Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

  Dulles went to Tokyo in late June to open full-scale negotiations on a peace and security treaty to end the occupation. At his first meeting with Yoshida, he found the prime minister disappointing. Unlike Hirohito, Yoshida appeared unrushed and reluctant to commit on security matters. Three days later, on June 25, the North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung, having secured prior, tacit support from Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, sent his army across the 38th parallel deep into South Korea. The endemic fighting in the divided Korean peninsula had turned into full-scale civil war. The Truman administration, always quick on the trigger, immediately ordered U.S. military intervention, overnight internationalizing the conflict. MacArthur’s command in Tokyo, though caught psychologically unprepared, responded with air, ground, and sea operations against North Korea.

  Hirohito, meanwhile, had learned of Yoshida’s disastrous meeting with Dulles. The next evening, he dispatched an “oral message” to Dulles through Matsudaira Yasumasa of the Imperial Household Agency, registering his loss of confidence in Yoshida. By Dulles’s account the “main point” was that when officials from the United States “came to investigate conditions in Japan, they only saw Japanese in the Government of Japan who had been officially approved by SCAP…. SCAP apparently feared contacts with some of the older Japanese because of their alleged former militaristic outlook.” Yet it was precisely these veteran officials, most of whom were purgees, who could “give most valuable advice and assistance to Americans interested in future relations between our two countries.” Hirohito “suggested that before any final action with regard to the…provisions of a peace treaty be taken there should be set up some form of advisory council of Japanese who would be truly representative of the people.”44

  Two Newsweek journalists, Harry Kern and Compton Packenham, had arranged the dinner at which Matsudaira conveyed this “oral message” to Dulles. Critical of MacArthur’s economic reforms and his purge of war criminals, they had organized, two years earlier, an “American Council on Japan,” dedicated to fostering trade between the United States and Japan. Hirohito may have believed that, where the peace treaty and rearmament were concerned, “loyal Shigeru” was no longer “truly representative of the people of Japan.” To him Kern and Packenham represented a new, independent channel by which, circumventing his prime minister, as he had earlier circumvented MacArthur, he could communicate with Washington. It was constitutionally reprehensible; it was characteristically Hirohito. In effect, he was reviving the prewar tradition of “dual diplomacy.”45

  On January 25, 1951, Dulles returned to Tokyo to work out remaining problems. At his first staff meeting, Dulles stated that the crux was “Do we get the right to station as many troops as we want [,] where we want and for as long as we want [,] or do we not?”46 Wanting unlimited military access to all areas of Japan, Dulles worried that the Japanese might try to extract concessions. But Yoshida, rather than make an effort, even a pro forma one, to limit America’s special privileges in postoccupation Japan, simply yielded. The United States would have its bases and its extraterritorial privileges; Japan would even establish a fifty-thousand-man “token” national defense force. Yoshida was obviously inept. But his failure in these negotiations—to gain leverage from granting bases, and to counter Dulles’s argument that the United States was performing an act of benevolence by leaving its military in Japan—may have had more to do with the influence of Hirohito than with his own blundering.

  How often Hirohito and his entourage communicated with key members of the American Council on Japan to facilitate discussions and negotiations cannot be determined. One must not overemphasize their influence. But neither should his role be ignored. On February 10, 1951, Hirohito hosted a banquet for Dulles at the Imperial Palace. He also met him on at least two other occasions that year. The future American secretary of state certainly regarded the Shwa emperor as more than a merely ceremonial figure.

  The Korean War contributed to a sharp change in the Japanese national mood. The earlier passion to develop democracy cooled. Left-led labor unions came under attack. A climate of political repression of the left ensued and the Yoshida government and the Japanese public showed a growing intolerance of the nascent peace movement and of criticism of the emperor. That summer the satirical magazine Shins reported that a young man from Sasebo city in Nagasaki prefecture claimed to be Hirohito’s “hidden child.”47 Prime Minister Yoshida, acting on behalf of Hirohito, sued. Shins’s publisher, Sawa Keitar, soon found himself locked up for libel.48 Even Hirohito’s youngest brother, Prince Mikasa, came in for criticism after publicly opposing the revival of “National Foundation Day” (Kigensetsu) and warning of the danger of militarism.49

  In late November 1950, two months after receiving authorization from Truman to cross the thirty-eighth parallel and occupy the north, and many weeks after having been warned by China that such an offensive by American (but not Korean) troops would threaten its security and bring a direct Chinese response, MacArthur learned that the threatened response had happened. The Chinese had crossed into Korea with an army of three hundred thousand. Recklessly overextended, the Americans were forced to beat a swift, long retreat and suffered heavy losses. By January 1951 the now panicky, depressed supreme commander who had ordered them to march to the Yalu River had become, in the eyes of the Truman administration, dangerously political and nothing more than “a prima donna figurehead who had to be tolerated.”50

  After a new Eighth Army field commander, Lieutenant General Ridgway, had halted the Chinese advance at roughly the thirty-eighth parallel, MacArthur again exceeded his authority by issuing unauthorized public statements threatening China and declaring, “There is no substitute for victory.”51 On April 11 an angry, disgusted Truman finally fired MacArthur for repeated insubordination and for his intention to spread the fighting beyond Korea. Four days later Hirohito paid a final, farewell visit to his friend, the prestigious general who had defeated him in war and defended him in peace. On April 16, 1951, MacArthur headed home without ever having visited the palace despite all the efforts of Hirohito’s entourage to get him to do so. Huge, subdued crowds lined the way as he was driven to Haneda Airport. Prime Minister Yoshida and a representative of the Imperial Household Agency were on hand to wave good-bye.

  Douglas MacArthur had been the most important person in Hirohito’s life for more than six years. He had admired the general’s constancy of purpose and imagined him to be a successful role player, capable of adapting to new situations. His dismissal shocked Hirohito. Did it portend a delay in the peace treaty? A shift perhaps in basic U.S. policy? A new escalation of the fighting in Korea? On April 22 Hirohito tried to find out by twice questioning Dulles directly. Dulles was irked. He replied that he “had no desire to discuss the merits of the matter, but…at least there had been a demonstration of the supremacy of civil over military authority under our system, and…that phase of the matter might usefully be pondered in Japan.”52 End of discussion.

  In October 1951 Hirohito prepared to visit Kyoto and three other prefectures. More than a thousand Kyoto University students convened a peace assembly to protest the San Francisco Peace Treaty and the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty the Yoshida government had signed on September 8. They issued an “open letter” appealing to the “human emperor” and focusing on rearmament: “We have been forced to recognize that you, through the unilateral peace [treaty] and the rearmament of Japan, have again, just as in the past, attempted to act as an ideological pillar of war.”53 When Hirohito appeared at Kyoto University, on November 12, a huge placard saluted him: “Because you once were a god, those who studied here before us died on your battlefield. Please, never again be a god; never again have us cry out ‘Listen! The voices of the sea! [kike wadatsumi no koe].’”54

  More than two thousand students welcomed the emperor to the campus, singing peace songs instead of the traditional national anthem, “Kimigayo.” Shocked by their symbolic action and breach of etiquette, about five hundred armed riot and regular p
olice stormed on to the campus and started skirmishing with the students. The next day’s newspapers announced that an “unprecedentedly disgraceful incident” had occurred at the university, and sided with the police against the students. Eight students were expelled for peacefully protesting. The student association was dissolved. For weeks, the reined-in and self-censored Japanese press sensationalized the incident, treating it as an act of lèse-majesté. Nationally and locally, many condemned the students as “heartless Reds” or as juveniles lacking in moral etiquette. Their equally numerous defenders, however, either expressed antipathy toward the emperor or declared total disinterest in him.55

  The Kyoto University protest incident marked the relicensing of de facto lèse majesté and the resumption of more traditional ways of protecting the emperor. It brought an abrupt end to the “human emperor” campaign. It warned Japan’s leaders that times had changed, bringing real danger to the restoration of any part of monarchical authority. In this tense encounter, one can see already the problems Hirohito would have in adapting to Japan’s emerging anti-militarism and one-nation pacifism.

  IV

  Hirohito’s first meeting with MacArthur confirmed the general’s belief that the emperor could be used as the American government desired. Hirohito came away convinced that he could benefit by collaborating. So began the great historical trade-off of the occupation period: MacArthur’s use of the emperor and the emperor’s utilization of GHQ to remake his role without sacrificing everything. Hirohito’s tours were for a time part of that trade-off. He both gained and lost from them. With the war still so overwhelmingly present in people’s memories, many sided with the defeated emperor partly out of mortification and shame at having lost. In effect, they used Hirohito to say to the world “we have been defeated, but we haven’t lost everything; we still have the emperor, and our pride.” At the height of their popularity in 1947, the “blessed visitations” were a powerful counter to the war crimes trials, displacing public attention to the happier spectacle of the smiling, hat-doffing emperor in motion. The media helped by glorifying him as the “emperor of love and peace,” and by interpreting his performances as supportive of democracy.

  By 1948 the Cold War in Europe had become more confrontational and a U.S.–Soviet showdown over Berlin seemed likely. Hirohito’s preoccupation with national security problems deepened. Hampered by his lack of constitutional authority, he worked behind the scenes to encourage the United States to retain Okinawa as a military base and later to consolidate Japan’s military alliance with Washington. For him anti-Sovietism and cooperation with the United States and Britain were a return to the policy from which his earlier deviation had brought disaster to Japan. He could not allow that to happen again.

  17

  THE QUIET YEARS AND THE LEGACIES OF SHOWA

  He said the Emperor had remarked to him several times that the name given his reign—Shwa [meaning] Enlightened Peace—now seemed to be a cynical one but he wished to retain that designation and hoped that he would live long enough to insure that it would indeed be a reign of “Splendid Peace.”

  from the papers of Gen. Courtney Whitney

  On April 28, 1952, the San Francisco Peace Treaty, the Japan–U.S. Security Treaty, and the Administrative Agreement granting American military forces in Japan special privileges all went into effect simultaneously. GHQ was abolished; the occupation ended. Thousands of American armed forces began to go home.

  Japan now, at last, regained formal independence. At last also the long era of combined military-civilian rule, which had begun in the mid–1880s under Meiji and endured through MacArthur and Ridgway, came to an end. Hirohito finally realized his often stated wish that the occupation be long and followed by an alliance with the United States that would protect Japan militarily into the future. Probably the emperor had even foreseen that the alliance (as opposed to the presence of large numbers of American troops) would be relatively popular with about half the nation, as indeed it proved to be.1 That the peace treaty had been signed with forty-eight nations but not with the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, the Philippines, and India did not bother Hirohito as it did most leftist and some conservative politicians. They opposed both the one-sided peace and the defensive military alliance that had as its main object the containment of China and the Soviet Union.

  Japan’s return to independence brought home to Hirohito once again the personal losses he had suffered from the defeat and MacArthur’s democratizing reforms. His tours of the country, originally undertaken to strengthen domestic integration and save the throne, had largely ended. He could no longer intervene in foreign and domestic affairs by secretly communicating his views to American officials. How was he to convey to the leadership of a new Japan his vision of peace and security through military alliance and economic development? He wanted still to be considered an important political figure, and a large constituency of emperor-enthusiasts continued to believe that he ought to be a driving force in politics. How could he adjust to the role the new constitution required, that of a merely ceremonial monarch?

  It was clear that these questions preoccupied him at a time when his only chance to play an active political role in rebuilding the nation depended on the continued loyalty of conservative politicians. When, at the formation of the Progressive Reform Party in February 1952, some of those politicians began to advocate constitutional revision, Hirohito’s hopes brightened. A few years later politicians in Yoshida’s Liberal Party and members of the Progressive Reform Party launched a movement to partially amend the new constitution in order to eliminate Article 9, entitle him “the head of state,” and revive some of the authority he had held under the Meiji constitution. Hirohito backed it. Popular opposition proved too strong, however, and by the end of the 1950s the movement was defeated.2

  At the return of independence, Japan was absorbed with physical reconstruction, restoration of foreign trade, and economic development. Territorial issues with the Soviet Union over the Kuriles and the United States over the Ryukyu and Ogasawara Islands remained to be negotiated. Memories of the lost war were still vivid; fear of militarism was strong and hatred of the upper echelons of the old officer corps widespread. People remembered that the emperor had sent their sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers off to war. Yet few still argued about his direct responsibility for launching the war, or for the many violations of domestic and international law that had occurred during its course. Where the “symbol” of the nation’s unity was concerned, most Japanese were reluctant to exercise their new freedoms. Hirohito’s continuation on the throne after independence clearly inhibited popular exercise of the constitution’s guarantee of freedom of thought and expression.

  Shortly before the treaties became effective, on January 31, 1952, a thirty-four-year-old conservative politician, Nakasone Yasuhiro, declared during questioning in the Budgetary Committee of the House of Representatives that “responsibility for having degraded the glory of modern Japan lies with the Shwa emperor.” Nakasone wanted Hirohito, whom he called “a pacifist,” to acknowledge “his responsibility for having driven Japan into a reckless war” by abdicating so that “the crown prince [could] become emperor” and “the moral foundation of the monarchy firmed up and made eternal.” Prime Minister Yoshida angrily labeled Nakasone “un-Japanese”; the rest of the nation just ignored him.

  So too did Hirohito. He had no sense of moral accountability to any but his ancestors, and when under pressure to abdicate, he sometimes intimated to aides that he continued to think of himself as a monarch by divine right. In early 1952, in private remarks to Grand Chamberlain Inada Shichi, Hirohito observed that regardless of what others had said of him during the occupation, he himself had never said he intended to abdicate. He believed he had a divine mission to remain on the throne and rebuild Japan. “The Meiji emperor said that unlike ministers who can resign, emperors can’t abdicate because they must carry out the divine order as written in the dynastic histories….
My duty is to bequeath this country, which I received from my ancestors, to my descendants.”3 Hirohito’s self-image could not have been more unsuitable and unrealistic for a “symbol” monarch under a democratic constitution. Postwar standards of morality were changing; Hirohito’s were not.

  While Hirohito clung to his old self-image, speculation that he might abdicate ended around 1952, and Japanese media attention shifted to his nineteen-year-old son, Crown Prince Akihito. With no dark shadow of war guilt hanging over him, Akihito had been hailed in the press as the “future hope of Japan.” He had received a Western-style education, was at ease with social conversation and spoke Japanese in a normal voice, with a normal intonation (neither of which his father did). Moreover, Akihito had been tutored in the virtues of Britain’s George V rather than Meiji, and in English by a Philadelphia Quaker, Mrs. Elizabeth Vining. He was now being prepared for his ceremonial investiture, a “state ceremony” scheduled for November 1952, and the press reported that he would soon be sent abroad to attend the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. At the start of the postoccupation period, Hirohito, the Imperial Household Agency, and the Yoshida cabinet strove to convey, through the crown prince, a message of close friendship with the island nation of Britain, praised as the model of apolitical constitutional monarchy.4