purged, subsequently pardoned, politicians. By the mid–1950s the latter (associated with Hatoyama Ichiro of the Democratic Party) had become the mainstream conservatives in the Diet and were leading a drive to amend the constitution totally. In an informal tape-recorded interview in 1955 with Kanamori Tokujir, a former minister of state during his first cabinet, Yoshida indicated that the emperor was not an enthusiastic supporter of a constitution that barred him from any political role. Referring to Shidehara’s audience of March 5, 1946, Yoshida told Kanamori that Emperor Hirohito merely said (referring to his loss of all political functions) “something to the effect of ‘Let it go.’”91
Thus, when the constitutional moment arrived, Hirohito did sanction the most progressive reform ever presented to him. By his assent he himself became a symbol of the nation that claimed descent from the “homogeneous” Yamato race, and also a symbol—no longer a wielder—of sovereignty. After clinging tenaciously to the kokutai longer than anyone else, he finally acted from fear, at the moment when he felt the whole world was against him: fear he would be pressured into abdication, and, most of all, fear that with prolonged public discussion of his hesitancy would come an uncontrollable debate on republicanism, which would end in the monarchy itself being eliminated. Thereafter, for the rest of his life, he continued at odds with his symbolic status, psychologically unable to adjust to it.92
Chapter 1, Article 1, of the final Japanese version of the new constitution, redefined the emperor as “the symbol of the state and of the unity of the nation, deriving his position from the will of the nation with whom resides sovereign power.” During subsequent deliberations on the constitution by the Ninetieth (and last) Imperial Diet, the members declared themselves loyal subjects of the emperor and downplayed this new basis of political legitimacy. But they did not try to restore the emperor’s powers. The Shwa emperor had failed in his most important duty—coordinating the army, the navy, and the government and making the system work. Failure would not be rewarded. More important, the unpurged politicians did not want to return to the authoritarian prewar system in which even conservative political parties had been unable to exercise the full powers of the state. As for Article 9, until the Korean War changed the circumstances, no politician dared to challenge public opinion by arguing that Japan had retained the right to maintain war power for self-defense.
Up to 1947 the real constitutional quarrel in occupied Japan had pitted supporters of the kokutai, centered on the court group and old guard politicians, against a small number of Japanese reformers who wanted a ceremonial monarchy and a genuine civil society but lacked the political power to achieve those goals on their own.93 Thanks to GHQ, the reformers won, leaving the extrem
es in the debate isolated: Communists on the left and die-hard protectors of the kokutai on the right, plus a few prewar constitutional scholars who were so committed to the Meiji constitution as to be unable to conceptualize a democratic state.
Hirohito’s teacher of constitutional law, Shimizu Tru, and Professor Minobe Tatsukichi represented the latter. Shimizu was so depressed by the new constitution, and by newspaper reports of crowds jostling the emperor in his walkabouts, that he committed suicide.94 Minobe, once the foremost liberal influence on prewar parliamentary politics, argued against the new constitution in newspaper and journal articles during 1946. Still fixated on German theories of constitutional law, Minobe emerged from the war as a staunch opponent of popular sovereignty and majority rule. He insisted that the only way to integrate the nation and realize “true democracy”—as opposed to the “American-style” practice, which easily led to “tyranny”—was for Japan to have a monarch in whom political power was concentrated.95
Nevertheless Emperor Hirohito remained on the throne—unindicted, unrepentant, and protected as well as crippled by the new constitution. And so the monarchy too remained a political issue, and the old constitution continued to exert influence through the debate on Hirohito’s war responsibility. For the Meiji constitution now furnished the theoretical basis for putting all blame for the war on the military. Hereafter both apologists and critics of Hirohito’s wartime behavior would repeatedly make use of different interpretations of its articles. The apologists (including of course Hirohito) would use the old constitution to exonerate him of responsibility on the general ground that constitutional monarchs are, by definition, politically passive and nonaccountable for their actions. They would also invoke the specific ground that Articles 3 and 55 immunized him and placed responsibility in the hands of his advisers.
Critics of the emperor would deny the very premise of constitutional monarchy. Arguing that Hirohito had been more akin to an absolute monarch, they would stress the responsibility that accrued to him as supreme commander and sole issuer of military orders, responsible for determining the organization and peacetime standing of the armed forces. The critics would also point to the prewar system of “independence of the right of supreme command,” and to the emperor’s unique power to proclaim military orders. Ultimately they claimed that the whole issue had been left unresolved precisely because he had never been indicted.96
The Constitution of Japan stripped the emperor of all political authority, removed him from the system of power, and linked him to the notion of the “peace state.” It thereby foreclosed public discussion on the monarchy before it had really begun. At the same time the new constitution changed the emperor from an absolute value into a relative one, from a “sacred and inviolable” divinity into a mere human being under the law. Henceforth it was the constitution, not the emperor, that articulated the highest ideals, aspirations, and purposes of the Japanese people. And instead of Hirohito having enacted the constitution, the Diet had enacted Hirohito. On paper at least, he possessed none of the prerogatives of power of a British monarch and could be criticized like any other official organ of state. Constitutionally speaking Japan had indeed created a new variant of the genus “constitutional monarchy”—one that was in step with modernity, quite unlike the archaic institution still perpetuating itself in Great Britain.
Constitutions, however, are living things, put into practice in accordance with existing conventions, precedents, and beliefs. At the deepest levels of national identity, emperorism retained its hold over the minds of many Japanese. Because of what many influential people believed him and the imperial house to be and to stand for, Hirohito still could influence Japanese political evolution. Powerful emotional barriers to questioning his conduct or criticizing his status continued throughout the occupation and for the rest of his life.
Moreover, although the Diet had enacted an Imperial House Law in 1947, the new law resembled the old even in name, and was drafted simply by deleting from the original those articles that could be construed as contradicting the 1947 constitution, such as the system of “era names” and the “great food-offering ceremony.” An attempt to insert a clause on the emperor’s abdication was rejected in the Diet. The new Imperial House Law was no longer on a par with the constitution as the old had been. Yet its existence allowed some scholars to argue that precisely because of its system of hereditary succession to the throne, Japan had an unwritten constitution in addition and prior to the Constitution of Japan.97
The new constitution also generated problems that were to beset Japan for the remainder of the twentieth century. One such problem was the great divide between the concept of the state held by Japan’s political rulers in 1946–47, and the modern secular, demilitarized, civil state concept enshrined in the new constitution, in conformity with the wishes and aspirations of most Japanese.98
The political elites had not been the original drafters of the constitution they were duty bound to implement. Like Hirohito, they too did not believe in many of its ideals, including especially the notion of the demilitarized state and the principle of the separation of politics and religion.
The Constitution of Japan also left unresolved the problem of the symbol monarchy’s place in Japanese national identity. How were the inherently incompatible principles of monarchy and democracy to be reconciled? How were Japanese citizens supposed to regard their formerly divine emperor who remained on his throne, though now only a “symbol,” and had never accepted responsibility for his earlier behavior? Were they to pretend that no conflict existed?
The answers to these questions changed as historical circumstances changed. But at the rebirth of the monarchy in February-March 1946, around the time the lists of the war crimes indictees were being settled and the emperor and his aides were preparing his defense, Vice Grand Chamberlain Kinoshita gave an interview to the editor of the magazine Chry. When asked what Hirohito thought about the democratization of Japan, Kinoshita answered,
His majesty thinks that to democratize Japan is to carry out thoroughly the spirit of the imperial house ever since antiquity. That is to say, for the emperor the heart of the imperial house is the heart of the people, and the way to democratize Japan is to make this spirit thoroughgoing.
Question: In order for us to ask the heart of the imperial house to become the people’s heart, I think, first, that the political form has to be one that allows the heart of the people to develop.
Kinoshita: Indeed, yes. The imperial house has to become the spiritual center of the people rather than the center of politics. His majesty the emperor will ensure that politics by the people for the people is not wiped out from this country.
Question: From the form, it seems as though the emperor’s powers of state might be narrowed. But in reality they will actually be more fully expanded.
Kinoshita: Yes, indeed.99
15
THE TOKYO TRIAL
Emperor Hirohito had known as early as 1942 that the trial of major war criminals was an official Allied war aim.1 In November 1943 the Moscow Declaration had confirmed the point. The Potsdam Declaration of July 1945 had reiterated it; and the Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), signed in London on August 8, 1945, definitively stated Allied policy toward war criminals.2 Thus on August 9–10, when the time came for him and the leaders of the government to consider capitulation, the issue of war crimes was of serious concern. That concern deepened on September 11, 1945, when MacArthur ordered the arrest and imprisonment of the first batch of suspected war criminals, including the emperor’s favorite prime minister—so hated by the Japanese people not only for brutal repression by the military police under his control but for the unfair way in which food rationing was carried out—General Tj.
Quite alarmed at this risk to the ruling elites, the Higashikuni cabinet immediately voted to seize the initiative from the Allies by convening an independent Japanese war crimes tribunal. Hirohito was not pleased. If war criminals were puni
shed under national law, in his name, he would be placed in a contradictory position and deeply embarrassed. Up to this time Higashikuni had been seeing the emperor daily; abruptly his audiences were reduced. Nevertheless, the next day Foreign Minister Shigemitsu requested GHQ’s permission to hold independent trials. GHQ refused.3 There would be no official Japanese war crimes trial, no participation by Japanese judges on the bench in the Tokyo trial, and no trial of crimes committed by Japanese troops against other Japanese. The dirty work would be left to foreigners.
MacArthur personally found the prosecution of war criminals distasteful. Get-the-trials-over-with-quickly was his principle, and he was careless about and indifferent to abuses arising from GHQ’s loosely defined and sparse rules of evidence and procedure. When he tried the surrendered Japanese generals who had commanded against him in the Philippines—Homma Masaharu and Yamashita Tomoyuki—justice was swift. After the trial, conviction, and sentencing to death of both men for failing to take all measures to prevent troops under their command from committing atrocities, two U.S. Supreme Court justices sharply criticized the procedures followed by the military commissions in the Philippines and the spirit of revenge that informed them. MacArthur, obviously angered, fired back: “Those who would oppose such an honest method can only be a minority…no sophistry can confine justice to any [particular] form. It is a quality. Its purity lies in its purpose, not in its detail. The rules of war, and military law…have always proved sufficiently flexible to accomplish justice within the strict limits of morality.”4
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 59
