Read Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Online
Authors: Herbert P. Bix
Tags: #General, #History, #Biography & Autobiography, #Military, #World War II
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (9 page)
The emperor's chief advisers had also crafted and handed down to Hirohito, through Meiji, an ideology of rule grounded in the fusion, ever since antiquity, of religious awareness and state consciousness. “[A]ll religions are extremely weak and none furnishes a foundation of the state,” It
had asserted. The throne, therefore, had to serve as a substitute, and its occupant had to be the source of authority for all governments. It, in his famous
Commentaries on the Constitution
of 1889, had furnished the classic rhetoric for the theocratic emperor.
“The Sacred Throne was established at the time when the heavens and the earth became separated.” (
Kojiki
) The Emperor is Heaven descended, divine, and sacred. He is preeminent above all his subjects. He must be reverenced and is inviolable. He has indeed to pay due respect to the law, but the law has no power to hold him accountable to
itâ¦. He shall not be made a topic of derogatory comment nor one of discussion.
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The imperial ideology in which religious myth figured so prominently was not ancient, however. Allegedly nonreligious “state Shinto” (as opposed to “sect Shinto”) took shape during Meiji's reign directly from the belief that Japan was a holy realm protected by Shinto deities and ruled by an emperor who was descended from the sun goddess. The nationalization of core elements of Shinto entailed the establishment of the Grand Shrine of Ise Jing
as the major Shinto shrine in which the sun goddess was enshrined. Ise became the main symbol of Shinto as well as a center of national devotion and the apex of a hierarchy of lesser shrines in villages and towns throughout the country.
In 1890 Emperor Meiji issued, without the countersignature of any minister of state, the short Imperial Rescript on Education. “Know ye, Our subjects,” it began, using the newly coined compound term
shinmin
to denote “loyal-officials-directly-subordinated-to-the-emperor, and people-who-obediently-comply-with-their-orders.”
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Then it went on to list the Confucian virtues, starting with filial piety, which were to inform human relationships, adding that “should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth.” The final line of the rescript asserted that emperors were the source of all morality.
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At the start of the Restoration both Confucianism and Buddhism had been considered foreign accretions to the national essence, and as such to be expunged. The education rescript, however, was part of a late-Meiji course reversal, using traditional Confucian, not Shinto, language to counter progressive, democratic thought and ideals and to drum in the new notion of “loyal subjects.” The rescript molded generations of Japanese to be loyal servants to the emperor-state, in which governance was an essentially
paternalistic exercise, carried out in a paternalistic manner, by officials who were supposed to know best what was good for the people. In addition the education rescript accustomed all Japanese to the notion that morality and culture were closely tied to, yet never transcended, the state.
Education and military affairsâtwo spheres of national life affecting all Japaneseâhad been placed under the emperor's direct extraconstitutional control, making him the sacred pedagogue with the power to proselytize, as well as the supreme generalissimo with the power to issue orders to the armed forces.
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Without the emperor's support and assistance, no cabinet or prime minister could rule for long.
The strengthening of the monarchy, through the promulgation of the Meiji constitution and the Imperial Rescript on Education, changed the whole intellectual climate in Japan.
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During Hirohito's childhood the institutions and ideology of the Meiji state underwent further development. State Shinto, and the notion of “the unity of rites and governance” through the emperor, gained a new lease on life through the establishment in 1900 of a Bureau of Shrines and Religion within the Home Ministry.
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Soon each member of a household, whether Buddhist or Christian (then about 1 percent of the population), had to become a parishioner of a local shrine and have a connection with a tutelary deity. When the local shrines raised their status to the state level by choosing names from ancient myths or historical legends, all the gods of the shrine became connected genealogically to the ancestral goddess of the imperial house, Amaterasu
mikami. Feelings of veneration for Emperor Meiji deepened, and many people began to imagine that they themselves existed because of him.
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Hirohito turned seven in 1908, the year the government reaffirmed its foreign policy of expanding Japan's colonial position on the Asian continent within a framework of continued division of spoils with the European powers and the United States. That same
year the Ministry of Education began to rewrite school textbooks to describe Japan as an organic, harmonious, moral, and patriarchial “family state” in which all Japanese were related to the emperor. Revision was needed because society was changing rapidly and interpretations of Meiji's “Imperial Rescript on Education,” written in archaic language, needed to be unified. Now the education rescript acquired a meaning it had not had in the 1890s. Children continued to be taught the foundation myths: that they were the subjects of the emperor and had to obey him just as they obeyed their fathers and mothers. But for the first time the impersonal emperor-state itself was presented as the supreme entity that took priority over all other values. The relationship of the imperial house to the nation began to be described as that of a progenitor “head-family” to its various “branch” and “stem” families. When the textbook revision was completed in 1911, the premises of monarchical absolutism had been written into public education, and state power had, in theory, been grounded in the intimate sphere of the family.
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In the real world, of course, not all Japanese sided with the government or identified strongly with the imperial house as the new textbooks assumed. Significantly the years 1910â11 witnessed the highly publicized High Treason Incident, in which a small group of radical socialists and anarchists were charged with lèsé-majesté and executed for allegedly plotting to assassinate Emperor Meiji. One of them was a young priest of the StZen sect, Uchiyama Gud, who had written and widely circulated a scathing denunciation of the entire imperial system:
The Big Bullock of the present government, the emperor, is not the son of the gods as your primary school teachers and others would have you believe. The ancestors of the present emperor came forth from a corner of Kyushu, killing and robbing people as they did. They then destroyed their fellow thievesâ¦. When it is said that the [imperialdynasty] has continued for 2,500 years, it may seem as if [the present
emperor] is divine, but down through the ages the emperors have been tormented by foreign opponents and, domestically, treated as puppets by their own vassalsâ¦. Although this is well-known, university professors and their students, weaklings that they are, refuse to either say or write anything about it. Instead, they attempt to deceive both others and themselves, knowing all along the whole thing is a pack of lies.
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