III
In February 1957 Kishi Nobusuke, who had served as minister of commerce and industry, and later vice minister of munitions under Tj, formed a cabinet bent on revising the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, and developing a more independent foreign policy. Kishi’s goals included reestablishing close economic ties with the nations of Southeast Asia and securing the release of Class B and C war criminals who still were imprisoned for such crimes as torture, rape, and murder. Some were in Sugamo Prison; others remained in the custody of former Allied nations. Their early parole and pardon, Kishi argued, would make it easier for Japan to forget the past and move closer to the United States. The Eisenhower administration agreed and helped to expedite the release of the remaining war criminals.
Kishi, like Hatoyama before him, hoped to revise Articles 1 and 9 of the constitution (on the emperor and the abandonment of war), and to expand the small Self-Defense Forces. Anticipating public demonstrations protesting renewal of the Security Treaty, Kishi introduced a bill to strengthen the powers of the police. In late October 1958 the mass media and most of the nation’s labor unions turned against the proposed police law and a national coalition soon emerged calling for Kishi’s removal.
In early November the four-million-strong Shy labor federation went on strike against the police bill. As opposition to Kishi escalated, his government, on November 27, happily announced the engagement of Crown Prince Akihito and Shda Michiko, daughter of the president of a large flour-milling company and the product of a Catholic upbringing. Public attention immediately turned from nasty politics to romantic love as palace officials and the media carefully orchestrated all the details. An astonishing “Mitchii” craze swept Japan, and Kishi safely escaped the headlines for awhile.
The engagement and marriage of the crown prince marked an important shift in the evolution of the monarchy. To hear the words “commoner” and “love” joined to the imperial family was distinctively new and very popular. Emperor Hirohito and Empress Nagako opposed the marriage because they believed Michiko might not be able to handle the intricacies of palace customs.20 What most concerned Hirohito was neither Michiko’s Christianity nor even the maintenance of the imperial house’s ties to state Shinto, but rather the break with tradition that the marriage connoted. Hirohito was uncomfortable with the very notion of an “open, popular monarchy.” But like everyone, he and Nagako could also appreciate how an alliance with one of the nation’s prominent business families could serve to strengthen a legally and politically weakened monarchy.
In February 1959 a Japanese opinion poll showed 87 percent support for Akihito’s choice of a commoner.21 But in addition to general approval, there was also public uneasiness about the marriage. Some worried that a perfectly normal woman marrying into the imperial family would suffer from the loss of her accustomed freedom and become unhappy. A small number of critics and writers of fiction, including the well-known novelist Fukazawa Shichir, urged that imperial males never marry outside the royal pale so that continued inbreeding would eventually lead to the extinction of the whole imperial lot. Die-hard traditionalists and Shintoists were also opposed.22 To them there was only threat in the new society of mass consumption and hedonistic aspiration: prewar values were fast eroding, and the marriage suggested that if the throne were brought down to earth, it would eventually be debased also—by popular acclaim and approval.
Crown Prince Akihito and Michiko were united on April l0, 1959, before a huge television audience estimated at fifteen million viewers; another half million lined the route of their marriage parade.23 The newlyweds then disappeared on their honeymoon, and from public attention, which now reverted to the great political issues. On January 19, 1960, Kishi signed in Washington, D.C., a renegotiated and more equitable Japan–U.S. Security Treaty. The United States promised to consult before committing its forces in Japan to military action. American bases remained on Japanese soil, however, and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces were obligated to aid U.S. forces should Washington find itself at war with some other Far Eastern nation (such as China), and should that other nation attack American bases in Japan.
Ratification was fiercely resisted by the opposition parties within the Diet and by organized labor and student groups outside the Diet. On May 19 five hundred uniformed policemen were brought into the House of Representatives; the vote on ratification was literally a forced vote. This proceeding triggered a month of the largest demonstrations in Japanese history, culminating on June 15 with the death of a student protester in a clash with police in front of the Diet building, followed by calls for a general strike by a coalition of union federations and groups of private citizens. Kishi immediately canceled the scheduled visit of President Eisenhower to Japan. Four days later the Security Treaty went into effect, and the next month Kishi and his entire cabinet resigned, having accomplished their primary mission.
For Hirohito the whole ratification experience was an emotional ordeal. He had wanted relations with the United States improved and the alliance strengthened at all costs. Until the very last minute he had hoped to travel to Haneda airport to greet visiting President Eisenhower, and be seen riding back to the Palace with him in a limousine past crowds of cheering well-wishers. Kishi would then have gotten his treaty renewed while Eisenhower’s visit would have helped the emperor raise his status as de facto “head of state,” with no need for constitutional revision. The cancellation had denied him that while the struggle over the treaty had temporarily turned the majority of the nation against any tampering with the constitution.24
Thus the results of the whole effort were mixed. Hirohito’s and the LDP’s wish for an American military alliance that would insure continuation of Japan’s diplomatic course for the remainder of his reign had been realized. But the struggle over the Security Treaty, anti-Kishi and prodemocracy in its aims, had been a learning process for the ruling elites. They had weathered the biggest national crisis of the postoccupation period without ever calling on help from the emperor. The rising generation of LDP leaders drew the lesson that the monarchy was not needed as a crisis-control mechanism. Hirohito’s dream of someday regaining political relevance was only a dream.
While the treaty struggle was unfolding in Japan, in South Korea student demonstrators were overthrowing American-sponsored dictator Syngman Rhee. In this heated atmosphere of revolutionary hope on the Left and counterrevolutionary fear on the Right, Fukazawa Shichir wrote a political parody entitled “Furyu mutan” (A Dream of courtly elegance).25 In December 1960, in the immediate wake of the treaty struggle, Ch kron (Central review), a popular journal of opinion and the arts, published the story. It begins when the first-person narrator purchases a strange wristwatch that keeps correct time only while he sleeps. As his dream unfolds he witnesses an uprising in central Tokyo resulting in the takeover of the palace by left-wing revolutionaries. At the plaza in front of the palace, crowds enjoy watching as their “superiors” are laid low. The dreamer sees Crown Prince Akihito (in a tuxedo) and Princess Michiko (in a kimono) lying on the ground bellies-up, awaiting execution. The narrator realizes that it is his own ax being wielded by the executioner. The royal heads come off with a swoosh, roll across the plaza, and disappear from sight with a clinking metallic sound of tin cans.26
Presently the narrator meets an elderly court chamberlain who tells him nonchalantly: “Now, if you go over there, their majesties the emperor and empress are being killed.” He proceeds as instructed, and as he looks at the deceased royal couple, he notices the foreign labels “Made in England” on Nagako’s skirt and “probably” Hirohito’s business suit. The high point of the dream is an exchange with Emperor Meiji’s wife—that is, Hirohito’s grandmother, who had died in 1914, and whom he confuses with Teimei kg, Hirohito’s mother.
“You scum wouldn’t even be alive if it weren’t for us! You owe us everything.”
“How can you say that, you shitty old hag? Owe what? To you? Why, you sucked our blood and lived high on our money.�
�
“What! So you’ve forgotten August l5? When our Hirohito saved all of you by surrendering? Unconditionally! And he did it!”
“Damn you! Our lives were saved because people around your grandson persuaded him to! Unconditionally!”27
Later the dowager empress mutters defiantly, “All the people are grateful to us. They do this and they do that for us. Then in the end they say we were bloodsuckers who squeezed money out of them. But who wanted war? You, you idiots! What insolence!”
A satirical attack on the institution of the “symbol” monarchy, and on the fabricated myth that Hirohito had heroically saved the nation from destruction, the “Dream” can be seen as revealing a miscellany of thrusts and cuts that say much about the emperor problem when the era of rapid economic growth began. At a time when most Japanese opted to avoid confronting the emperor’s responsibility for the war of aggression, the actors in Fukazawa’s story, including the narrator, all have a bald spot on the crown of their heads. That common scar, baldness, is Fukazawa’s metaphor for the emperor problem buried deep inside the Japanese conscience. The “Dream,” in effect, asserts a mutual relationship of culpability shared by emperor and people, nearly all of whom had enthusiastically identified with him and cooperated in the unjust war of aggression. Fukazawa implies that having made the monarchy a unifying “symbol” for their own purposes, the people have not yet liberated themselves from their emperor. By failing to pursue his war responsibility, they avoid pursuing their own.
Fukazawa’s fictionalized murder of the nation’s “symbolic family” provoked expressions of delight and approval from some readers, but these quickly gave way to cries of outrage from others, and finally to a real homicide. The Imperial Household Agency sought to bring suit against both author and publisher but the Ikeda cabinet refused to take up the issue. Right-wing groups saw the struggle against the Security Treaty and Fukazawa’s “Dream” as springing from the same source—a desire for revolution. They were more successful than the government in enforcing sanctions against such an act of “lèse majesté.” The rightists gathered outside the Ch Kron Company’s Tokyo headquarters to berate and threaten its employees. The furor built until, on February l, 1960, a seventeen-year-old member of a radical right-wing party invaded the residence of the company president, Shimanaka Hoji. Finding him not at home, the youth killed the family maid with a short sword and severely wounded Shimanaka’s wife.
After the murder Fukazawa went into hiding for five years. Apparently he never published again. According to literary historian John W. Treat, he devoted “himself to making bean paste” and later “ran a muffin stall—grandly dubbed the Yumeya or ‘Dream Shop’ in a working-class district of Tokyo.”28 Shimanaka disavowed any association with the writer. Rather than criticize the rightists for the bloodbath at his home, or defend freedom of speech and artistic expression, he repeatedly issued public apologies in the newspapers for having troubled the throne.29 Then, to further mollify right-wing and respectable opinion alike, Ch Kron changed its editorial direction and became an outlet for articles that made the behavior of the wartime state appear less condemnable. Other large commercial publishers followed suit, censoring themselves more strictly on subjects concerning the throne. No one (except for a few small, underground presses) thereafter dared publish parodies mocking the authority of emperors.
The “Fry mutan” and “Shimanaka incidents” highlighted the limits of free expression in the new, more tolerant Japan. In their wake, the mass media stopped publishing articles that could be construed as critical or demeaning of Hirohito and the imperial house. The scope of this “chrysanthemum taboo” widened in 1963 when the publisher Heibonsha ended its magazine serialization of Koyama Itko’s novel, Lady Michiko (Michikosama) following its criticism in the Diet as “entertainment” unsuitable for the nation.30 Such actions did not silence intellectual argument about the monarchy, however, and their overall impact on the mass media was ephemeral. In the middle-class consumer society that had emerged from war and occupation, the constitution had gained a high level of legitimacy. A postwar generation had become the main bearer of democratic, antiauthoritarian values, in conflict with the values of the older generations, educated under the prewar and wartime regimes, for whom unthinking loyalty and reverence for the throne remained strong. In this conflict Hirohito stood with the older generation but was always very careful never openly to defend their view of the “War of Greater East Asia.”
Some 233 organized crime and rightist groups were disbanded during the early occupation years. Between 1958 and 1961 right-wing terrorism returned briefly to the Japanese political scene. There is no clear evidence that Kishi and his “mainstream” faction of the LDP directly ordered terrorism against political opponents. Nevertheless, their hard-line policies probably did foster a climate in which such incidents could occur while the police, passive if not complicit, looked the other way. Right-wing hit men struck at leftist Diet members and intimidated opponents of the Security Treaty. Asanuma Inejir, chairman of the Socialist Party, was assassinated while giving a speech on live television. Radical rightists also ventured into the cultural arena. For the first time in the postwar era, they targeted for intimidation and death writers like Fukuzawa who were effective in expressing the need for continued reform of the monarchy.
IV
Drawing a lesson from Kishi’s downfall, his successor, Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato, abandoned constitutional revision and hoisted the slogan “Tolerance and Patience.” Ikeda is mainly remembered for his plan to “double” the nation’s income within a decade by increasing its GNP by 9 percent annually. During his years in power—June 1960 to November 1964—Japan entered a period of extraordinary economic growth that continued until the first “oil shock” in 1973. Though it slowed at that time, the rate of growth still remained well above that of all Western nations. The decline in the Japanese farm population also accelerated, going from almost a third of the total employed in 1960 to under a fifth in 1970 and less than a tenth in 1980. When Hirohito turned sixty-seven in 1968, Japan had achieved the second largest GNP in the capitalist world; by the time he reached eighty in 1981, few of the agricultural communities that years earlier had been important mainstays of the monarchy still even existed.31
In 1963 Ikeda succeeded in making surrender day, August 15, the anniversary for memorializing the nation’s war dead in a purely secular, non-Shinto ceremony of condolence. Avoiding all historical evaluation of the war itself, Ikeda, like Yoshida before him, declared the war dead to be “the foundation of the remarkable development of our economy and culture.” Henceforth War Memorial Day would be an occasion for other prime ministers to evoke that Yoshida-Ikeda memorial mantra: From the sacrifices of the war dead had come, in time, postwar economic prosperity.32 In such ways were small steps taken in the direction of legitimizing the war and reconstituting an inclusive national community. Also in 1963, the Ikeda government passed a new law on textbooks designed to “normalize education.” The new law quickly led to the production of history texts and teaching guides that completely skirted the issue of Japan’s culpability for aggression and Hirohito’s role in the war.
Ikeda also revived the practice, originally stipulated in the Meiji constitution and abandoned during the occupation, of having the emperor bestow imperial awards on distinguished citizens who had made important contributions to the nation in the arts and sciences. The award ceremonies, held at the palace, affirmed a cultural hierarchy based on excellence and political conformity, and at the same time strengthened the societal hierarchy atop which was Hirohito on the imperial throne. From 1963, awards for battlefield survivors were included, and from April 1964, posthumous awards to servicemen killed in combat. The leader of the LDP drew up the awards lists twice annually from 1963 onward and transmitted them to the emperor. Conferring these imperial accolades always just before election days served not only to honor deserving artists, intellectuals, and war veterans, but also gave popular support to t
he LDP, which was precisely their purpose.33 Spreading imperial accolades in order to strengthen a ruling party’s electoral support base was certainly “a new use of the imperial institution,” though it had well established counterparts overseas.34
By middle and later Shwa, the 1960s into the 1970s, Japan was transforming rapidly into an intensely urbanized society, oriented to meet the infrastructural, financial, technical, and social requirements of huge capitalist enterprises. Above all, postwar Japan was politically dedicated to supporting big business, big manufacturing, and big trade, no matter what the human and environmental costs. And as big business expanded and consolidated, the Japanese middle class also expanded. During the occupation, large enterprises joined together in business federations. Representing corporate and financial interests with their ever changing requirements, these federations essentially mediated between corporate interests and key ministries of the state, such as Finance, Post and Telecommunications, and International Trade and Industry and the Bank of Japan, and the ruling party establishment.35 Prosperity and affluence unified this new Japanese society, and the role constitutionally assigned to the “symbol” was now merely supplementary.
Unlike most of the wartime generation who had identified with the emperor or paid lip service to (if they did not actually believe in) the ideological principles of the state, the “younger generation” of the 1970s, for example, had been brought up in the emerging enterprise society. They identified with the company, tended to be distrustful of the state, and affirmed the values of economic growth and democracy. Stated differently: The series of ideological changes that had gone from pre-Meiji samurai loyalty to feudal lords and post-Meiji loyalty of all “subjects” to the emperor had shifted to employee loyalty to the firm in a company-centered society. With Japan fast becoming a major economic power, but not yet having regained its status as a great political power, the monarchy was no longer needed to actively mold the nation as in Meiji, or to prevent and constrain democratic change as in Taish and early Shwa. Nevertheless, because the constitution preserved the monarchy, and the monarchy contravened the principle of equality and nondiscrimination under the law, it remained a constraint on the freedom of the individual. This was not because the conservative political establishment of the 1960s and 1970s ordered it to perform as such: the enterprise society itself generated hierarchy and discrimination, and the monarchy, situated at its apex, served to validate those principles.36
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 68
