Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (4 page)

 

He was also a lonely man. He is said to have kept a diary faithfully from the age of eleven. Probably he did. But that diary—held tightly by the Imperial Household Agency—is not and probably never will be freely accessible to researchers. The same agency is now compiling the chronicles of Hirohito's reign, but the work is proceeding “on the premise that it will not be made public…because it might constitute an infringement of the privacy of the people referred to, and those related to them.”
⁸
Also off limits is Hirohito's correspondence with family members, the entire “Record of the Emperor's Conversations” (
Seidan haich
roku
) in its various versions, as well as a wealth of unpublished documents, such as diaries of people who served him, and that someday may illuminate Hirohito's whole existence. Neither has the U.S. government opened to the public all the secret records it holds on Hirohito, such as, for example, his conversations with Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the folder in the U.S. National Archives bearing his name.
⁹

To pry open Hirohito's life and access his motives one must rely on his entourage of note takers and diarists, who worked closely with him, thereby came to know him well, and have actually published their notes and diaries. One must rely also on accounts by senior military officers and diplomats who recorded his words during the war years. Recently, due largely to the efforts of a new gen
eration of Japanese scholars, the publication of hundreds of new documents, diaries, reminiscences, and scholarly studies pertaining to him during the war and postwar years, and the greatly changed valuation that the Japanese now place on the imperial institution, we in the West and in Japan have the chance finally to understand the intellectual, moral, and social forces that molded his life. Although far too many source gaps remain, these new materials justify retelling the story of Hirohito in the century of total war.

The work of Japanese scholars also enables us to appreciate how isolated Hirohito was from the Japanese people. Although he became the center of fanatical national worship and was greeted by some as a living deity whenever he traveled on visits to different cities, he was never “popular” in any lay sense of that term. He operated within a bureaucratic monarchy, and was considered at once an “organ” of the modern centralized state yet also an entity whose “will” transcended all law.
¹⁰
Above all, the new materials make it possible for us to appreciate how Hirohito embodied—as no other Japanese did—the contradictory logic of Japan's entire modern political development.

 

That development had begun in the time of Hirohito's grandfather, Emperor Mutsuhito, known posthumously as Meiji, “the Great.” On becoming emperor in 1868, Meiji was made to serve as the polestar of the nation's modern transformation. Eventually the way his powers were built up and institutionalized during the late nineteenth century shaped the parameters of Japan's political development down through 1945. The imperial court was separated from the government and reorganized in accordance with models of European monarchy. A written constitution followed. Bestowed by Meiji in 1889 as his “gift” to the nation, the constitution asserted that the emperor was the successor in an unbroken, sacred blood lineage, based on male descendants, and that government was subordinated to monarchy on that basis.
¹¹
It defined him as “sacred and
inviolable,” “head of the empire” (
genshu
), supreme commander (
daigensui
) of the armed forces, and superintendent of all the powers of sovereignty. He could convoke and dissolve the Imperial Diet; issue imperial ordinances in place of law; and appoint and dismiss ministers of state, civil officials, and military officers and determine their salaries. The underlying assumptions were that the emperor, as the source of law, transcended the constitution, whose purpose was not to place limits on his powers but the very opposite—to protect him and provide a mechanism enabling him to exercise authority unimpeded by limits. This system of government can be called a kind of constitutionally guided but by no means constitutional monarchy.
¹²

Japan's colonial empire and new status as a great regional power in control of both continental and insular possessions was the second great legacy Meiji bequeathed to Hirohito. In 1894, nearly a decade after having decided to catch up with the advanced Western nations by joining them in the competition for Asian colonies, the oligarchic leaders of the nation declared war on China for the purpose of occupying and controlling Korea. China lost and the next year ceded Taiwan, along with the Liaotung Peninsula of southern Manchuria, and the Pescadores Islands. China agreed to pay a huge indemnity and later signed an unequal commercial treaty that allowed Japanese ships to navigate the Yangtze River and Japanese businessmen to operate factories in the inland and coastal treaty ports (such as Tientsin, Shanghai, and Canton).

Victorious war further enhanced Emperor Meiji's prestige. Mainly a protector of the interests of the nation's oligarchic rulers, at forty-three he became a national symbol and acquired the dual image of a monarch by divine right and a hands-on ruler making decisions in all affairs of state. In a people long habituated to an antimilitary outlook and to regarding samurai warriors with suspicion, fear, and disdain, the victory in 1895 evoked support for the new conscript military. It also stimulated xenophobic nationalism
and implanted a sense of superiority to the Korean and Chinese peoples.

After Japan's defeat of China the international situation throughout East Asia became more complicated. Threats from Germany, Russia, and France forced Meiji and the oligarchs to return the Liaotung Peninsula to China. Immediately the Great Powers intensified their struggle for territorial and trade concessions at China's expense. Russia acquired leasehold rights in the Liaotung Peninsula, moved into Manchuria in 1898, and made its influence felt in Korea, thereby checking Japan.
¹³
That same year the United States fought the Spanish-American War, annexed Hawaii, and seized the Philippines, Wake, Guam, and Midway. In 1900, when the Western powers mounted an international expedition to put down the Boxer uprising in China, Japanese troops participated. The next year Japan joined the leading Western powers in signing the Boxer Protocol, which gave them indemnities and the right to station troops permanently in designated Chinese cities to protect their nationals and diplomats.

Three years later, starting in 1904, Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. The ensuing conflict cost an estimated 110,000 Japanese lives and ended with a brokered peace, no indemnities, riots in the capital, and the prospect that someday Russia would seek revenge. Emperor Meiji played no role in the fighting but nonetheless again added luster to his image. Japan gained the unexpired Russian leasehold rights to the Liaotung Peninsula, a seven-hundred-mile-long railway running through southern Manchuria, and the southern half of Karafuto (Sakhalin Island) in the Sea of Okhotsk, and these were praised as his epochal achievements.

Hirohito entered the world right at the dawn of this new era of imperial rivalry in Asia and the Pacific, and under him the drama of Japanese politics reached its disastrous conclusion in war and defeat. We can gain new perspective on Japanese politics by seeing how this man, who was so often out of step with his people, ignorant of their lives, never entirely sure of their real support, survived war and
occupation, and how he maintained his place on the throne to continue the imperial tradition well into the second half of the century.

Hirohito and the Japanese nation formed a political unit based on sentiment and ideology, as well as shared memories of war. In looking at his life, we can see how he and his nation stood beside each other in a deeply symbiotic relationship, the manipulation and exploitation of which came chiefly from the emperor's side. Before, during, and immediately after the trauma of war and defeat, he presented himself to the people as a “traditional” exalted being, looking down on them while manifesting only their ideal features, never their shortcomings. They in turn were supposed to hold him in awe and trembling as a living deity and a model of the ideal father. They were to assist him in the construction of his authority, and to take responsibility for his exercise of power because he, in theory, could not. Never were the people to discuss where this model and organizing principle of their national life fell short of perfection. (Nevertheless, in every single period, some of them always did.)

Following Hirohito's enthronement in 1926, politics in Japan became enflamed over foreign and domestic policy issues. Political and military elites began to debate the meaning of the national polity, or
kokutai
. Centered on the imperial house,
kokutai
meant the best possible principles of Japanese state and society. As dissatisfaction with society deepened, the belief spread that reform could be achieved by utilizing the emperor's authority. In this context a new, spiritually driven, and powerful nationalism called the “imperial way,”
k
d
, arose and spread widely. The “imperial way” was a motivating political theology sprung from the idea of the emperor as the literally living embodiment of Japan past and present, a paradigm of moral excellence all should follow. The term denoted a kind of ideological warfare but also, on the other hand, an action plan. It was designed to make Japan free of all externally derived isms, such as Western democracy, liberalism, individualism, and communism. Free to be itself only, the nation would regain self-
esteem and be able to wage a “holy” war of ideas against Western political doctrines. Although the roots of
k
d
went back to the crisis of the mid–nineteenth century, its revival at the end of the 1920s, and its actual application in real-life Japanese diplomacy during the early 1930s, helped Japan break with its immediate past—and also greatly narrowed the nation's range of possible choices.