The Emperors of Modern Japan [1 ed.] 9004168222, 9789004168220

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction (Ben-Ami Shillony)
PART ONE GENERAL THEMES
The Strange Survival and Its Modern Signifi cance (Imatani Akira)
The Way of Revering the Emperor: Imperial Philosophy and Bushido in Modern Japan (Christopher Goto-Jones)
State Shinto and Emperor Veneration (Shimazono Susumu)
Ise Jingu and Modern Emperorship (Rosemarie Bernard)
The Emperor and the Left in Interwar Japan (Rikki Kersten)
Conservative Dissatisfaction with the Modern Emperors (Ben-Ami Shillony)
Emperors and Christianity (Ben-Ami Shillony)
The Unreciprocated Gaze: Emperors and Photography (Julia Adeney Thomas)
PART TWO INDIVIDUAL EMPERORS AND EMPRESSES
The 'Great Emperor' Meiji (Hara Takeshi)
Taisho: An Enigmatic Emperor and his Infl uential Wife (Hara Takeshi)
Empress Nagako and the Family State (Sally A. Hastings)
Axes to Grind: The Hirohito War Guilt C ontroversy in Japan (Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi)
The Emperor in the Constitutional Debate (Sigal Ben-Rafael Galanti)
Akihito and the Problem of Succession (Takahashi Hiroshi)
Contributors
Chronology of the Japanese Emperors since the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Recommended Books in English
Index

Citation preview

The Emperors of Modern Japan

Handbook of Oriental Studies Handbuch der Orientalistik Section Five Japan

Edited by

M. Blum R. Kersten M.F. Low

VOLUME 14

The Emperors of Modern Japan Edited by

Ben-Ami Shillony

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2008

Cover illustration: Japanese Imperial Palace, Tokyo Japan. Photo by Lonnie Toshio Kishiyama, July 2006. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The emperors of modern Japan / edited by Ben-Ami Shillony. p. cm. — (Handbook of Oriental Studies = Handbuch der Orientalistik. Section 5, Japan, ISSN 0921-5239 ; 14) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-16822-0 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Emperors—Japan. 2. Japan— History—1868– I. Shillony, Ben-Ami. DS881.95.E487 2008 952.03092’2—dc22 2008026657

ISSN 0921-5239 ISBN 978 90 04 16822 0 Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................ Ben-Ami Shillony

1

PART ONE

GENERAL THEMES The Strange Survival and Its Modern Significance .................. Imatani Akira The Way of Revering the Emperor: Imperial Philosophy and Bushidō in Modern Japan ........................................................ Christopher Goto-Jones

15

23

State Shinto and Emperor Veneration ....................................... Shimazono Susumu

53

Ise Jingū and Modern Emperorship .......................................... Rosemarie Bernard

79

The Emperor and the Left in Interwar Japan .......................... Rikki Kersten

107

Conservative Dissatisfaction with the Modern Emperors ......... Ben-Ami Shillony

137

Emperors and Christianity ......................................................... Ben-Ami Shillony

163

The Unreciprocated Gaze: Emperors and Photography .......... Julia Adeney Thomas

185

vi

contents PART TWO

INDIVIDUAL EMPERORS AND EMPRESSES The ‘Great Emperor’ Meiji ........................................................ Hara Takeshi

213

Taishō: An Enigmatic Emperor and his Influential Wife ......... Hara Takeshi

227

Empress Nagako and the Family State ...................................... Sally A. Hastings

241

Axes to Grind: The Hirohito War Guilt Controversy in Japan ....................................................................................... Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi

271

The Emperor in the Constitutional Debate .............................. Sigal Ben-Rafael Galanti

299

Akihito and the Problem of Succession ..................................... Takahashi Hiroshi

313

Contributors ................................................................................

331

Chronology of the Japanese Emperors since the Mid-Nineteenth Century ........................................................

335

Recommended Books in English ................................................

339

Index ...........................................................................................

343

INTRODUCTION The historical role of the Japanese emperors was different from that of kings and emperors in most other countries. On the one hand, the dynasty was so sacred, that no one dared to overthrow it in recorded history. As a result, the same family, which does not even possess a name, has been reigning continuously in Japan for at least fifteen centuries, making it the oldest dynasty on earth today. Although Japan knew many periods of internal warfare and political turmoil, except for a fifty-six-year schism between two branches of the dynasty in the fourteenth century, the imperial family did not split into rivaling courts. This meant that, except for those fifty-six years, there was always one emperor recognized by the whole country. The dynasty was based on the male line, therefore no other family, not even the aristocratic Fujiwara clan which for about a thousand years intermarried with the imperial family, could place one of its own sons on the throne. The possession of such a long and unbroken dynasty provided the Japanese with pride, and it kept the country from breaking into separate kingdoms as so often happened in other places. On the other hand, the emperors of Japan were weaker than royals in other countries. The imperial court of Japan adopted the trappings of the imperial court of China, but it never controlled the state in the way that the Chinese monarchs did. Since the ninth century, there has hardly been a Japanese emperor who administered the state, commanded troops, or initiated policies. Weak royals existed in other countries too, but in Japan this was the norm. Not expected to exercise power, the emperors of Japan could be minors or (unlike in China) women—the daughters of emperors—with the throne reverting to the male line after their reign (there was only one case, in 715, when a reigning empress, Gemmei, the daughter of an emperor and the widow of a crown prince, was succeeded by another woman, her daughter Genshō who was born from that prince). Unlike in other countries, where abdication of kings was a rarity, in Japan about half of the historic emperors (not including the mythical ones), despite their sacrosanct position, resigned out of their own will or on the demands of the people in power. The religious role of the emperors was to intermediate between the state and the Shinto gods and to perform rites that only they, as descendants of the

2

introduction

sun goddess, were allowed to perform. This did not prevent them from patronizing Buddhism, and some of them became Buddhist monks or nuns after their retirement. The combination of sanctity and weakness, which characterized the Japanese emperors, enabled others—aristocrats, warlords, or former emperors—to manipulate them for their own benefit. The imperial aura, which preserved the dynasty, also sustained the power of the actual rulers. Between the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries, the emperors sanctioned the authority of the military lords, while preserving the façade of a civilian imperial government. The success of the Tokugawa shoguns in unifying the country and maintaining a long peace was partly due to their ability to control the throne in an effective way. Despite their weakness, the Japanese emperors were the only ones who could bestow legitimacy on the actual rulers and provide them with coveted imperial titles. The emperors legitimized the status quo, but they could also sanction change. In the second half of the first millennium, the imperial court was the conduit through which Chinese culture, including Buddhism, entered Japan, and in the nineteenth century it was instrumental in espousing western civilization. Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the fifteen-year old emperor, Mutsuhito (known posthumously as the Meiji Emperor), bestowed legitimacy on the new government and its sweeping reforms. But ‘Meiji the Great,’ as he was often called, neither initiated nor controlled these changes. To the outside world and to his own people he was the paramount symbol of the rising Japanese nation. He inaugurated factories, issued a constitution, and established a parliament, but he also declared wars, legitimized aggression, and authorized colonies. The imperial institution hindered democracy by sanctioning the authoritarian state, but it also provided the stability which was needed for modernization. As all praise was due to the sacred monarch, there was no room in Japan for a charismatic dictator, like the ‘great leaders’ who appeared in other modernizing societies. Throughout modern history, leadership in Japan remained collective. The emperor legitimized what the ruling group of politicians, military men, senior bureaucrats and imperial advisers had agreed upon in advance. He was rarely expected to choose between conflicting recommendations or to formulate his own policies. The postwar constitution, imposed by the allied occupation and embraced by the Japanese public, demoted the emperor to the status of a symbol of the state and of the unity of the people. Although that had, in fact, been his role throughout history, it was the first time

introduction

3

that his powerlessness was explicitly admitted and decreed. Today, the Japanese emperor has less authority than his predecessors, because for the first time in history he has been deprived of his central role, which was legitimization. No longer the sovereign, he signs official documents in the same way as presidents in other countries do, but does not sanction anything anymore. Nonetheless, conspicuous components of his previous position have been retained. The same family continues to occupy the throne, the same title tennō continues to be carried by the emperors, the emperor performs the same Shinto rites as his predecessors, and the same man, Hirohito, who had reigned before and during the war, remained on the throne for nearly forty-four years after the war ended. Japan is the only modern country in the world in which the monarchy survived defeat and still exists today. It is also the only country today that has an emperor, despite the fact that Japan is not an empire anymore. Of the four emperors of modern Japan, two reigned for more than four decades, providing symbolic continuity to their long eras. These were the Meiji Emperor (Mutsuhito), who reigned from 1867 to 1912, a period in which Japan was transformed into a strong and modern state; and his grandson the Shōwa Emperor (Hirohito), who reigned from 1926 to 1989, a period of a devastating war, a humiliating defeat, a foreign occupation, a long peace, and an unprecedented prosperity. Western attention has not been divided equally among the modern emperors. Dozens of books and articles have been written about the Shōwa Emperor, because of his involvement in the Second World War, while much less has been written in western languages about the Meiji Emperor, who was involved in two wars: against China (1894–5), and against Russia (1904–5). The Taishō Emperor, who reigned from 1912 to 1926 and was involved in the First World War, and the present emperor Akihito, who has been reigning since 1989 and was not involved in any war, have earned even less attention. This book presents a broad picture of the four modern emperors who reigned during the 140 years between 1867 and 2007. They descended in a direct line from father to son, but were different in character and behavior from one another. The book examines part of the ways in which they acted and reacted, the role of their wives, the ideologies that were woven around them, their religious functions and interests, the debate over war responsibility, the mixed feelings toward them on the Left and the Right, and the problem of imperial succession. The essays, by scholars from different countries, present new information

4

introduction

and new interpretations. Some of them are more informative, while others are more analytical, but in their entirety they form a handbook of the modern emperors of Japan. The book is intended for scholars, students, and the general public interested in Japan, its history and the peculiar institution of its monarchy. The book is divided into two parts. The first part deals with general themes related to the imperial institution in modern Japan. Imatani Akira, in his opening essay, examines the history of the imperial family and the reasons for its long survival. He reveals that besides the orthodox tradition of an unchanging and unbroken dynasty, there existed, until the fourteenth century a different tradition, which predicted that the imperial line would come to an end with the 100th emperor. On the basis of that esoteric prophesy, the third Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimitsu, at the end of the fourteenth century, schemed to replace Emperor Go-Komatsu, the 100th emperor by the traditional count, with his own descendants. He upheld the Confucian doctrine, not accepted in Japan, which justified the periodical transfer of the mandate of heaven from one dynasty to another. Yoshimitsu failed in carrying out his plan, because the sanctity of the imperial family was too strong to allow it. As Imatani shows, from that time on the status of the emperors was constantly rising, despite the internal wars. It was improved in the Edo era, and reached its peak in the Meiji Restoration, when the emperor was installed as the supreme national leader. Eighty years later, the postwar constitution returned him to his premodern status. Christopher Goto-Jones, in his essay on imperial philosophy, shows how bushidō, originally a feudal value system emphasizing loyalty and self-sacrifice, was transformed, after the Meiji Restoration, into a patriotic code of loyalty to the emperor and the nation. Associated with kokutai, or national polity, bushidō was inculcated into the national psyche through education and exhortation. It was presented both as an age-old, uniquely Japanese ethic, reaching back to Emperor Jimmu, and as a modern ideology fitting the needs of the new Japan. Goto-Jones shows how two modern philosophers, Inoue Tetsujirō and Watsuji Tetsurō, differed in their interpretation of bushidō as related to the nation and the emperor. Both praised self-sacrifice, but Inoue, following the pragmatic Confucian tradition, regarded it as an effective means of promoting national interests. This was also the official interpretation of bushidō before the Pacific War, as it was reflected in the Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890 and the Kokutai no hongi of 1937. Watsuji, following the romantic Buddhist tradition, as it appeared in the eighteenth-

introduction

5

century samurai guidebook Hagakure, offered a different interpretation. According to him, self-immolation, as an expression of reverence for the emperor and as a wish to achieve self-salvation, was a noble act for its own sake regardless of its consequences. Shimazono Susumu explores the topic of State Shinto, as it evolved from the emperor-centered palace rites at the beginning of the Meiji period into a complete religion by the time of the Pacific War. He points out the dual nature of State Shinto. On the one hand it was presented as a non-religion, a system of civic ceremonies, expressing loyalty to the state and to the emperor. As such, it could be practiced by members of any religion, including Christianity. On the other hand, it developed a rich system of beliefs, symbols and rituals that turned it into a full-fledged religion, which competed with other religions, such as Buddhism and Christianity. Shimazono analyzes the concept of kokutai, according to which Japan is a family nation with the emperor at its head. This concept, which first appeared in the late Edo period, became the central ideology in the Meiji era, when the political leaders propagated State Shinto and emperor veneration in order to achieve national integration. Rosemarie Bernard examines the links between the emperors and Ise Shrine, where the holy mirror, the first of the three regalia of the imperial family, is emshrined. This holiest shrine has always been remote from the imperial palace and from the centers of power, and until modern times no emperor, with one possible exception in the seventh century, visited it in person. The emperors figured at Ise not by their presence, but by their absence, as the worship on their behalf there was conducted by imperial envoys and designated priests. In the Edo period, mass pilgrimages to Ise took place, but the carnivalesque atmosphere of these pilgrimages came to an end with the Meiji Restoration, when Ise was placed at the top of a state-sponsored Shinto hierarchy. Breaking with tradition, the Meiji Emperor visited Ise and worshipped there, and his successors followed him. In the early Shōwa period, the imperial visits were accompanied by military spectacles. Hirohito went to Ise in 1941 to report the attack on Pearl Harbor, and in 1945 to report the defeat. After the war, State Shinto was disbanded and the link between state and religion was severed, but the emperors continued to visit Ise Shrine and pray there in their private capacity. Today, in a world no longer centered on the emperor or on agricultural rites, Ise still attracts multitudes, as an icon of nostalgia for a pre-modern Japanese culture.

6

introduction

Rikki Kersten examines the attitudes of Japanese Marxists toward the imperial institution between the two world wars. The orthodox MarxistLeninist ideoplogy, formulated by Moscow, regarded the overthrow of the monarchy as an essential precursor to the advent of a social revolution. But Japanese Marxists were divided over the significance of the emperor in this revolutionary scenario. The Kōza theorists, who followed the line of the Japan Communist Party, argued that the Meiji Restoration had been an incomplete revolution, which established an absolutist Emperor System based on feudal elements. For them, the emperor was a central ‘feudal remnant’ that had to be eliminated before the bourgeois-democratic revolution could be carried out. The Rōnō theorists, on the other hand, straying from the official line of the Communist Party, maintained that the Meiji Restoration had already established a bourgeois state, and therefore the next stage should be a socialist revolution. For them, the emperor was an insignificant element of the capitalist state, which could be tolerated for a while. As a result, the police initially treated the Rōnō Marxists more leniently than the Kōza Marxists. Kersten suggests that by marginalizing the emperor and stressing the political and economic dynamics of modern Japan, the Rōnō group devised a plausible theoretical opposition to the Emperor System. My essay, on right-wing disenchantment with the modern emperors, looks at the phenomenon of Japanese nationalists venerating the throne, but being critical of the man who occupies it. Such a situation already developed in the mid-nineteenth century, when Emperor Kōmei was resented by the patriotic samurai who wished to restore him to power. According to one theory, which has not been refuted, he was assassinated by the loyalists who later became the Meiji leaders. Kōmei’s son, the Meiji Emperor, presided over a successful and victorious Japan, and therefore was not criticized by the nationalists. The Taishō Emperor was too close to his father and too sick to be censured. But the Shōwa Emperor, during whose reign Japan suffered internal strife, international humiliation, and a disastrous defeat, attracted right-wing dissatsfaction. Until 1945, the dissatsfaction was covert, but after the war it became overt, with open calls for Hirohito’s resignation. The writer Mishima Yukio admired the imperial institution, but accused Hirohito of betraying the 1936 rebels and the kamikaze pilots. After Hirohito’s death, rightwing disenchantment extended to Emperor Akihito and Crown Prince Naruhito. As a result, for the first time in modern history, nationalist

introduction

7

thinkers started to question the centrality of the imperial institution and to suggest a ‘normal’ nationalism without the emperor. In my second essay, on emperors and Christianity, I look at the intricate relations between the modern emperors of Japan, ostensibly the high priests of Shinto, and Christianity, the foreign religion of the west. Far from being antagonistic, both sides have shown interest in each other. Emperor Meiji and his government were friendly toward the missionaries and were praised by them for that. In the first half of the twentieth century, Japanese Christians embraced nationalism, joined the emperor cult and worshipped Shinto deities. Consequently, some of them attained senior positions in government, education, and the imperial palace. During the allied occupation, General McArthur wished to convert the imperial family to Christianity, on the belief that only Christianity could prevent the spread of communism or the return of militarism. For a while his scheme seemed to work. Hirohito invited lecturers on Christianity to the palace, his wife and daughters took regular Bible lessons, and his brother suggested that the emperor should combine Christianity and Shinto, in the same way that his predecessors had combined Buddhism and Shinto. Ultimately, MacArthur’s efforts failed. Despite a continuing interest in Christianity, the imperial family did not convert, and the Japanese people adopted democracy and pacifism without becoming Christian. Julia Adeney Thomas, in her essay on the imperial gaze, examines photographs to find out how the emperors looked at the people and how the people looked at them. The Meiji Emperor hated posing in front of a camera and only a few photographs were taken of him. The Taishō Emperor, himself an amateur photographer, was photographed on many occasions. The Shōwa Emperor and Emperor Akihito were frequently photographed. What do their photographs tell us about the relationship between them and the people? Thomas shows that before 1945 the imperial gaze was majestic, unidirectional and paternal. The emperor, from his sublime stand, looked down on the bowing people, who were not allowed to stare at him when his coach passed in the street. After the war, the gaze remained unidirectional, but the direction reversed. Now the people gaze at the emperor, out of curiosity, while he is hardly conscious of them. Only on rare occasions was the gaze reciprocal. Thomas describes two such cases: one in 1947, when a photo magazine reproduced a hitherto unknown picture of Crown Prince Hirohito in 1922; and another one in 1951, when a camera

8

introduction

magazine presented Crown Prince Akihito’s photograph on its cover. She concludes that it was easier for emperors to exchange glances with the public when they were still crown princes, and it became more difficult for them to do so after they had ascended the throne. The second part of the book focuses on individual emperors. Hara Takeshi portrays the Meiji Emperor as a shy and taciturn man, who seldom smiled and who spoke very little even to his closest friends and relatives. The emperor expressed his emotions through the means of the thirty-one-syllable waka poems, which he composed on a daily, and sometimes hourly, basis. The emperor’s advisers differed over his role in the modern state. The Confucianists, led by Motoda Nagazane, wanted him to be an authoritarian and benevolent father figure, on the model of the ancient Chinese emperors. The modernists, led by Iwakura Tomomi and Itō Hirobumi, wanted him to be a constitutional monarch on the model of the European kings of that time. The issue was decided not by the emperor, but by the outcome of the political contest within the ruling elite, in which the modernists won. Nevertheless, the Confucian influence remained in several areas, such as education. Although the imperial palace played an important role in the establishment of State Shinto as the national ideology, Hara reveals that the Meiji Emperor himself showed little interest in Shinto and often avoided the palace rites. In his essay on the Taishō Emperor, Hara describes him as an intelligent and friendly crown prince, more outgoing and warm than his aloof father. Hara dismisses the widely held notion that Taishō was mentally deranged. He points out that Taishō’s intellectual sophistication and artistic talents were evident in his elegant calligraphy and the fine Chinese poetry which he composed. The Taishō Emperor, like his father, disliked the Shinto rites and often avoided them. His major problem was his deteriorating health, the result of a childhood disease which ultimately affected his brain. Hara emphasizes the important role that Taishō’s wife, Empress Sadako, played in the palace. After generations of childless imperial consorts, she bore him four robust sons, a fact which enabled her to put an end to the time-honored institution of imperial concubines. Because of her husband’s poor health and her own strong personality, Sadako became the dominant figure in the palace maintaining close ties with politicians. After Taishō’s death, she continued to exert influence on her son Hirohito. Unlike her husband, she was deeply religious, first as a devout Nichiren Buddhist, and later as a devout Shintoist. She showed also interest in Christianity.

introduction

9

Sally A. Hastings, in her essay on Hirohito’s wife Empress Nagako, examines the place of the emperor’s family in the prewar and wartime drive to bolster patriotism. She shows how the visual presentation of the empress and her children bolstered the myth of an organic family state. Hastings points out that Japanese nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s was based not only on the abstract, male-oriented, kokutai, but also on the specific, female-oriented, immediate family of the emperor. The Japanese were interested in the human aspects of the imperial family no less than in its religious and national ones. They prayed for imperial births, celebrated them, and watched the royal children grow. Through his wife and children, the emperor appeared less remote than is usually assumed. The government encouraged public interest in the imperial family, by disclosing its human, mortal and reproductive aspects. The rituals surrounding the births of the emperor’s children and other family events bound the nation around the throne. Like similar events in other countries, these festive occasions, independent of the theory of the unbroken imperial line, constituted an important and less known form of Japanese nationalism. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi analyzes the debate over Hirohito’s war responsibility that has been going on since the end of the Second World War. He notes that while in Germany the issue was war crimes, in Japan it was war guilt. Wakabayashi presents the arguments of both sides of the debate with equal conviction. The accusers (‘Indictors’) of Hirohito, representing anti-establishment circles, base their case on the emperor’s wide legal powers as commander-in-chief and on his sacred position which made his orders absolute. They argue that in the same way that Hirohito managed to block reckless moves of the military before the war, he could and should have used his prerogatives to prevent the war, or at least to shorten it. Their conclusion is that Hirohito was more concerned about protecting kokutai and the regalia than about the lives of his people. The defenders (‘Absolvers’), representing establishment circles, argue that Hirohito was a constitutional monarch who acted within strict legal limits, which did not allow him to reverse the decisions of the military and the cabinet. They point out that, thanks to him, there was no communist revolution in Japan after the war. While the accusers blame the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal for not indicting the emperor, the defenders question the very legality of that tribunal. Wakabayashi shows that both accusers and defenders harbored political agendas. The accusers wished to use Hirohito’s war guilt to abolish the imperial institution altogether, while the defenders wanted to use his

10

introduction

innocence to restore the emperor’s position as head of state. Both sides failed to achieve their covert goals. The postwar constitution preserved the emperor, but demoted him to the status of a symbol. Sigal Ben-Rafael Galanti examines the parliamentary debates in 1946 over the emperor’s constitutional status. She shows that on the issue of the emperor, the position of the politicians within the Diet was more moderate than the pronouncements of their parties outside the Diet. In the parliamentary debates and votings on the new constitution, the Diet members showed a remarkable degree of consensus. Although belonging to opposing parties and groups, almost all of them agreed to retain the imperial institution, to keep Hirohito on the throne, and to change his status to that of a symbol. The conservatives and nationalists were satisfied that the monarchy had been preserved and that Hirohito was left intact. They could claim that under the new constitution, the emperor shared sovereignty with the people, by being one of them, and therefore kokutai had been preserved. The socialists and communists were glad that the emperor had been stripped of all sovereignty and divinity and that, by becoming a mere symbol, he was not even the head of state. Ben-Rafael Galanti maintains that this was a rare moment in Japanese political history, when almost all Diet members endorsed the reform out of a shared sense of responsibility. Takahashi Hiroshi approaches the subject of dynastic succession from the standpoint of an observer who has been writing on the imperial family for many years, as well as from the standpoint of an expert who has been involved in suggesting new succession rules. He describes the perennial difficulty of ensuring the continuity of the imperial family, and shows how on several occasions in the past that family barely avoided extinction. Takahashi claims that the birth of Prince Hisahito in 2006 did not solve the problem, because the continuity of the dynasty still depends on the health of this prince and on his future capacity to produce a male heir. He opposes the idea of reviving the collateral princely houses, which had been set up to produce imperial heirs when the main line failed to do so. He argues that these houses, which were abolished after the war, are too remote from the main line, have been embroiled in scandals, were associated with militarism, and have been commoners for too long to be reinstated into the imperial family. Takahashi supports the recommendation of the advisory council to abolish the exclusive male line and to base imperial succession on primogeniture, regardless of gender. This would allow women to ascend the throne, to marry commoners, and to have the children of these marriages succeed them.

introduction

11

He argues that the tradition of the male line is not immutable and can be changed, in the same way that other traditions were changed in the past. According to Takahashi, the quality which has sustained the imperial dynasty throughout the ages was not its rigidity, but rather its flexibility and adaptability to changing circumstances. Some of the essays in this book were presented as papers at a conference organized by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the spring of 2007 on the occasion of my retirement. This conference enabled scholars from various countries to discuss the topic of the Japanese emperors, as well as other subjects of Japanese history. I thank the Hebrew University and its Japan Culture Fund for providing this opportunity, and the Japan Foundation for supporting it. I am grateful to Albert Hoffstaedt, senior acquisition editor of Brill, for suggesting the topic; to Lucy North for translating four essays from Japanese; to Estherlee Kanon for editing the volume; and to my wife Lena for inspiring and assisting me all along the way. Ben-Ami Shillony Jerusalem, 2008

PART ONE

GENERAL THEMES

THE STRANGE SURVIVAL AND ITS MODERN SIGNIFICANCE Imatani Akira When Did the Present Dynasty Start? Most scholars agree that the traditional account, according to which the imperial dynasty was founded in 660 BC by Emperor Jimmu, is a myth, and that the first nine emperors on the official list are legendary figures. Even so, the imperial family of Japan is the longest reigning dynasty in the world, as it has been on the throne for either 1,500 or 1,700 years. The reason for the two different figures is that we are uncertain whether the lineage broke in the early sixth century between Emperor Buretsu and Emperor Keitai. If, as some scholars claim,1 Keitai started a new line in the sixth century, then the present dynasty is about 1,500 years old; on the other hand, if there was a genealogical link between Buretsu and Keitai, then the dynasty started about 1,700 years ago in the fourth century. In the latter case, its founder was probably Mimaki Iri Biko, known as Emperor Sujin, whose title Hatsukuni Shirasu Sumera Mikoto (‘The Emperor who First Ruled the Land’) suggests this. Archaeological research into the kofun, the burial mounds of the fourth to the seventh centuries, has made great advances in recent years. It is now the prevailing view that the Hashihaka burial mound in Nara Prefecture may be the tomb of the person referred to as Himiko in the Wei zhi woren zhuan, or the ‘Account of the People of Wa,’ in the Annals of the Kingdom of Wei. Some historians believe that the second son of Queen Toyo, who is mentioned in the Annals of the Kingdom of Wei, is Emperor Sujin, and that the Nishitonozuka burial mound is his tomb.2 Sujin’s reign was followed by the reigns of the ‘Five Kings of Wa,’ who are reported in the Annals of the Liu-Song Dynasty to have

1 2

Mizutani Chiaki, Nazo no ōkimi: keitai tennō (Tokyo: Bunshun Shinsho, 2001). Wada Shigeru, Yamato ōken no seiritsu (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 2003).

16

imatani akira

sent envoys to China. By the time of Emperor Yūryaku (King Bu of the Annals) in the mid-fifth century, there was a more or less consolidated domain reaching from Kyushu to Kanto. Iron swords bearing the inscription Waka-Takeru Ōkimi (‘Great Ruler Waka-Takeru,’ possibly Emperor Yūryaku, whose given name was Ō Hatsuse Waka-take no Mikoto) have been unearthed from both the Etafunayama burial mound in Kumamoto Prefecture and the Inariyama burial mound in Saitama Prefecture. However, four reigns after Yūryaku, the imperial line probably petered out, since Emperor Buretsu had killed every single other potential candidate to the throne. In this case, Sujin’s dynasty ended with Emperor Buretsu’s death in 507, and the present dynasty started with his successor Ō-odo Ōkimi, later known as Emperor Keitai (r. 507–531). Keitai seems to have hailed from the Okinaga clan in Ōmi (present day Shiga Prefecture) and he was chosen as ōkimi, or great ruler, by powerful families in the Kinai region (around present-day Kyoto).3 The imperial dynasty of Japan has not changed since then, and accession to the throne has been by genealogically related descendents. In the sixth and seventh centuries, the Soga clan, who provided consorts to the emperors, dominated the throne. However, the Soga were destroyed in 645 by Prince Naka no Ōe (later Emperor Tenji, r. 661–672), who restored the power of the throne for about a century. The Jinshin Disturbance of 672, over a succession dispute, ended in the victory of Emperor Temmu. During the reigns of Temmu and his wife and successor Empress Jitō in the seventh century, imperial power was consolidated. This is evidenced by the Manyōshū poem, praising Empress Jitō: Our Lord A very god Builds her lodge Above the thunder By the heavenly clouds.4

Since Temmu won his victory without the assistance of the powerful clans, he did not award them ministerial posts, instituting instead what may be called an imperial-family government. The line of Emperor

Nihongi (tr. W.G. Aston. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972), II, pp. 1–3. Gary L. Ebersole, Ritual Poetry and the Politics of Death in Early Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 43. 3 4

the strange survival and its modern significance

17

Temmu continued until Empress Kōken in the eighth century. However, after her abdication and the accession of Emperor Kōnin, the grandson of Emperor Tenji in 758, the throne returned to the Tenji line. Emperor Kōnin’s son Kammu (r. 781–806) was born to a Korean mother and during his reign the foreign Confucian model of a strong monarchy was adopted, together with Korean court ceremonies.5 However, the large-scale projects, in which Kammu engaged, such as the wars against barbarian tribes in the north and several attempts at building capital cities, exhausted the coffers of the early Heian state. This led to the rise of the northern branch (‘Hokke’) of the Fujiwara clan, who came to exert control over the emperors through matrimonial ties with the imperial family. The enthronement of the eight-year-old Emperor Seiwa in 858, and the appointment of his maternal grandfather Fujiwara no Yoshifusa as his regent, was a turning point in the history of the imperial institution, because thereafter the throne could be occupied by minors. As a result, members of the northern branch of the Fujiwara clan, acting as sesshō (regent to a child emperor) and kampaku (regent to an adult emperor), held the reins of power, while the emperors became ceremonial figures.6 This was the beginning of the ‘symbol emperor’ system of Japan. In 810 ex-emperor Heizei, supported by his Fujiwara wife Kusuko, tried to regain the throne by force (the Kusuko Disturbance), but failed and entered a monastery. Since that time, members of the imperial family who rebelled against the government and failed were allowed to take holy orders. The Warriors Rule, But Do Not Reign In the middle of the eleventh century, with the rise of the bushi (warrior) and sōhei (armed monk) classes, the situation started to change. As the existing political system, based on the ritsuryō code, became ineffective, the necessity arose for a more powerful kind of kingship. In 1086, ex-emperor Shirakawa instituted the system of insei (‘Cloistered Government’), by which the retired emperor wielded power. Whereas in the Fujiwara regent system the head of the maternal family of the emperor ran the state, in the insei system the head of the paternal family

5 6

Imatani Akira, “Chūsei no tennō,” GYROS, vol. 4, 2004. Yoshida Takashi, Kodai kokka no ayumi (Tokyo: Shōgakkan Library, 1992).

18

imatani akira

of the emperor wielded power. One can regard this development toward retired emperors regaining control over civilian and military affairs as a kind of imperial restoration. However, the retired emperors only held power for a brief period. In the Hōgen Disturbance of 1156 and the Heiji Disturbance of 1159, the warriors made great advances and became the ruling elite. The process culminated in the dictatorship of Taira no Kiyomori in the middle of the twelfth century and, later in the same century, in the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate by Minamoto no Yoritomo. Taira no Kiyomori had sufficient power to put the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa under house arrest, but he never tried to assume the throne for himself and was satisfied with the rank of dajō daijin (Grand Minister of State). Minamoto no Yoritomo, in addition to being a sei-i tai shōgun (Barbarian Subduing Generalissimo), was content with the imperial title u-taishō (Commander of the Right), a mere official of the emperor. We see a somewhat similar example in the barbarian kings of Italy, Odoacer and Theodoric, in the sixth century, who, despite being German kings, contented themselves with the title ‘patricius,’ or imperial magistrate, in their dealings with the Romans. The military leaders who succeeded Yoritomo showed an attitude similar to his. In 1221, when the retired emperor Go-Toba attacked the shogunate, in what was known as the Jōkyū Disturbance, the warrior commander Hōjō Yoshitoki sent him and two other retired emperors into exile. Thereafter, the emperors were mere puppets, but none of the Hōjō rulers tried to grasp the imperial title and they remained satisfied with the relatively lowly title of shikken, or shogunal regent. Why did strong military men, like Kiyomori, Yoritomo, and the Hōjō regents, not attempt to overthrow the emperor? Why were they content with the subordinate positions of daijin, shōgun, and shikken? One reason must have been the traditional belief that the emperors were direct descendents of the sun goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami. At the end of the Nara period, the Buddhist priest Dōkyō, who had won the favor of Empress Shōtoku, tried to gain imperial status on the grounds that the god Usa Hachiman had ordered him to do so. However, Dōkyō was unable to claim imperial lineage, and therefore had to give up his ambitions for the throne. The Fujiwara clan, the proverbial ‘power behind the throne’ in the Heian period, claimed to be descendants of the deity Ame-no-koyane no mikoto, but this deity belonged to a different line of gods from that of Amaterasu, and therefore Fujiwara made no attempt to seize the throne. From the ninth century onwards, there

the strange survival and its modern significance

19

were regular lectures at the court on the Nihon shoki that emphasized the importance of lineage to the court nobles. Yoshimitsu and the Theory of the Hundred Emperors The civil wars of the Namboku-chō (Northern and Southern Courts) period (1336–1392) strengthened the warrior families and caused an additional decline in the status of the emperors and the court nobility. The man who took advantage of this situation was the third Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimitsu. Inspired by the theory of the Chinese philosopher Mencius about the transfer of the mandate of heaven, he tried to assume the position of emperor. In 1394, Yoshimitsu acquired the title dajō daijin, or Grand Minister of State, as Kiyomori had done before him. A year later, he relinquished the title of shōgun to his son Yoshimochi, and took holy orders to become a monk. Although he detached himself from the ritsuryō system of official ranks and positions, he continued to wield great power, instituting what was in effect a new insei, or ‘cloistered government,’ this time by a retired shogun. In 1401 Yoshimitsu accepted the title of Nihon koku-ō, or ‘King of Japan,’ from the Chinese Emperor Jian Wen and entered into tributary relations with Ming China. His intention was to acquire the throne using the prestige of the emperor of China. In 1392 he put an end to the dynastic schism, by making the Northern Court emperor Go-Komatsu the sole emperor of Japan. His plan was to have his second son Yoshitsugu succeed Go-Komatsu, but he died in 1408, before he could realize this plan.7 After Yoshimitsu’s failure to usurp the throne, no such attempt was made by any one of the military leaders of Japan. Moreover, from that point on the imperial institution started to recover its fortunes. There was, however, also a contrary tradition. From the middle of the Heian period, a secret theory, known as hyakuō-setsu (Theory of a Hundred Kings), circulated among the people. According to this theory, after the reign of one hundred emperors, the dynasty would come to an end and be replaced by a new dynasty. During the Kamakura period, the Hundred Kings theory, together with the Buddhist concept of mappō

Akira Imatani and Kōzō Yamamura, “Not for Lack of Will or Wile; Yoshimitsu’s Failure to Supplant the Imperial Lineage,” Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 18, No. 1 (Winter 1992), pp. 45–78. See also Imatani Akira, Muromachi no ōken (Tokyo: Chūkō Shinsho, 1990). 7

20

imatani akira

(‘Latter Day’), spread in Japan and contributed to the malaise of the time. The historian Jien (1155–1225) and the Buddhist priest Nichiren (1222–1282) both allude to this theory in their sermons and texts. The myth of the divine imperial lineage propounded by the court and the nobility was thus challenged by the Hundred Kings theory as well as by the social unrest of the time. Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, in his attempt to seize the throne, relied on the mandate-transfer theory of Mencius as well as on the Hundred Kings theory. Go-Komatsu was, according to the official count, the hundredth emperor, and according to that theory should have been the last monarch in the dynasty. The Slow Rise of Imperial Prestige The sengoku (Warring States) period (1467–1568) witnessed a slow rise in the prestige of the emperor. The daimyō, or local lords, who were the effective power holders of that time, placed a higher value on court ranks bestowed by the emperor than on feudal appointments to the position of shugo (provincial constables) issued by the shogun. While shoguns sometimes fled the capital, the emperor never set foot out of Kyoto. In this way, the emperor became a symbol of the unity of the state. Some daimyō provided the money needed for the imperial accession ceremonies or for the repair of the palace buildings. The warriors’ respect for the emperor was reflected in the attitudes of the three great unifiers of Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Oda Nobunaga did not get on well with Emperor Ōgimachi, but his wish was to become the emperor’s shogun. Toyotomi Hideyoshi did not want to become shogun, but assumed instead the court titles of kampaku and later taikō, or regent and supreme officer of the emperor. After his victory at the Battle of Sekigahara, Tokugawa Ieyasu became shogun and, like the Ashikaga, set up a bakufu, or ‘tent government’. After decimating the Toyotomi clan in 1615, he set out to consolidate power to a degree never seen before. However, he never tried to call himself koku-ō, or king. Later, Tokugawa shoguns used the title Nihon koku taikun, Great Lord of Japan, but even so the imperial family continued to survive and only the emperor could appoint the head of the Tokugawa clan as shogun. Why did the Tokugawa shoguns not attempt to become emperors themselves? Horigome Yōzō, a Japanese scholar of European history, claims that Japanese society from the Kamakura to the Edo period remained feudal, and this was the reason it did not

the strange survival and its modern significance

21

develop an autocratic government but retained the old ritsuryō system, in which the emperor was the axis.8 This explanation is questionable, however, because the Tokugawa state was not exactly feudal and it possessed many of the elements of an autocratic state. From Sovereign to Symbol The Meiji Restoration was Japan’s reaction to the encroachment of western powers. The Japanese, having seen the Qing Empire of China humiliated in the Opium Wars, decided to build a strong nation-state around the throne. However, after more than a thousand years in which the emperor had been nothing but a ceremonial figure, it was difficult to turn back the clock and to revive direct imperial rule. It was also highly problematic to have the emperor serve as commander of the armed forces after 700 years in which the emperors had entrusted military affairs to the warriors. The postwar constitution instituted the ‘symbol emperor’ system, but this was not, as some people think, a humiliating alien concept imposed on Japan by the allied occupation. Considering the 1,500-year history of the imperial family, after the Second World War the role of the emperor simply reverted to what it had been before the Meiji Restoration. The Shōwa Emperor spent the first part of his reign as a monarch who (according to Article 4 of the Meiji Constitution) ‘is the head of the Empire, combining in Himself the rights of sovereignty.’ Therefore, it might have presented considerable difficulties for him to play the role of a symbol, or ceremonial figure. In fact, however, he performed his new duties with relative ease. Since then, the ‘symbol emperor’ system has gained a firm hold in Japan, and surveys of public opinion indicate that nearly 90 percent of the people support it. Many Japanese intellectuals, scholars and historians consider the imperial system to be an anachronism, an institution bequeathed by the feudal past. They predict that it will not be long before Japan makes the transition to a republic. I wonder whether they are right. Voter turnout in the national elections in recent years in Japan barely breaks 50 percent, but every year nearly everyone participates in the hatsu-mōde, or pilgrimages to shrines at New Year. Although it is still not

8

Horigome Tsunezō, “Hōkensei saihyōka e no shiron,” Tembō, No. 85 (1969).

22

imatani akira

clear whether democracy has truly taken a firm hold in postwar Japan, an overwhelming proportion of the population, as seen in the opinion polls and the hatsu-mōde, support the institution of the emperor. Unless the situation changes drastically, this institution is likely to continue. Somebody once predicted that the only kings that would remain in the modern world would be the four kings in a pack of cards and the King of England. Indeed, the people who drafted the 1947 constitution believed that they were modeling it on the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain. However, the prospects for the Japanese emperors may be even better than those of the British kings and queens. After all, the English monarchy was once disrupted by the Puritan revolution, while no such break occurred in Japan. The present system, in which the emperor is a symbol of the state and the unity of the people, has existed for many centuries, withstood several considerable crises, and stands every chance of surviving well into the future. (Translated by Lucy North)

THE WAY OF REVERING THE EMPEROR: IMPERIAL PHILOSOPHY AND BUSHIDŌ IN MODERN JAPAN Christopher Goto-Jones Bushidō can be seen as expressing the most remarkable feature of our national morality . . . To embrace life and death as one, to fulfill the Way of Loyalty [to the Emperor], that is our bushidō.1

Introduction In many aspects, the tumultuous wartime years of the 1930s and 1940s represented the breaking of various waves of intellectual and political culture that had been stirred up by the arrival of Commodore Perry and the Meiji Restoration in the second half of the nineteenth century. For many Japanese thinkers during this period, the massive influx of ‘Western’ philosophy and culture, accompanied by the menacing presence of potentially overwhelming military forces, challenged the very existence of Japan and its so-called ‘Japanese spirit.’ However, whilst the integrity of a territorial and legal ‘Japan’ was relatively simple to define, and hence to defend, the parameters and meaning of the entity called the ‘Japanese spirit’ proved to be much more elusive. Hence, the problem of how to defend the Japanese spirit actually began with the more fundamental problem of what this Nihon seishin ( Japan spirit) might be.2 A diverse constellation of features and forces were marshaled in the ensuing debates and battles about the dimensions of the so-called essence of Japan. The various fields of contestation included military affairs and national defense, political reform and constitutional governance, economic reform and distribution of wealth, social reforms and welfare, educational reforms, national identity and spiritual health.

Itō Enkichi, Kokutai no hongi (Tokyo: Mombushō, 1937), pp. 110–111. For some critics on the left, it was precisely this concern for establishing a meaningful conception of the Japanese spirit that led inexorably to Japanese ultranationalism. See, for example, Tosaka Jun, Nihon ideorogi-ron, 1935, reprinted in volume II of the Tosaka Jun zenshū, 6 vols. (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1966–79, hereafter TJZ). 1 2

24

christopher goto-jones

Given a context in which every aspect of society was vulnerable to challenge and change, one of the key problems for the various wouldbe reformers was the ability to define a constant, or series of constants, to which the idea of ‘Japaneseness’ could be tied, lest the very idea of ‘being Japanese’ simply collapse under wholesale reform. What was needed, it seemed, was a beacon of stability amidst the roiling tides of change.3 The first such beacon to appear in the intellectual and political landscape was the figure of the emperor, who was quickly recovered as not only a symbol of national unity but also as the rightful sovereign of the nation. Indeed, in various contexts, the emperor became coterminous with the concept of kokutai (national polity) itself.4 In the years between the demise of the Tokugawa shogunate (1867) and the inauguration of the Constitution of the Great Empire of Japan—the so-called Meiji Constitution (1890)5—intellectuals debated various legal and political strategies to achieve kummin dōchi (the unity of the monarchy and the people) in order to accomplish a recognizably ‘Japanese’ and successfully modern state. In other words, the figure of the emperor (even if not the person of Mutsuhito himself) appeared to be the key to harmonizing the dynamically shifting and frequently conflicting interests of Japanese society. In the words of Kevin Doak, the emperor “quickly became a testing ground for whether the new government could construct a sense of public that would serve the interests of political stability and the privileged positions of those already in power.”6 However, even if some level of agreement could be reached on at least the theoretical centrality of the figure of the emperor in the emerging, modern Japanese polity, this was only half of the problem. A parallel discourse was concerned with the significance of the emperor to the conduct and morality of the Japanese people themselves. In other words: what implications should the existence of the emperor have for the everyday behavior of the people; what should be the

3 The origins of this culturally-defensive quest for the parameters of ‘Japaneseness’ can be seen in what Harry Harootunian has called the ‘nativist’ (kokugaku) discourse in Tokugawa Japan. See Harry Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 4 This argument is persuasively made by Kevin Doak, A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan: Placing the People (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), see especially chapter 3. 5 The constitution was promulgated on 11 February 1889, but did not come into effect until 29 November 1890. 6 Kevin Doak, A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan, p. 89.

revering the emperor: imperial philosophy and BUSHIDŌ

25

Way of Revering the Emperor in modern Japan? It is this question that brings the contested ethical tradition of bushidō (the way of the samurai) into focus. One of the difficulties in talking about bushidō, at least outside Japan, is provoked by the relative dearth of scholarly literature that attempts to tackle the subject.7 In the English language literature, we are accustomed to being told that bushidō is an invented tradition of the modern period that either bears little relation to the actual conduct of historical samurai8 or, even worse, that it was one of the militaristic codes of conduct that facilitated some of the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese imperial army during the Pacific War.9 Part of the problem appears to be the assumed centrality of Nitobe Inazō’s 1899 book, Bushido: The Soul of Japan, which was originally written in English and, for a long time, was the only source of insight into bushidō available to Western commentators who were unable to read Japanese.10 Indeed, even though Hurst takes care to explain that Nitobe knew very little about Japanese history and ethics and hence that his ideas about bushidō were unreliable, he does go so far as to suggest that Nitobe’s book and the conception of bushidō that emerges from it lay the conceptual 7 In recent years, the Japanese have been treated to a boom in interest in bushidō, and there have been a series of monographs published, albeit of varying academic interest. 8 Important articles in this tradition are Cameron Hurst III, “Death, Honor, and Loyalty: The Bushidō Ideal”, in Philosophy East & West, 40:4 (1990), pp. 511–527; Karl Friday, “Bushidō or Bull? A Medieval Historian’s Perspective on the Imperial Army and the Japanese Warrior Tradition”, in The History Teacher, 27:3 (1994), pp. 339–349. Both Hurst and Friday point out that Nitobe Inazō thought he was coining the term ‘bushidō’ in 1899; and both cite Basil Hall Chamberlain’s famous, contemporaneous charge that bushidō was an example of the ‘invention of a religion.’ Friday, in particular, takes great pains to point out that the ideals of bushidō are not reflected by the conduct of samurai in the historical record. However, the fact that warriors did not perform according to these ideals does not in itself invalidate the existence of ideals themselves. Norms are not transparent in this way, and hence the intellectual history of bushidō need not be identical to a history of the deeds of the samurai. For a sustained account along these lines, see Chris Goto-Jones, Warrior Ethics in Japan: Bushidō as Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 9 Famous statements along these lines come from Lord Russell of Liverpool, The Knights of Bushido: A Shocking History of Japanese War Atrocities (New York: EP Dutton, 1958); Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (Oxford: Westview Press, 1996). 10 Inazo Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan (Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 1969). Thankfully, there are now many other ‘primary sources’ concerned with bushidō available in European translations, although many of them have not been produced with an academic audience in mind, but rather with a view toward a popular and business oriented market.

26

christopher goto-jones

foundations for bushidō in the twentieth century, arguing that “Nitobe’s bushido was ultimately linked by the ultranationalists to the movement for ‘national purity’ (kokusui shugi).”11 However, whilst the importance of Nitobe in bringing the word ‘bushidō’ into common parlance, both in Japan and in the world outside, is beyond question, it seems relatively clear that Nitobe was almost entirely peripheral to the intellectual and philosophical project of codifying its meaning and central problematics in early twentieth century Japan. Indeed, the real philosophers of bushidō, such as Inoue Tetsujirō, criticized Nitobe severely for his lack of scholarship and systematic thought, accusing him of failing to provide any constitutional or textual basis for his assertions about ‘the soul of Japan,’ and hence of intellectually emasculating this ethical tradition.12 Far from being rooted in Nitobe’s work, Inoue’s genealogy of bushidō makes no reference to his work at all. Nitobe, it seems, is a straw man from the perspective of intellectual history. In fact, as we shall see, bushidō in modern Japan represents a field of discourse concerned with the ideal type of ethical behavior for the Japanese subjects; it is characterized by a series of sophisticated debates about the meaning of and obligations entailed by loyalty and filial piety, and about the priority of practice versus metaphysical realization. This essay represents an attempt to elaborate some of the ways in which bushidō became assimilated into the wider intellectual discourse of the so-called imperial philosophy, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. In particular, I am interested in exploring the ways in which currents of thought about the symbolic and political function of the emperor in the modern state intermingled with the process of (re)inventing the quasi-feudal ethical standpoints of bushidō into their ostensibly modern forms. The key thinkers within this veritable philosophical whirlpool

Cameron Hurst III, “Death, Honor, and Loyalty”, p. 512. Hurst (p. 512) suggests that only Basil Hall Chamberlain had ‘courage enough to challenge [Nitobe] at the time’ and implies that Inoue’s projects were in line with Nitobe’s ideas. In fact, Chamberlain’s critique was limited to identifying bushidō as an invented tradition, whereas Inoue refuted Nitobe’s vision of the meaning of the term as vacuous and actually damaging, criticizing him severely for his assertions that: ‘it is not a written code; at best it consists of a few maxims handed down from mouth to mouth’ (Nitobe, Bushido, p. 5). In particular, Inoue claimed that Nitobe ignored the historical record and especially the importance of Yamaga Sokō in codifying bushidō. By the early 1930s, it was Nitobe that had moved toward Inoue, rather than the other way around, when he praised Sokō as a vital, patriotic link in the development of bushidō in Japan, in his book Japan: Some Phases of Her Problems and Development (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931). 11 12

revering the emperor: imperial philosophy and BUSHIDŌ

27

included members of the Kyoto School of philosophy13 as well as other professional philosophers from Tokyo, such as Inoue Tetsujirō (1855–1944) and Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960, whose own relationship with the Kyoto School is contested). In various ways, the development of an imperial philosophy and a theoretical realm of bushidō reflect a consciousness, on the part of Japanese intellectuals, that models of kokutai in the modern state had to be as domestically inclusive as possible, whilst maintaining exclusivity toward the rest of the world. Like the figure of the emperor, one of the conceptual challenges for bushidō was to reformulate itself as a national ethic, liberated from its samurai-focused, class-based elitism in the feudal period, to become a national ideology.14 Imperial Philosophy The accelerated decrepitude of the Tokugawa regime in the first half of the nineteenth century was both sparked and fueled by a gathering sense of crisis regarding the integrity and security of the domain, which appeared to be challenged from within and without at the same time. Although finding its roots in the seventeenth century, the Mito School (a syncretic school that brought together elements of Confucian and Shinto intellectual traditions) became extremely influential in its so-called ‘late phase,’ following the publication of Seimeiron (On the Rectification of Names) by Fujita Yūkoku in 1791 and, in particular, following the publication of Shinron (New Treatise) by Aizawa Seishisai in 1825.15 It was with these publications that a new swell of interest

13 The dimensions and meaning of this school are treated even-handedly by James Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001). 14 For critics of the whole quest for a ‘Japanese spirit,’ such as Tosaka Jun, philosophers like Watsuji Tetsurō and Inoue Tetsujirō were both essentially involved in the same ideological enterprise of constructing a Japanese ideology. Tosaka labeled them both as ‘Japanists’ in his essay (which formed part of his 1935 book, Nihon ideorogii-ron), “Gendai Nihon no shisōjō no shomondai: Nihonshugi, jiyūshugi, yuibutsuron,” in TJZ, II: 227–235. 15 In general, the early phase of the Mito School was marked by a greater interest in historiographical issues. In the guise of the Shōkōkan (which was endorsed by the shogun and established by order from the local daimyo Tokugawa Mitsukuni), scholars of the Mito domain worked on the Dai Nihon-shi (Great History of Japan) for about 60 years, from the creation of the research institute in 1657. However, it was not until the 1790s that the Mito School became more interested in ideological questions and political activism. There are a number of excellent works about the Mito School in

28

christopher goto-jones

arose in sonnō shisō (thought about revering the emperor, or imperial philosophy). The first to grasp the power of this tide was Fujita’s son, Fujita Tōko, who coined the now infamous term sonnō jōi (revere the emperor and expel the barbarians) as a gloss on the thrust of Aizawa’s Shinron. To begin with, this phrase was designed to encourage loyalty to the shogun as the defender of the emperor at a time of foreign menace, and indeed the slogan was endorsed by the Mito daimyo Tokugawa Nariaki in 1838. However, following the perceived failure of the shogun to prevent the opening of Japan in 1854, the slogan was quickly coopted by the anti-shogunate (i.e., the restorationist) forces in the years preceding the Meiji Restoration and in the bloody Boshin civil war of 1868–9, a conflict much romanticized in later literature about bushidō.16 This rapid and profound political reversal of the ideological function of the imperial throne—from conservative to revolutionary—was an early indicator of the volatility and power of sonnō shisō. Indeed, one of the immediate problems for the revolutionary Meiji government, after it had seized power, was how to reclaim the conservative or, at least, the stabilizing force of the figure of the emperor. This meant seeking a theoretical and philosophical apparatus that could prevent the disenfranchised from using the restorationists’ own arguments (under the flag of sonnō jōi) to overthrow the restoration government itself.17 The official result of this engagement with sonnō shisō over the next twenty years was the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution, which sought to resolve the volatile ambiguity of the relationships between the emperor, the state, the nation, and the people of Japan by legislation in the name of the emperor himself.18 Unfortunately, the Meiji Constitution did not resolve all of the theoretical dilemmas of sonnō shisō. Indeed, in some aspects, its promulga-

English: Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825 (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986); J. Victor Koschmann, The Mito Ideology: Discourse, Reform, and Insurrection in Late Tokugawa Japan, 1790–1864 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 16 The romantic views of icons such as Yoshida Shōin and Saigo Takamori stem from their actions during this period. The popularity of this romantic view is reflected in Edward Zwick’s Hollywood film, The Last Samurai (2003). 17 An interesting discussion of this dilemma is Bernard Silberman, “The Bureaucratic State in Japan: The problem of authority and legitimacy”, in Tetsuo Najita & J. Victor Koschmann (eds.), Conflict in Modern Japan: The Neglected Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). 18 From the turn of the century through the 1940s, there was considerable conceptual and linguistic confusion about the parameters of these various terms.

revering the emperor: imperial philosophy and BUSHIDŌ

29

tion marked the beginning of a new phase of thinking about what it should mean to revere the emperor and to be a good subject in modern Japan. The ensuing intellectual and political discourse was characterized by the use of new theoretical tools, as currents of legal, moral, and political philosophy flowed rapidly into Japan from Europe throughout the Meiji, Taishō and early Shōwa periods. It is in these periods that we can begin to talk about imperial philosophy in a more technical sense,19 although engagement with ‘philosophy’ (tetsugaku) in this sense will become politically volatile by the early 1940s.20 (Re)signifying the Modern Emperor One of the crucial issues that were resolved, at least theoretically, by the proclamation of the Meiji Constitution was that of the conceptual locus of sovereignty. In the years since the Restoration, there had been much debate about whether sovereignty lay with the state (kokken) or with the people (minken), and hence which of these entities constituted the so-called kokutai and was most proximal to the emperor. The constitution resolved this dispute by declaring unambiguously that the “emperor is the head of the empire, and combines in himself the rights of sovereignty.”21 Hence, sovereignty lay neither with the people nor the state. Indeed, the people immediately became imperial subjects (shimmin), and the state was effectively reduced to a vaguely structured group of advisors to the throne.22

19 The term ‘philosophy’ (tetsugaku) was coined by Nishi Amane in 1874 with the express purpose of distinguishing this new, foreign import from Confucianism and Buddhism. 20 Nishida Kitarō and other members of the Kyoto School were severely criticized during the 1930s and early 1940s for being too sympathetic to the west because they engaged in ‘philosophy.’ 21 Dai Nihon teikoku kempō (1889), article 4. The preamble to the constitution also states: “The right of sovereignty of the State, We have inherited from Our Ancestors and We shall bequeath them to Our descendants.” The entire first chapter of the constitution (17 articles) is devoted to the powers and prerogatives of the emperor, which include the full range of sovereign powers: sanctioning laws, convoking parliament, commanding the military, controlling foreign policy, declaring war etc. 22 Chapter 4 (articles 55 and 56) set out the functions of the ministers of state. Article 55 states: “The respective Ministers of State shall give their advice to the Emperor, and be responsible for it.” Likewise (article 56), privy councillors will “deliberate upon important matters of State, when they have been consulted by the Emperor.”

30

christopher goto-jones

Although the priority of the emperor over both the state and the people was stated very clearly, at least two very important, adjacent issues remained unresolved: firstly, what was the nature of the relationship between the emperor and the still underspecified and contested kokutai (and how did this relate to the people and the state); and secondly, on what grounds should the people accept the sovereignty of the emperor? The Meiji Constitution and the accompanying rescript (kempō happu chokugo) answer these questions through recourse to faith rather than theory. There is no appeal to popular sovereignty, representation, or even power. Instead, these documents attempt legitimation through a synthesis of the moral and political realms (saisei itchi, literally: unity of religion and government), asserting that the emperor’s authority is inherited directly from his ancestors and that this ancestral line is sacred and divine.23 Indeed, the rescript takes a further step and claims that all subjects are descended from previous generations of imperial subjects who had pledged their loyalty to previous incarnations of the sacred emperor.24

23 An interesting interpretive variation on this theory was voiced by Orikuchi Shinobu just before the enthronement of the Shōwa Emperor in 1928. In a very influential thesis (Daijōsai no hongi, The Fundamental Principles of the Great Enthronement Ritual), he argued that “the power and dignity of the monarch was not derived from his constitutional position as supreme sovereign, nor from his symbolic power as the cultural unifying principle of the Japanese nation. Rather, the source of his majesty and authority came from the physical incarnation of this spirit of the gods that takes place in the divine enthronement ceremony of the Daijōsai.” (Kevin Doak, A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan, p. 110). 24 The text of the rescript, which is often omitted from the English literature, is worth quoting here in full (this is the official translation by Itō Miyoji, which originally appeared in the accompanying commentary on the constitution by Itō Hirobumi, one of the original architects of the constitution itself, in 1889. Miyoji was an influential thinker in Hirobumi’s so-called ‘brain trust’): Whereas We make it the joy and glory of Our heart to behold the prosperity of Our country, and the welfare of Our subjects, We do hereby, in virtue of the Supreme power We inherit from Our Imperial Ancestors, promulgate the present immutable fundamental law, for the sake of Our present subjects and their descendants. The Imperial Founder of Our House and Our other Imperial ancestors, by the help and support of the forefathers of Our subjects, laid the foundation of Our Empire upon a basis, which is to last forever. That this brilliant achievement embellishes the annals of Our country, is due to the glorious virtues of Our Sacred Imperial ancestors, and to the loyalty and bravery of Our subjects, their love of their country and their public spirit. Considering that Our subjects are the descendants of the loyal and good subjects of Our Imperial Ancestors, We doubt not but that Our subjects will be guided by Our views, and will sympathize with

revering the emperor: imperial philosophy and BUSHIDŌ

31

Prima facie, this resembles a typical feudal model. However, the Imperial Rescript on Education (kyōiku chokugo) of 1890 makes it clear that the constitutional regime affected a deliberate conflation of Confucian filial piety with Shinto ideas about loyalty to the imperial throne (coeval with heaven and earth). Hence, various ethical and political bonds between the people and the emperor were asserted simultaneously: firstly, loyalty was naturally owed to the sacred emperor; secondly, the Confucian rules of filial piety should be extended to encompass piety toward the emperor as the father of the nation; thirdly, because the emperors had ruled Japan for ‘ages eternal,’ the strictures of filial piety meant that serving the emperor in the present was effectively coincident with demonstrating piety to the ancestors who had devoted themselves to the emperor in the past (a ‘historical fact’ that could be copiously and imaginatively documented in the national histories). This conflation of filial piety and loyalty to the emperor will be one of the central problems in the (re)theorization of bushidō in the twentieth century.25 Rather than resolving all the ambiguities of the significance of the emperor in modern Japan, the Meiji Constitution sparked a new round of interpretive debates. Chief amongst these, concerned the allegedly divine origins of the person of the emperor himself and thus the apparent emptiness of constitutional guarantees of religious freedom (article 28).26 If religious freedom was guaranteed to the extent that it did not interfere with the public welfare, and if kokutai was in some way coincident with a divine emperor, then any religious faith that conflicted with belief in the divine and eternal quality of the imperial throne would be heresy. Whilst there is evidence to suggest that this kind of ‘nativist’ interpretation was not what was intended by Itō Hirobumi and the all Our endeavors, and that, harmoniously cooperating together, they will share with Us Our hope of making manifest the glory of Our country, both at home and abroad, and of securing forever the stability of the work bequeathed to Us by Our Imperial Ancestors. 25 This confusion of obligations was not new to the modern period, but rather was a characteristic dilemma in Confucian thought in Japanese history. For some, it is one of the distinguishing features of Japanese Confucianism that it emphasized loyalty to one’s lord over piety to one’s father (e.g., Robert Bellah, Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957), especially p. 18). However, McMullen provides an excellent analysis of the complexities of the discourse that surrounded this dilemma during the Tokugawa period: I.J. McMullen, “Rulers or Fathers? A Casuistical Problem in Early Modern Japanese Thought,” in Past and Present, 116 (1987), pp. 56–97. 26 “Japanese subjects shall, within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects, enjoy freedom of religious belief.”

32

christopher goto-jones

other architects of the constitution, political developments and discourse quickly indicated that this would become the orthodoxy. The fukei jiken (heresy incident), which saw Uchimura Kanzō denounced as a traitor and a disloyal subject when he refused to bow before a portrait of the emperor in 1891, was only the first of many anti-Christian outbursts that rooted themselves in the terms of the new constitution.27 One of the chief ideologues of this kind of reaction was the first Japanese professor of philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University, Inoue Tetsujirō, whose commentary on the Imperial Rescript (chokugo engi) in 1891 famously declared that Christianity was incompatible with kokutai, and hence illegal and heretical. In a series of influential publications in the subsequent years, Inoue probably did more to philosophize a Confucian-Shinto synthesis than any other contemporaneous thinker.28 Despite sophisticated and genuinely philosophical opposition from Buddhist-influenced thinkers, such as Kiyozawa Manshi (1863–1903), Inoue Enryō (1859–1919), and Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945),29 the Christian philosopher Ōnishi

Uchimura Kanzō was a Christian teacher at the First Imperial Higher School in Tokyo; he refused to engage in what he perceived of as idolatry by showing religious deference to the image of the emperor. The plight of Japanese Christians at this time is well documented in Gonoi Takashi, Nihon kirisutokyō-shi (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1990). A substantial and recent biography of Uchimura in English is John Howes, Japan’s Modern Prophet: Uchimura Kanzō, 1861–1930 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005). 28 In his early career, Inoue was centrally concerned with establishing the credentials of Confucianism as an indigenous intellectual and ethical tradition that could confront Western philosophy in terms of its power and sophistication. He attempted this in a trilogy of influential works at the turn of the century: Nihon yōmei gaku-ha no tetsugaku (Tokyo: Fuzambō, 1897/1900). In this work, Inoue contrasts idealist Confucians such as Nakae Tōju and Kumazawa Banzan with the utilitarian ethics of ‘modern, western philosophy.’ Nihon shūshi gaku-ha no tetsugaku (Tokyo: Fuzambō, 1902/1945), and Nihon kogaku-ha no tetsugaku (Tokyo: Fuzambō, 1905/1918). In these two volumes, Inoue tackles the Confucian rationalists, such as Hayashi Razan and the Mito School, and the historicists, such Ogyū Sorai, Itō Jinsai, and Yamaga Sokō. Toward the end of the Taishō period, Inoue published another series of monographs, in which he explicitly sought to conflate the Confucian way of heaven with a Shinto-oriented imperial way (kōdō). Waga kokutai to kokumin dōtoku (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1925); Nihon seishin no honshitsu (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1934/1941). 29 Kiyozawa Manshi and Inoue Enryō did much to recover the intellectual respectability of Buddhism at the turn of the twentieth century, as they attempted to show that Buddhism, rather than Confucianism, was the real source of Japan’s intellectual vitality and power. Enryō’s work on Hegel and Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932, a German scientist and philosopher who won the 1909 Nobel Prize for Chemistry) was very influential on Nishida Kitarō, whose own system of ethical thought would underlie the development of the most sophisticated and original school of philosophy in modern Japan, the so-called Kyoto School. In his earliest work, Zen no kenkyū (Tokyo: Iwanami 27

revering the emperor: imperial philosophy and BUSHIDŌ

33

Hajime (1864–1900),30 and modernizers such as Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901),31 Inoue Tetsujirō’s synthesis effectively established this quasi-nativist interpretation of the signification of the emperor as the orthodoxy by the start of the Shōwa period. In this orthodoxy, the shimmin no michi (the Way of the Subjects) was premised emphatically on the significance of the emperor as the unification of obligations engendered by filial piety and sacred loyalty, legitimated by the divine lineage of the imperial throne. In a number of contemporaneous works, Inoue recognizes bushidō as the exemplary incarnation of shimmin no michi.32

Shoten, 1911/1991), Nishida explicitly rejects the heteronomous ethics implied by Inoue Tetsujirō. See Christopher Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School and Co-Prosperity (London & New York: Routledge, 2005), especially chapter 3. 30 Ōnishi’s Christian and Kantian critique of Inoue Tetsujirō’s Confucian stance and Inoue Enryō’s Buddhist standpoint was scholarly and powerful. He was one of the first Japanese philosophers to draw a crisp, theoretical distinction between ethics (rinri), which were universal and ineffable, and morality (tokkō ), which was basically a system of norms in a specific society. He argued that Inoue Tetsujirō’s approach failed to differentiate between the two, and that his theory of the god-emperor was (at most) simply an example of a local morality. An interesting discussion of Ōnishi in English is: Sharon H. Nolte, “National Morality and Universal Ethics: Ōnishi Hajime and the Imperial Rescript on Education”, in Monumenta Nipponica, 38:3 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 283–294. 31 Strongly influenced by Herbert Spencer and the Social Darwinists, Fukuzawa famously referred to Shinto beliefs and Confucian ritual as idealistic relics of Japan’s barbaric past, both of which should be abandoned in favor of individualism. He was severely critical of the Imperial Rescript on Education, having already dealt his killer blow to Confucianism in the first line of his influential 1872 bestseller, Gakumon no susume (The Advancement of Learning): ‘Heaven makes no man above any other and no man below any other.’ Fukuzawa’s position shifted somewhat in his later years. In Teishitsu-ron (On the Imperial Household, 1882) and Sonnō-ron (On Revering the Emperor, 1887), he was clear that the Japanese should be loyal to the emperor, in order to keep the nation unified. He wrote that at a time of political dispute and external threat, the symbol of the emperor was vital to the survival of the nation, since all Japanese could rally behind it. Nonetheless, Fukuzawa is very clear that the emperor’s role should not be confused with a political position. If his symbolic, unifying role is to function properly, the emperor must remain above and outside of politics. The emperor does not rule, he reigns (this distinction is actually common to feudal Japan, when the shogun or a regent in Edo would typically rule in the name of an emperor cloistered away in Kyoto). Fukuzawa notes that the conduct of modern warriors relies upon this premise: soldiers should not return from war expecting to be rewarded by their lord (as they did in feudal times), but rather they should fight in the name of Japan and the emperor, expecting their service to be its own reward. He admires the conduct of the bushi of the Satsuma Rebellion (1877) in this respect. This appears to be as close as Fukuzawa comes to linking the significance of the emperor to bushidō. See Fukuzawa Yukichi, Nihon teishitsu-ron (Tokyo: Shimizu Shobō, 1987). 32 Inoue Tetsujirō’s interest in bushidō coincides almost perfectly with his elaboration of the Confucian-Shinto foundations of the way of the subjects. He spent a number of years around the turn of the century compiling and annotating three volumes of

34

christopher goto-jones

Just as was the case with his synthetic Confucian-Shinto position on the signification of the emperor, Inoue’s interpretation of bushidō would also be challenged from various sides, especially from the standpoint of Buddhism (but also by Christians and others).33 The idea of saisei itchi, that is the unity of moral and political realms, contained within this orthodoxy, was contested from numerous standpoints in the political discourse of the early twentieth century, as well as in the postwar period.34 It was contested especially, though not only, by the political left, particularly after the Hibiya Riots of 1905, which provided a vivid demonstration of the importance of the hitherto neglected voice of the Japanese people themselves in the composition of the Japanese polity.35 However, the fledgling political left was itself not united, and its representatives ranged from the complete rejection of the emperor as a feudal residue that should be abolished (or even assassinated), to those, such as Kita Ikki (1883–1937), who rejected the idea that the state was a tool of the capitalist classes and claimed that the polity was the Japanese people themselves and hence the legitimacy of the state and of the emperor rested upon their representation of

collected works: Bushidō sōsho (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1905), and later an even larger (thirteen volumes) Bushidō zenshū, together with an extended commentary: Bushidō no honshitsu (1942). 33 This chapter will focus on the differences between the Buddhist infl uenced Watsuji Tetsurō and the orthodox Shinto-Confucian view of bushidō during the war years. However, it should be recalled that some of the key thinkers in the discourse about bushidō were actually Christians: Uchimura Kanzō himself was very interested in exploring the intersections between Christianity and bushidō. An interesting account of this is: Ōuchi Saburō, “Kirisutokyō to bushidō,” in Furukawa Tesshi and Ishida Ichiro, eds., Nihon shisō-shi kōza, vol. 8, (Tokyo: Yusankaku, 1977). It is, of course, well-known that the author of perhaps the most influential modern text on bushidō, Nitobe Inazō, was a committed Quaker. 34 Maruyama Masao made a famous postwar critique of this aspect of the theory and psychology of Japanese ultranationalism. See Maruyama Masao, Gendai seiji no shisō to kōdō (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1964). 35 The Hibiya Riots (Hibiya yakiuchi jiken, so-called because they were triggered when police refused demonstrators entry to Hibiya Park in central Tokyo), were sparked by popular discontent at the apparently humiliating terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. For some commentators, the Hibiya Riots marked the beginning of a period of minshū sōjō (popular violence), in which the people of Japan strove to negotiate their social, political and ethical status within the Japanese state through direct action. One key figure in this movement was the Marxist activist, Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911), who called for marches of resistance against the imperial state, which he saw as a tool of the capitalist classes who operated the emperor like a puppet. Kōtoku was eventually arrested in 1910, for allegedly plotting to assassinate the emperor; he was executed in 1911 with his alleged accomplices. The Meiji emperor died in 1912.

revering the emperor: imperial philosophy and BUSHIDŌ

35

the will of the people and not upon a divine mandate. Kita Ikki talked about the citizen state (kōmin kokka) and the people’s emperor (kokumin no tennō ).36 The notion that the emperor’s legitimacy derived from the people, and not from his ancestors, rendered the imperial throne different from and subordinate to the nation: the emperor existed to represent the will of the people—however invisibly that might be expressed—who comprised the nation. The people did not exist to service the will of the eternal and divine imperial throne, coeval with heaven and earth. Not long afterward, in 1912, at the height of public support for liberalism, Minobe Tatsukichi (1873–1948) published his classic work on the constitution, kempō kōwa, in which he set out his theory of the emperor as an organ of the state (tennō kikan setsu).37 Minobe immediately became the most widely read constitutional scholar in Japan. These ideas about the contingency of the emperor, which essentially problematized the issue of the will, would characterize the philosophical debates in imperial philosophy and bushidō until the end of the Second World War. For those invested in the orthodoxy and the status quo, ideas that seemed to provide for the possibility of conceptual distance between the throne and kokutai also seemed to provide for the possibility of imperial fallibility (and hence for the overthrow of the agents and ministers of the emperor by the people themselves). Such ideas were extremely dangerous: not only did they raise the possibility of a second revolution, or even a second modern restoration,38 but they also undermined the foundations of shimmin no michi—the ethical basis of the loyalty and piety of the people. These ideas seemed to imperil kokutai itself. The conservative forces moved quickly after the Manchurian Incident, which pushed Japan into a state of war for the next fifteen years. The

36 Kita Ikki’s idiosyncratic version of state socialism was laid out (in Kokutairon oyobi junsei shakaishugi) (The Theory of Japan’s National Polity and Pure Socialism) in 1906, the same year as the establishment of the Nihon shakai-tō ( Japan Socialist Party). His vision of national socialism rapidly slipped into a kind of fascism by 1923, when he published his notorious Nihon kaizō hōan taikō (An Outline Plan for the Reorganization of Japan), in which he appeared to call for a coup d’état to bring about a new era of direct rule by the emperor, whom he believed represented the will of the Japanese people in an esoteric rather than in a democratically expressed manner. The revolutionaries who were involved in the attempted coup d’état of 1936 (the so-called February 26th Incident) claimed inspiration from Kita Ikki. 37 Minobe Tatsukichi, Kempō kōwa (revised edition, Tokyo: 1922). 38 Kita Ikki and his supporters called on the emperor to proclaim their 1936 coup d’état as a ‘Shōwa Restoration.’

36

christopher goto-jones

initial litmus was Minobe Tatsukichi, whose Emperor Organ Theory was so popular in the relatively liberal 1920s that he was appointed to the House of Peers by merit alone in 1932. By 1935, however, his books had been banned by Prime Minister Okada on the insistence of Baron Kikuchi Takeo, who had branded Minobe as espousing the “treacherous thought of an academic rebel,”39 and he had been forced to resign his membership of the House of Peers. In the intervening years, Japan had witnessed the creation of the Superior Special Thought Police,40 the establishment of the Research Center for National Spiritual Culture (kokumin seishin bunka kenkyūjo),41 and the so-called Takikawa Incident.42 During this period, the government and its ideologues had embarked on a deliberate and vocal policy of discrediting any systems of thought that differentiated the emperor from the state. Indeed, on 15th October 1935, just after the Minobe Incident, the government issued a formal statement that any theory that “holds that the subject of sovereignty is not the emperor but the state and that the emperor is an organ of the state—such as the so-called organ theory—must be strictly eradicated, for they run counter to our divine national polity.”43 With the nation on war-footing and with consensus on the meaning of the national polity and the significance of the emperor apparently under threat, the government took action. At the end of 1935, the ministry of education established a Committee for the Renewal of Education and Scholarship (kyōgaku sasshin hyōgikai ) with the express mission to ‘clarify the national polity’ (kokutai o meichō ni suru). The ministry invited a number of leading philosophers to attend the first

39 Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 287. During the 1920s, there were two schools of constitutional thought dominating the Tokyo Imperial University Law Faculty: one was represented by Minobe, and the other by Hozumi Yatsuka (1860–1912) and Uesugi Shinkichi (1878–1929), who advocated an interpretation of the constitution that supported direct imperial rule—for them, the emperor was properly conceptualized as prior to the state. 40 A subsection of the Special Higher Police (tokubetsu kōtō keisatsu), which was established in 1911 following the execution of Kōtoku Shūsui, charged with policing “thought crime” (shisō hanzai). 41 This research center was established by the Ministry of Education in August 1932, with the mission to combat Marxism by elaborating the ‘genuine nature of kokutai’ as well as the Japanese spirit (Nihon seishin), philosophy, history, art, etc. 42 The Kyoto University Incident of 1933 saw the removal of Professor Takikawa Yukitoki (1891–1962) from his post in Kyoto, ostensibly because of his politically leftist sensibilities. 43 Stephen Large, Emperor Hirohito and Shōwa Japan: A Political Biography (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 65.

revering the emperor: imperial philosophy and BUSHIDŌ

37

meeting of the committee on 5 December. Some, like Nishida Kitarō, attended only the first meeting, concluding that it was a waste of time since the agenda was already set.44 Others, like Watsuji Tetsurō, attended more meetings and were instrumental in the production of one of the committee’s major achievements—the publication of the Kokutai no hongi (The Fundamental Principles of the National Polity) in 1937. In the year between the establishment of the committee and the publication of the Kokutai no hongi, the Japanese political establishment encountered exactly the kind of anti-state, restorationist uprising that it had feared in the immediate aftermath of the Meiji Restoration. Seizing on the conceptual potential of direct rule by the Shōwa Emperor, a group of military officers (apparently inspired by the work of Kita Ikki) staged an abortive coup d’etat in the center of Tokyo—the socalled 26 February 1936 Incident. Prime Minister Okada narrowly escaped an attempt on his life, but the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the finance minister, and a senior military figure suspected of sympathies with Minobe’s emperor organ theory, were assassinated. The group of officers wanted Emperor Hirohito to voice his support for their coup, so that they might proclaim a Shōwa Restoration in his name. Hirohito, however, refused to sanction what he perceived to be an anti-constitutional action. In addition to confirming the fears of the political establishment that the Meiji Constitution had failed to resolve the ambiguities of kokutai and particularly the question of the nature of the duties of subjects toward the state and the emperor respectively (which still appeared to be separate in practice), this incident also revealed that the theoretical problems of the regime could be exploited by activists and theorists on the political right as well as on the left. Marxism and liberalism, the target of the Peace Preservation Laws (chian ijihō of 1925, amended in 1928), were only half the problem. Nationalists, nativists, and imperialists also disputed the status quo. All of these groups could find some support and vindication within the conceptual ambiguities of the constitutional order. Hence, whilst the text of Kokutai no hongi was being written, the question of clarifying the nature of kokutai, its relationship to the emperor, and the duties of subjects toward both,

44 For a discussion of the political involvement of the late Nishida and his displeasure with the nativist turn in the orthodoxy, see Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, chapter 4.

38

christopher goto-jones

was of paramount political importance. In this respect, the official cooptation and re-narration of elements of the bushidō tradition as part of the modern and national ‘Japanese spirit’ was a vital, strategic step. The meaning, content, and vectors of loyalty, piety, and service of the shimmin needed to be formally clarified. (Re)inventing Imperial Bushidō: Kokutai no hongi and Inoue Tetsujirō The Kokutai no hongi was published in 1937 by the Ministry of Education. By 1943 it had sold more than two million copies, and it was required reading for all teachers and students in middle and higher schools in Japan. It was by far the most influential and widespread of a number of official shūshinsho (ethics textbooks) that resulted from the government’s efforts to clarify the national polity.45 Bushidō is referred to many times in this text, where it is lauded as “expressing the most remarkable feature of our national morality.”46 Indeed, an elaboration of the ethics and virtues of bushidō plays a central role in the text’s efforts to clarify the orthodoxy. Many commentators outside Japan have perceived these references to bushidō as romantic flourishes, referring the reader to the mythic past of honorable samurai and selfless devotion. Whilst it is true that there is a romantic flavor to these references, to argue that this is their sole function would be to miss their purpose as theoretical and ideological attempts to resolve the disputes of a substantial philosophical discourse that had evolved around bushidō in the early twentieth century. Indeed, the kind of bushidō that we see in the pages of Kokutai no hongi has a particular ideological force. It grows out of an identifiably Confucian tradition of the (re)invention of bushidō that was spearheaded by the influential work of Inoue Tetsujirō, following from his focus on Yamaga Sokō (1622–1685) as the most representatively ‘Japanese’ Confucian thinker of the Tokugawa period, in the second and third volumes of his history of Confucian thought in Japan.47 Whilst this tradition, which garnered the name kinnō bushidō (imperial bushidō),48 45 Another such text that is often cited in relation to Kokutai no hongi is the Shimmin no michi, which was published early in 1941. 46 Kokutai no hongi, p. 110. 47 Inoue, Nihon shūshi gaku-ha no tetsugaku; Nihon kogaku-ha no tetsugaku. 48 After the publication of the Kokutai no hongi, the phrase kokutai no bushidō (national polity bushidō ) was also used.

revering the emperor: imperial philosophy and BUSHIDŌ

39

was dominant during the Taishō and early Shōwa periods, it was not the only school of thought at that time in this field. A more Buddhistinfluenced (re)invention of bushidō, which found a sophisticated and philosophical phrasing in the wartime work of Watsuji Tetsurō, competed with kinnō bushidō to produce a lively and interesting intellectual discourse, even in the early 1940s. One of the ironies of this is that Watsuji was involved, at least in its early stages, in the authorship of Kokutai no hongi while Inoue was not.49 In some ways, it should be seen as a testament to the influence and pervasiveness of Inoue’s position that it was his interpretation of bushidō that became most evident in the final text. The Kokutai no hongi accepts, and officially endorses, Inoue’s Confucian-Shinto position on the divine origins of the emperor and on his priority over his subjects. It states that confusions about this issue arose due to the insidious influence of ‘foreign theories about states’ which fail to understand the uniqueness of the Japanese kokutai. One of the key differences, it claims, concerns the matter of choice: in Japan, unlike in Europe, the sovereignty of the emperor is not premised upon the choice or even consent of the people—the imperial throne was not established to help administrate, govern or improve a pre-existing community; the community was established to manifest the divine will of the emperor.50 As a consequence, the service of the Japanese subjects should not be because of duty per se, nor should it be experienced as submission to

Watsuji was part of the committee that drew up the first draft of the Kokutai no hongi; it was revised at least twice before it was finally published. Most postwar historians attribute the final draft to Itō Enkichi. There has been a tendency for postwar historians to use Watsuji’s membership of this committee as evidence of his complicity in the orthodox ideology of the wartime state, and sometimes to argue that his apparent complicity is tantamount to the complicity of the Kyoto School of philosophy as a whole. To some extent, this charge reflects a general historiographic trend to read biographical accounts in place of analysing philosophical texts. The apparent orthodoxy of Nishida and Kyoto School in comparison with the Kokutai no hongi has been asserted in similar terms by Pierre Lavelle, “The Political Thought of Nishida Kitarō”, Monumenta Nipponica, 49:2 (1994), pp. 139–165. Lavelle’s thesis has been criticized as insufficiently nuanced and as failing to recognize the space between Nishida’s philosophy and the orthodox ideology—see Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, chapter 4. Leaving aside the issue of whether Watsuji should be considered a member of the Kyoto School, and without wanting to distance Watsuji from an undoubtedly imperialist standpoint, it seems relatively clear that there is considerable philosophical space between Watsuji’s position and that of the Kokutai no hongi in several important respects. A key differentiation is the place of Buddhism in Watsuji’s work, which is largely absent from the government’s text. 50 Kokutai no hongi, pp. 32–34. 49

40

christopher goto-jones

authority. Instead, it should be recognized as the natural expression of the heart; it should take the form of spontaneous obedience premised upon a deep faith in the emperor.51 The individual subject does not exist other than in its unity with, and in manifest service of, the kokutai. In keeping with Inoue’s position, the authors of Kokutai no hongi insist that the practical manifestation of this unity is loyalty: “loyalty is the foundation of the way of subjects; it is the basis of our national morality (kokumin dōtoku). It is through loyalty that we become Japanese subjects, and it is through loyalty that we are granted life, and hence we discover the source of all morality.”52 In conformity with Inoue’s position, the Kokutai no hongi takes the step of conflating ‘loyalty and filial piety as one’ (chūkō ippon),53 arguing (in a now familiar way) that filial piety to one’s forefathers, who loyally served the imperial throne in their time, is morally identical with loyalty to the current emperor. In other words, the essence of the kokutai, as expressed in the unity of loyalty and piety to the throne, is timeless and eternal, since it rests on the moral unity of the past and the present. “In our country, filial piety does not exist separately from loyalty, and filial piety has loyalty as its basis.”54 The Kokutai no hongi illustrates this abstraction through recourse to an example of relevance to bushidō. It explains the feudal practice of nanori (identifying names) before battle, arguing that this was originally seen as a way of enacting piety to a samurai’s ancestors by ensuring a worthy adversary for combat. But it also argues that this practice simultaneously identified a samurai’s house, and hence his lineage back to the imperial household, the mythical progenitor of all samurai

Kokutai no hongi, p. 19. Kokutai no hongi, p. 38. 53 Kokutai no hongi, pp. 46–49. Chūkō ippon (lit. loyalty and piety have one foundation) is the choice term of the Kokutai no hongi. Other similar terms, with slightly different philosophical implications, include chūkō ichidō (loyalty and piety are one path), chūkō muni (loyalty and piety are non-dual), and the most pervasive chūkō itchi (lit. loyalty and piety are one). 54 Kokutai no hongi, p. 47. The authors of Kokutai no hongi claim that this idea is an unpacking of the thought of Yoshida Shōin in Shiki shichisoku (Seven Precepts for Gentlemen), reprinted in Yoshida Shōin zenshū, vol. 2, Tokyo, 1934). Yoshida Shōin was also an important figure for Inoue. McMullen (‘Rulers or Fathers’) deftly demonstrates that the Chinese Confucian emphasis on filial piety is gradually overthrown by a Japanese emphasis on loyalty (or on the unity of the two) in the work of Yamaga Sokō and Asami Keisai (1652–1711). 51 52

revering the emperor: imperial philosophy and BUSHIDŌ

41

houses. Thus the identification of names was also a pronouncement of loyalty to the emperor.55 The intervention of the shogun as a mediation between the emperor’s subjects and the emperor, becoming a competitor for the focus of samurai loyalty (which was the case until the Meiji Restoration ever since Minamoto Yoritomo established the Kamakura shogunate in the twelfth century), is proclaimed in the text to have been a political abnormality (seiji hentai) that violated (somuki) the kokutai as well as the laws established by the imperial ancestors, making the emperor himself ashamed.56 In fact, the origin of Japan’s ‘warrior spirit’ is declared to be the imperial house itself, and not the shogun or the samurai. In a section dedicated to warrior spirit (bu no seishin), the Kokutai no hongi describes the manner in which the Japanese have always venerated great warriors, including at Shinto shrines. It explains that a ‘heavenly jewel-spear’ was used by the gods to create Japan itself at the beginning of time, and that Jimmu, the first emperor, exercised a characteristic ‘warrior spirit’ (bushin) in his great expedition to the East. In this section, the authors of Kokutai no hongi make a play on words with the word bushin by revealing that it is written with the same, but reversed, characters as Jimmu, to suggest the existence of a ‘divine warrior’ (shinbu/Jimmu) at the origins of Japan, and hence at the foundations of the Japanese spirit.57 In this way, in a manner familiar to Inoue, the imperatives of bushidō were detached from the tradition’s elitist, feudal origins and nationalized (via appeals to Shinto mythology) into a spirit for all Japanese subjects, all of whom were ostensibly descendents of Jimmu: “At the time of the Meiji Restoration, bushidō discarded feudalism’s anachronisms (hōken

55 Kokutai no hongi, pp. 44, 48. A fascinating account of the power of names granted by the imperial family (and by the military government) is Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, “In Name Only: Imperial Sovereignty in Early Modern Japan”, Journal of Japanese Studies, 17:1 (1991), pp. 25–57. 56 Here, the Kokutai no hongi (p. 73) quotes Emperor Meiji’s Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors ( gunjin chokuyu, 1882), which was explicitly designed to ensure that former samurai would devote their loyalty directly to the emperor and not to any vestiges of the abolished bakufu government. 57 Kokutai no hongi, p. 52. Elsewhere, an affinity is drawn between the fact that a sword (the fabled Sword of Kusanagi) is one of the three treasures of the imperial regalia and the inherent warrior spirit of the divine Japanese lineage (the three treasures are discussed on pp. 19–20). The authors take great pains to point out that this warrior spirit should be aimed at the achievement of peace, not focused on war for its own sake. See p. 52.

42

christopher goto-jones

no kyūtai), increased in radiance, and became the way of loyalty and patriotism (chūkun aikoku no michi).”58 In terms of the content of the imperatives of bushidō, the Kokutai no hongi treats them as a kind of ideal type of the normal duties of subjects. It explains how the sense of ongi (indebtedness, and therefore loyalty) that binds servant to master (shujū), son to father, and subject to emperor, reaches a special level in the case of bushidō and develops into a spirit of self-effacement that actually transcends this sense of obligation (ongi o koeta botsuga no seishin). Once attained, this spirit enables a subject to face anything with calmness, even death in the service of the emperor, and hence in fulfillment of the subject’s authentic existence as an indivisible part of kokutai.59 Facing death in this way should not be considered as a pursuit of death (i.e. not shinikurui or ‘craze for death’ as advocated in Hagakure), but as the transcendence of both life and death in the realization that one’s authentic life is kokutai itself, and not the atomistic individual body. In other words, to consider oneself as indivisible from kokutai, and hence from the will of the emperor, is the genuine fulfillment of shimmin no michi (as well as an authentic ontological realization). That is the meaning of “to embrace life and death as one, to fulfill the way of loyalty, that is our bushidō.”60 In the same breath, the authors of Kokutai no hongi acknowledge that the key figures who ‘brought bushidō to perfection’ in Japan were Yamaga Sokō (1622–1685), Matsumiya Kanzan (1686–1780), and most recently Yoshida Shōin (1831–1860). The shape of bushidō in Kokutai no hongi, as well as its intellectual lineage would have been readily familiar to Inoue, who had attempted an intellectual history of the tradition in 1912, in Kokumin dōtoku gairon (An Outline of National Morality). In this important text, Inoue described bushidō as an ancient and continuously evolving system of ethics, reaching back to before the arrival of Buddhism into Japan in the fifth century, placing it alongside Shinto as the indigenous ethical foundation of the nation. For Inoue, it reached its most developed heights in the modern period in the theory of chūkun aikoku (loyalty and patriotism).

58 Kokutai no hongi, p. 111. In practical terms, the abolition of the samurai class in the 1870s opened the door to the nationalizing of its ideology. 59 Kokutai no hongi, pp. 110–111. 60 Kokutai no hongi, p. 111; for the generic way of the subjects rooted in loyalty, see pp. 32–34.

revering the emperor: imperial philosophy and BUSHIDŌ

43

As he had done in other writings, Inoue gave pride of place to Yamaga Sokō’s attempts to divorce bushidō from its exclusive orientation toward combat, transforming it into a systematic, ethical system that could be learned and passed on through education and scholarship.61 In a step that has subsequently been viewed as unreliable, Inoue asserted that Sokō’s formulation of bushidō provided the ethical foundations for the actions of the so-called Akō rōnin, who had famously committed ritual suicide after enacting vengeance on the man whom they believed had killed their master.62 The story of Chūshingura and the forty-seven Akō rōnin was very popular throughout the early years of the twentieth century, and Inoue’s interpretation of Sokō’s role in this legend seems to have been pervasive. Like the Kokutai no hongi, Inoue also connects Sokō to the Meiji restorationist intellectual Yoshida Shōin, who studied and lectured on Yamaga’s thought in order to inspire the restorationist shishi who had provided the spiritual and martial backbone of the Meiji Restoration. Shōin provided Inoue with a connection between Sokō and the subjects of the modern Japanese state, especially, though not exclusively, the military forces and their soldier’s ethics (gunjin dōtoku). In the same year as the publication of Kokumin dōtoku gairon, Japan witnessed the death of Emperor Meiji, followed by the suicide of General Nogi Maresuke (1849–1912), who together with his wife, sought to join his lord in death. For both Inoue and the authors of the Kokutai no hongi, Nogi represented the spiritual and ethical heir to Sokō and Shōin, and especially to the Akō rōnin, who had also committed suicide after the death of their lord. Inoue took great pains to explain that Nogi was a scholar of Yamaga Sokō and that his suicide should be considered as an exemplar of the Japanese kokutai, representing the spirit of self-sacrifice through imperial loyalty that characterized the nature of authentic loyalty and patriotism in modern Japan.63

61 It seems fairly clear that Yamaga did not use the term bushidō, but instead explained his system of thought in terms of shidō (gentlemanly way) and bukyō (warrior’s creed). 62 For an excellent analysis of the unreliability of this version of the story of the influence of Yamaga Sokō’s work on the rōnin, see Richard Tucker, “Tokugawa Intellectual History and Prewar Ideology: The Case of Inoue Tetsujirō, Yamaga Sokō, and the Forty-Seven Rōnin”, in Sino-Japanese Studies Journal, vol. 14 (April 2002), pp. 35–70. 63 Inoue Tetsujirō, Jinkaku to shūkyō (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1941), especially pp. 256–72 (I am grateful to John Tucker for finding this source). For a recent account of Nogi’s life (and death), see Doris Bargen, Suicidal Honor: General Nogi And the Writings of Mori Ogai And Natsume Soseki (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006).

44

christopher goto-jones (Re)inventing Bushidō: Watsuji Tetsurō and the Metaphysics of Suicide

The significance and meaning of suicide ( junshi, following one’s lord to death) or self-destruction ( jibaku, exploding oneself ) in the name of the emperor was a crucial issue of serious social weight, especially during the war years. Like the authors of the Kokutai no hongi, Inoue argued that death in the name and service of the imperial throne is a beautiful and glorious thing, because of the unity that such an act demonstrates between sovereign and subject (kummin itchi) and between piety and loyalty. Moreover, such an act would have an almost magical effect on the rest of the Japanese subjects, literally transforming the kokutai (written with the characters of nation and body) and elevating the national morality. Finally, in a later text, emphasizing the practical dimensions of bushidō as a national treasure, Inoue notes that jibaku is a particularly Japanese instrument of war that distinguishes the imperial army from the military forces of other nations.64 In many ways then, suicide, in the context of bushidō, was presented as the ideal type of service in the way of revering the emperor. Inoue’s trend toward the identification of bushidō as a practical philosophy in this way was in keeping with a general tendency in Japanese Confucian discourse to privilege social function over individual cultivation. Indeed, McMullen identifies this trend already in the middle of the Tokugawa period, manifesting itself in the emerging influence of Yamaga Sokō and Asami Keisai. Unlike in China, where there was an ‘emphasis on metaphysics and the notion that conflicting imperatives could be reconciled metaphysically,’ McMullen argues that key Japanese thinkers in this Confucian/bushidō tradition were ‘intensely preoccupied with particularistic relationships and little inclined to speculation.’ They did it to such an extent, that the language of self-transcendence amongst the bushi (samurai) was concerned with ‘dedicated and practical service’

64 Inoue Tetsujirō, Senjinkun (1941), which was issued to soldiers in the imperial army in the name of Tōjō Hideki, then Minister of War. In his essay on the way of the Japanese subject (Nihon no shindō, 1944), Watsuji Tetsurō goes to some lengths to explain the various ways in which the dedication and loyalty of Japanese soldiers, even to the point of death, is often misunderstood by the soldiers of other nations as insane or merely desperation. He refers to a skirmish with English sailors in 1605. See Watsuji Tetsurō, “Nihon no shindō” in WTZ, 1961–92) XIV:297–312, especially pp. 299–302.

revering the emperor: imperial philosophy and BUSHIDŌ

45

to a lord, and that this conception of service was ‘at best weakly mediated by any metaphysical or universal system of values.’65 Of course, even if we accept the existence of a dominant tradition of thought about bushidō (as the ultimate expression of sonnō ) and about suicide (as the ultimate expression of bushidō) in the early twentieth century, this does not mean that the tradition was uncontested or univocal. Indeed, in the 1930s a recognizable counter-current was beginning to emerge in literature, with writers such as Nagayoshi Jirō, Hada Takao, and Horiuchi Bunjirō suggesting the existence of a philosophical space between Inoue’s views on the centrality of Yamaga’s practical philosophy and freshly recovered interpretations of another ‘classic’ of bushidō, the Hagakure.66 In fact, Hagakure was a relatively obscure text from the time it was written in 1716 by Yamamoto Tsunetomo ( Jōchō) until the modern period, when it was given a prominent place in the evolving canon of bushidō. Its great international visibility and popularity in the postwar period belies this situation.67 One of the key differences between Yamamoto and Yamaga was their interpretation of the fabled Akō rōnin, whom Inoue praised as exemplars of Yamaga’s teachings. Yamamoto, who was himself a samurai who had not followed his own lord in death because his lord had instructed him not to do so68 was critical of the actions of the rōnin. However, the criticism in Hagakure did not relate to the act of suicide per se, which it famously endorses as a kind of honorable ‘craze for death’ (shinikurui),69

McMullen, “Rulers or Fathers”, p. 96. Tucker provides a nice summary of the impact of Nagayoshi, Hada and Lieutenant General Horiuchi Bunjirō. Richard Tucker, “Tokugawa Intellectual History”, esp. pp. 61–63. The texts in question are Nagayoshi Jirō, Nihon bushidō-shi (Tokyo: Chūbunkan shoten, 1932); Hada Takao, Bushidō to shidō (Tokyo: Hōfûkan, 1940); Horiuchi Bunjirô, Bushidō no hongi (Tokyo: Monasu, 1939). 67 The Hagakure was lauded by postwar nationalists, such as Mishima Yukio before his spectacular suicide in 1970, as an icon of the Japanese spirit. Mishima Yukio, Hagakure no nyūmon, 1967, translated as Yukio Mishima on Hagakure: The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan, trans. Kathryn Sparling (New York: Basic Books, 1977). An abridged version has been translated into English by William Scott Wilson (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1979), and this version served as the basis for the voice-over for the Jim Jarmusch film, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). There have also been a number of modern Japanese versions in recent years. My preference is for the 1941 version, edited by Watsuji Tetsurō & Furukawa Tetsushi, reprinted by Iwanami Shoten (3 vols.) 2003. References are to this edition. 68 It is intriguing that this was his reason, rather than the fact that the practice of junshi was already illegal in Tokugawa Japan. 69 Section 114 of book 1 of Hagakure opens with the words: “Bushidō is a craze for death.” Watsuji & Furukawa (eds.), Hagakure, p. 65. Hereafter, Hagakure. 65 66

46

christopher goto-jones

but rather to the practical calculations that enveloped the actions of the forty-seven rōnin. In other words, Yamamoto’s critique focused on the fact that the rōnin had acted so slowly, that they had taken time to calculate and prepare their revenge rather than simply jumping straight in. Whilst the considered approach of the historical rōnin was certainly one of the reasons why the vengeance was such a success, the Hagakure suggests that evaluating the actions of the rōnin in terms of success and failure in this manner fundamentally misses the point of the way of the warrior, which is actually, and ultimately, a way of death (shidō ), not a way of strategy or calculation. What would have happened, asks Yamamoto, had Lord Kira Yoshinaka, their enemy, died before the rōnin had moved against him? Was not the possibility of being unable to act at all potentially such great dishonor to them that it should have been avoided at all costs, even at the cost of failing to kill their enemy and perhaps dying in the failed attempt because of poor planning? Bushidō does not lie in calculation or wisdom, nor in the choice of victory or defeat, but in the spontaneous disregard of these things in a moment of uncontrolled and non-discriminating sincerity:70 the true warrior simply launches himself furiously and desperately into death (munimusan ni shinikurui suru bakari nari). In a metaphysical twist, Yamamoto insists that this kind of abandonment of the self through a faith in inevitable death (kesshi no shinkō ) is actually a form of self-realization, as well as service: “by launching yourself furiously toward death you will achieve an awakening.”71 Later in the same chapter, Yamamoto goes further to argue that: “if one is too discriminating then one regresses in budō; it is not only a question of being loyal or pious, bushidō is simply this craze for death. And it is therein that loyalty and piety should naturally find themselves.”72 In other words, even though the Akō rōnin succeeded in their vengeance, Yamamoto presents their case as an example of an action that contravenes the way of the warrior: the moral value of their practical success is profoundly undermined by their metaphysical failure. Bushidō is not simply about practical actions that render loyalty and piety as one. It is essentially more than loyalty or piety; it is about the accom-

70 Sincerity is variously interpreted as makoto (in the Kokutai no hongi) and as seimyōshin (by Watsuji Tetsurō). 71 Hagakure, section 55 of book 1 (p. 45) deals with the Akō rōnin. 72 Hagakure, section 114 of book 1 (p. 65). The influence of Zen in such passages is clear.

revering the emperor: imperial philosophy and BUSHIDŌ

47

plishment of an ontological realization, which is prior to both loyalty and piety. Bushidō is way to truth. This idea, of gaining access to an authentic experiential space, in which morality and reality become perfectly transparent through the abandonment of self, was already central to the political and philosophical discourse of early Shōwa Japan. The so-called Kyoto School of Philosophy had been searching for a philosophical expression of this depersonalized sense of the individual since Nishida Kitarō’s influential debut in 1911. For many of the thinkers in this important school, the intellectual foundations for this type of concept, which they typically identified as being distinctly Japanese, as opposed to ‘Western,’ lay in Mahayana Buddhism and especially in Zen. Indeed, it approaches Nishida’s core concept of ‘pure experience’ ( junsui keiken)—the absolutely unmediated and non-discriminated experience that underlies all existence.73 One of the most famous, albeit marginal, members of this school was Watsuji Tetsurō, one of the framers of the Kokutai no hongi, but also the editor of the 1941 reprinting of the Hagakure. It is in Watsuji that we find the most philosophically sophisticated opposition to Inoue Tetsujirō’s conception of bushidō, and his resonance with the Hagakure is clear. Watsuji’s main consideration of bushidō comes in an essay, written in 1944, three years after he had edited the Hagakure and seven war-torn years after his involvement with the Kokutai no hongi. As was the case with Inoue and the other thinkers of the early twentieth century, Watsuji saw bushidō as the exemplar of an ethic for the whole Japanese nation rather than as an elite, historical ethic for the samurai class. Indeed, the title of his essay, Nihon no shindō (The Way of the Japanese Subject), reflected his attempts to locate bushidō as an ideal of the national spirit.74 Watsuji attempts to make it clear that the shift from feudal, hierarchical loyalties since the Kamakura period, and through the Tokugawa, to a model of national loyalties centered explicitly on the unmediated figure of the emperor in the modern period, was not only a useful

73 A recent treatment of the Kyoto School is Chris Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan. The legacy of Mahayana Buddhism is considered briefly in chapter 2. Watsuji Tetsurō explicitly cites Zen as one of the foundations of bushidō in his essay “Nihon no shindō” in WTZ, XIV, pp. 297–312. 74 Watsuji Tetsurō, “Nihon no shindō” in WTZ, XIV, pp. 297–312. Quotations are from this source.

48

christopher goto-jones

political and ideological step for the development of a national spirit, but that it was also a necessary moral and metaphysical step in the realization of human existence. He explains that the feudal attitude might be expressed as a ‘readiness to die’ (shi no kakugo) for one’s lord, whilst the modern state of mind was a more elevated ‘standpoint transcending life and death’ (shisei o koeta tachiba), although he is clear that the subtleties of the distinction have only become apparent in the modern period. For Watsuji, the turning point came toward the end of the Muromachi period and continued through the Tokugawa. He argues that warriors became increasingly confused about the target of their loyalties—for whom they performed their death-defying duties—but that the evolution of greater levels of social and political unity in the nation provided them with greater and more compelling targets of loyalty. Until, with the admixture of Buddhism and Confucianism in the Tokugawa period, the way of revering the emperor (sonnō ) became the ultimate expression of this pure obligation: “although this meaning evolved gradually, it was this synthesis of factors that brought the warriors (bushi) to the realization of a standpoint that overcame life and death.”75 In other words, the true meaning of bushidō was historically revealed at the time of the Meiji Restoration. Until that time, warriors and their respective lords had remained trapped in a feudal mindset that set them against each other in ‘domestic struggles.’ Watsuji called them ‘myopic’ (kinshigan), because of their inability to focus the imperial sentiment ‘adequately into the depths of their being.’76 This was partly due to the fact that Japan was isolated from the world, and hence that ‘there was insufficient consciousness of Japan as a state (kokka)’ in a world that contained other states. In this context, argues Watsuji, even when warriors claimed to have reached a standpoint that overcame life and death in feudal Japan, they didn’t really understand what this meant. For this to happen, “the path of the warrior (bushi no michi) had to be clarified as the path of revering the emperor (sonnō no michi ).”77 Only in the context of sonnō could bushidō become an ‘absolute condition.’78

75 WTZ, XIV, p. 298. Watsuji devotes some time to explaining the influence of Buddhism (especially Zen) and Confucianism on the evolution of bushidō. 76 WTZ, XIV, p. 305. 77 WTZ, XIV, p. 305. 78 WTZ, XIV, p. 306.

revering the emperor: imperial philosophy and BUSHIDŌ

49

The process of nationalizing the focus of loyalty was also a process of nationalizing the focus of filial piety, to the extent that the emperor was presented as the progenitor of the national body. This process, which accompanied the Meiji Restoration, was an essential step in the elevation of bushidō to a metaphysical, rather than merely a practical, system of thought. To some extent, Watsuji is less concerned with the actions of warriors (or with Japanese subjects as a whole) and more concerned with intentionality and signification. Like Yamamoto, Watsuji is much more interested in the foundations of action than in the action itself. Whilst he applauds the idea of self-sacrifice in the name of a great and absolute entity, such as the emperor or kokutai, his concern is to ensure that Japanese subjects do not exhibit selfish or egotistical motives in the performance of this self-abandonment. According to him, this should be a quasi-religious act rather than the result of calculated risk.79 Self-sacrifice, including suicide, should be a means of ‘entering into a condition of absolute existence,’ which is unified with the process of revering and serving the emperor.80 It should be a pathway toward a space of absolute value, symbolized by the emperor and kokutai in the everyday world, ‘incomparably more valuable than the life of an individual human being.’81 Following the Hagakure, Watsuji argues that the Japanese have historically valued purity of intent more highly than efficacious or successful conduct. He labels this purity as seimyōshin (pure spirited), and he argues that this is the most essential characteristic of the Japanese subject and of the warrior. He takes issue with the warriors of the feudal period, who may have been willing to sacrifice their lives for their lords, but who could not escape from egoism when they did so. Feudal warriors performed their duties as ritual affirmations of their privileged status and social class or perhaps to further the domestic, sectional interests of their lords, hence their sacrifice was designed to set them apart from their peers, rather than to solidify them together into a greater

79 Watsuji is clear that the emperor serves a religious function for the Japanese, but that this function is non-exclusive and non-specific. He believes that the underdetermination of the throne is the key to its universal potentials. WTZ, XIV, p. 308. Elsewhere, Watsuji associates rational, calculative thought with a morally defunct, European civilization. 80 Watsuji makes a comparison with religious martyrs in Europe, but comments that whilst these have just begun to emerge at the national level in Japan, in Europe they have all but disappeared, suggesting the moral decay of Europe. WTZ, XIV, p. 304. 81 WTZ, XIV, pp. 308–309.

50

christopher goto-jones

unity.82 The significance of this self-sacrifice was actually anti-national. In the modern period, however, any task performed for the emperor is immediately a public or a national task, within which the subject can experience the potential for transcending life and death through the destruction of self and unity with the absolute whole.83 On the question of loyalty, which Inoue had interpreted crisply as meaning practical obedience to the emperor, even to the point of death, Watsuji’s position is clearly more metaphysical in nature: Utilizing the authority of one’s rank or station, imposing one’s own will, or pushing one’s own way of thinking onto others, these kinds of attitudes are always nothing but [the assertion of an] ‘I’ from the standpoint of the subjects . . . That is to say: this is the greatest disloyalty. Hence, when we think about it properly, it is the case that accomplishing our purity of spirit is something much more difficult than [simply] the resolution to die . . . In order to accomplish this purity of spirit, one must realize the significance of one’s public duty and overcome life and death—and one must realize that this duty emerges from a divine source, as the august activity of the emperor . . .84

Imperial Philosophy and Bushidō in Wartime Japan Just as the process of modernization in Japan interleaved with the development of a bellicose posturing in international relations, so the evolution of imperial philosophy after the Meiji Restoration interleaved with the development of bushidō as an intellectual realm. During this crucial period, conceptions of the nation, the state, the national polity, the emperor, the people/subjects, service, loyalty and piety were all under scrutiny. This scrutiny was not only exercised across the widest breadths of the political system, although intellectual and political disputes between right and left were powerful and often violent, but also within camps of ostensibly similar political persuasions. Just as the political left was fragmented and somewhat hampered by its high level of theoretical sophistication and contestation,85 it also seems that

Watsuji cites Kitabatake Chikafusa’s writings as examples. WTZ, XIV, pp. 310–311. 84 WTZ, XIV, p. 311. 85 For a discussion of the parameters of the philosophic left in wartime Japan, see Chris Goto-Jones, “The Left Hand of Darkness: Forging a Political Left in Interwar Japan,” in Rikki Kertsen & David Williams (eds.), The Left in the Shaping of Japanese Democracy (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 3–20. 82 83

revering the emperor: imperial philosophy and BUSHIDŌ

51

the political right was far from unified on a theoretical level, even on such core issues as the meaning and function of the emperor himself. In many ways, the ethical traditions of bushidō became symbolic of the contested rightist sphere, as a body of thought that grappled with a number of the core issues for a recently ‘nationalized’ wartime state. One of the intriguing things about bushidō, at this historical juncture, was the way in which it could be manipulated and sculpted according to the agendas of the intellectuals involved. Like the institution of the imperial house itself, bushidō managed to present itself both as an ageold ethical tradition of the Japanese nation and as a modern ideology perfectly suited to the needs of the national polity. In the hands of both Inoue Tetsujirô and Watsuji Tetsurô, bushidō was presented as having taken on a new and more perfected evolutionary form in the modern period, thanks to the transition from fractious feudal loyalties to local warlords or the shogun to a nationalized, or absolute, system of loyalty to the divine emperor. For both of them, bushidō represented an idealized version of the way of the subjects. For Inoue, it was ideal in the sense that the people should be inspired by the example of the bushi for the sake of the emperor. For Watsuji, it was ideal in the sense that all people can and should aspire to its ideals for the sake of their own salvation. It represented the perfection of the way of revering the emperor, and the interdependency of imperial philosophy and bushidō appears to have been essential to both. In the crudest terms, we might speak of the existence of at least two competing versions of bushidō during the early Shōwa period. One of them was exemplified by Inoue himself, who drew on an invented tradition of thought that found its most developed form in the work of Yamaga Sokō. This Confucian-Shinto oriented bushidō emphasized loyalty over filial piety (or their unification in the mythic status of the emperor as the progenitor of the nation); it emphasized practical action and obedience over contemplation and self-actualization, and it focused on loyalty as a means to the achievement of success. This version was probably the dominant version during the early Shōwa period, and it is certainly what we find in statements of the ideological orthodoxy such as the Kokutai no hongi. On the other hand, we have the bushidō of Watsuji Tetsurō, which drew on a more Buddhist tradition and rooted its own invented tradition in the work of Yamamoto Tsunetomo. This version of bushidō was unconcerned with filial piety and focused on loyalty as a means through which to accomplish an existential realization; it emphasized contemplation, self-actualization, and purity of

52

christopher goto-jones

intentionality over practical action. In this bushidō, the purpose of loyalty was not necessarily to better accomplish great successes or victories, but merely to use the occasion of loyalty to escape from the confines of egoism that plague human existence. In the space between these two versions of bushidō we can see at least two significations of the emperor and kokutai: firstly, as the source of moral authority and absolute sovereignty; and secondly, as an incarnation or symbol of an absolute, unified reality, of the kind that appeared to be proposed by the wider Kyoto School. It seems relatively clear that Inoue’s position was more in line with the ideological orthodoxy of the imperial state, and that Watsuji’s position, although dangerously slippery and abstract, was actually a form of counter-orthodoxy, albeit within limits. In other words, as a contested intellectual sphere within imperial philosophy, bushidō presented wartime Japan with at least two ways of revering the emperor, and both of these might be considered as constitutive of the nationalist discourse of wartime Japan.

STATE SHINTO AND EMPEROR VENERATION Shimazono Susumu State Shinto: The Theory of Murakami Shigeyoshi In order to understand the term ‘State Shinto,’ it is necessary to clarify the ideology of kokutai (National Polity) and its relation to the religious structure of modern Japan. Murakami Shigeyoshi, in his 1970 book Kokka shintō (State Shinto), regarded kokutai as the core of State Shinto. He wrote: The theory that Shinto had no doctrine led people to think that State Shinto was not a religion. However, State Shinto was without doubt a religion. It revered specific gods and it taught people to believe in these gods. State Shinto was a developed form of ethnic religion that had an organized ideology. The doctrine of State Shinto was the doctrine of kokutai, as heralded by the Great Empire of Japan.1

What is the doctrine of kokutai? Murakami quotes the following passage from jinja hongi (The Basic Principles of Shrines) published by Jingi-in (Institute of the Gods) in 1944, during the Pacific War: The Great Empire of Japan originated from Amaterasu Ōmikami, the founder of the Imperial Family. Her descendants, an unbroken line of emperors, have ruled the country to realize the divine words of the founder which extend from ancient times to eternity. Here lies the National Polity (kokutai) of Japan. . . . All the emperors have been united with the founder goddess, and as god incarnates have reigned and provided the people with their generous holy virtues. The people, embraced by the emperors’ compassion, have been united as a nation and have loyally and devotedly served them. Thus, the whole nation has become a large family with the emperor at its top. The life of the nation continues to grow without break. This is the essence of kokutai. This is the Way of the Gods, based on the incomparable dignity that originated in ancient times and continues eternally, and that can be offered at home and abroad. The places where the Way of the Gods is embodied in the most solemn and venerable manner

1

Murakami Shigeyoshi, Kokka shintō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1970), pp. 140–141.

54

shimazono susumu are the shrines. With the Ise Shrine on top, shrines across the country embody the National Polity and keep the nation tranquil.2

Murakami considers the three elements of Shrine Shinto, Imperial House Shinto, and kokutai to be the components of State Shinto.3 His understanding of State Shinto is that Shrine Shinto and Imperial Household Shinto were integral elements of State Shinto, and that these two entities became the nucleus around which the doctrine of kokutsi was formed and propagated. Problems of Murakami’s Theory Some scholars are skeptical of Murakimi’s understanding of State Shinto and the ideology of National Polity. They have noted that his quotation from jinja hongi was written during the war, when people were experiencing unusual emotional conditions. Did all the shrines follow that principle after the Meiji Restoration? Is it not misleading to believe that this exaggerated description of State Shinto, based on the ‘doctrine of kokutai,’ covered the entire modern history of Japan, when it actually existed only in one specific short period?4 According to Murakami’s theory of the ‘doctrine of kokutai,’ the state and the people who manipulated the imperial household and the shrines took the initiative, while the rest of the population remained passive. In fact, ordinary people were the main players in spreading State Shinto, and the phenomenon of their emperor veneration cannot be ignored. Emperor veneration by the people is an important factor in understanding the ideology of National Polity, but this aspect is slighted in Murakami’s assessment. In my opinion, the people’s commitment to emperor veneration was an important component of the ideology of kokutai. Murakami’s theory does not sufficiently answer the following questions:

Murakami, Kokka shintō, p. 141. Murakami, Kokka shintō, p. 223. 4 Ashizu Uzuhiko, Kokka shintō to wa nan datta no ka (Tokyo: Jinja Shimpō-sha, 1987, new edition, 2006); Sakamoto Koremaru, Kokka shintō keisei satei no kenkyū (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994); Nitta Hitoshi, Kindai seikyō kankei no kisoteki kenkyū (Tokyo: Daimeido, 1997); Nitta Hitoshi, Arahitogami, kokka shintō to iu gensō (Tokyo: PHP Research Institute, 2003). 2 3

state shinto and emperor veneration

55

(1) What place does the ideology of kokutai and emperor veneration hold in the theory and practice of State Shinto? (2) If State Shinto was established by the modern state, to what extent can the ideology of kokutai and emperor veneration be considered as modern? (3) Who advocated the ideologies of kokutai and emperor veneration; who systematized them; who accepted them; and who practiced them after the Meiji Restoration? (4) To what extent can the ideology of kokutai and emperor veneration be considered as part of Shinto? The Place of the Ideology of Kokutai in State Shinto The system of State Shinto functioned strongly in modern Japanese society from around the time of the Meiji Restoration until the end of the Pacific War. In this system, Shrine Shinto and Imperial House Shinto had an important significance. Facts about the ideology and practice of this system have not been sufficiently revealed in past studies, and it has not yet been fully clarified where the ideology was formed and how it functioned. This is why Murakami’s theory of State Shinto has lost its credibility among present-day scholars,5 and why the relationship between State Shinto and the ideology of National Polity still needs clarification. During the period from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 to Japan’s defeat in 1945, the ideology of kokutai was the center of the nation’s spiritual system. Few scholars would disagree with this observation. But there has been no sufficient examination of the extent to which this ideology influenced the people’s mental life, in what way it can be considered a religion, or how it related to Shrine Shinto and to Imperial Shinto.

5 Yamaguchi Teruomi, Meiji kokka to shūkyō (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppanbu, 1999); Shimazono Susumu, “Sōsetsu: jūkyū-seiki nihon no shūkyō kōzō no hen’yō” in Komori Yōichi, et al. eds., Iwanami kōza—kindai nippon no bunka-shi, 2: kosumorojii no “kinsei” (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2001); Sakamoto Koremaru, ed., Kokka shintō saikō—saisei itchi kokka no keisei to tenkai (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 2006).

56

shimazono susumu Nagao Ryūichi’s Theory of the Ideology of National Polity

In his book Nihon kokka shisōshi kenkyū (Study of the History of the National Ideology of Japan), Nagao Ryūichi, a scholar of the history of legal thought, discusses the ‘ideology of kokutai,’ instead of the ideology of State Shinto, and presents it as a combination of three concepts, or articles of faith, that politicians, intellectuals and common people held and practiced, rather than as a doctrine imposed on the people by the state. The first concept was that of ‘the land of the gods (shinkoku).’ This meant that Japan was a country created by gods, a country in which Amaterasu Ōmikami was born, and a country which has been ruled by her descendants. As such, the country was superior to the rest of the world. The second concept was emperor veneration—the principle that the legitimacy of government stemmed from ‘the rule by the unbroken line of emperors.’ This was a faith in the hereditary charisma of the emperor as a living deity. It was linked with the assertion of the superiority of Japan to other countries. Japan was said to have an advantage over other nations in that the line of emperors remained continuous with no revolution i.e., no abolition of one dynasty and the rise of another one as happened in China. The third concept was the ‘Japanese Spirit’ ( yamato-damashii). This was the theory that the Japanese possessed ‘clean and bright minds,’ deemed their lives to be as light as a feather, and devoted themselves to serving the emperor. This became the norm for national morality, on one hand, and the theory of the Japanese character on the other. This view of life and death provided the Japanese with the faith which served them on the battlefield.6 By placing an emphasis on the Japanese spirit, Nagao claimed that the ideology of kokutai had a religious foundation. This claim relates closely to my own interest in seeking to reveal the relationship between National Polity and State Shinto. But were the Shinto or religious elements of kokutai part of the Japanese spirit which Motoori is referring to?

6

Nagao Ryūichi, Nihon kokka shisō-shi kenkyū (Tokyo: Sōbun-sha, 1982), p. 7.

state shinto and emperor veneration

57

Religious Aspects of Kokutai One reason that Nagao stressed the importance of the Japanese spirit was that, according to Karl Schmidt, a political ideology can be effective on the battlefield only when it contains ‘the view of life and death as an indispensable element.’7 If this is the case, we must look at the ideology of Kokugaku (National Learning), which is based on ‘political myths or political theology,’ rather than at Mitogaku (Mito School of Confucianism), because only the former has a unique view of life and death.8 This is the reason that the religious elements of the ideology of kokutai existed in the teachings of National Learning, from Kamo no Mabuchi to Motoori Norinaga and Hirata Atsutane, rather than in the Confucian-oriented Mitogaku. Nagao regards the ideology of kokutai as part of the ideology of National Learning, which emphasized the Shinto view of life and death. Nagao examines why the religious element is important in the ideology of kokutai, which is often regarded as a political ideology. He looks not only at what has been explained in the documents of state organizations, and by scholars and ideologues, but also at how this philosophy directed political and social life, and how people believed in it. His intuitive observation that Shinto underlies the ideology of National Polity is worthy of attention. But Nagao’s reasoning in highly evaluating National Learning is rather arbitrary. He does not pay much attention to the historical background of the ideology of kokutai as it developed in modern Japan, and he does not examine the process by which religious elements were incorporated into this ideology. The places where the ideology of kokutai and its religious aspects functioned and were practiced can hardly be found. Although he pays attention to the religious aspects, Nagao’s interest lies mainly in the political sphere. He regards the systems of politics, law, and government as more important than religion, believed or practiced. He did not actually examine the religious aspects of the ideology of kokutai based on documented information, but, rather, extracted the ideology of National Polity only from the writings of scholars and intellectuals.

7 8

Nagao, Nihon kokka, p. 15. Nagao, Nihon kokka, p. 15.

58

shimazono susumu The Ideology of Kokutai from a Religious Perspective

From the perspective of religious history, the approach to the ideology of National Polity looks different. Religion provides significance and order to people’s lives. We should not be satisfied with understanding Shinto merely through shrine and palace rites, through formal activities and rituals, or through the records of those who carry them out. We must expand the range of our study and gain understanding of the reality of the daily life of people who were engaged in Shinto thought and practice. It is important that we understand how, within State Shinto, the ideology of kokutai, accompanied by emperor veneration, shaped social life, and how that ideology was practiced by the people. To do this, we need to outline the thoughts and practices of unspecified people. But if we want to treat ‘thoughts’ as we do social relations, verbal communications and physical practices, we must venture into new areas: such as the history of institutions and the history of ideas. This same difficulty is faced when we examine State Shinto, and wonder to what extent emperor veneration was part of it, and what elements were excluded from it. This difficulty is unavoidable whenever religions are discussed, particularly those with large numbers of followers, or when we attempt to depict the patterns of people’s daily thinking and activities. Nonetheless, we cannot avoid the need to conceptualize patterns of people’s ways of thinking and practicing for the purpose of characterizing them and comparing them with others. Researchers in cultural anthropology, social history, and the history of popular thought grapple with this issue all the time and have made some progress in refining the process. Since people understand each other through concepts, we must use concepts that respond to reality and are free of bias. I have been exploring ways to improve the use of concepts in analyzing Shinto and State Shinto.9 I shall now try to explain the concept of State Shinto from the viewpoints of the ideology of kokutai and emperor veneration. 9 Shimazono Susumu, “Kokka shintō to kindai nihon no shūkyō kōzō,” in Shūkyō kenkyū, No. 329 (2001); Shimazono, “Sōsetsu”; Shimazono Susumu, “Kokka shintō to meshianizumu: tennō no shinkakuka kara mita ōmotokyō,” in Yasumaru Yoshio, et alii, eds. Iwanami kōza, tennō to ōken o kangaeru 4: shūkyō to ken’i (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002); Shimazono Susumu, “Sengo no kokka shintō to shūkyō shūdan to shite no jinja,” in Tamamuro Fumio ed., Nihonjin no shūkyō to shomin shinkō (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2006); Shimazono Susumu, “Shintō to kokka shintō, shiren: seiritsu e no toi to rekishiteki tembō,” in Meiji seitoku kinen gakkai kiyō, Republication, No. 43 (2006).

state shinto and emperor veneration

59

What is the Ideology of Kokutai? The term kokutai originated in the Chinese classics, where it meant ‘government form’ or ‘national dignity,’ in comparison with other nations. The term was used with this meaning in Japan in the seventeenth century. By the latter half of the eighteenth century, it came to express the uniqueness of the state structure of Japan. Later, all the allegedly unique elements of Japanese political traditions were included in this term. Thus the kokutai ideology developed.10 The core of the ideology of kokutai, or National Polity, is the “selfrecognition of Japan’s traditional uniqueness and superiority based on the rule of an unbroken line of emperors.”11 However, at different times people used the term with different meanings. Many changes occurred in the way this term led people to political and daily behavior. Had the alleged superiority of the Japanese political system rested only on the ‘unbroken imperial line,’ the ideology of kokutai could not have motivated the revolutionary activists at the end of the Tokugawa era, nor could it have motivated the daily life of people in modern Japan. But when that theory was linked with emperor veneration, it assumed the power of a religious ideology, able to motivate and shape people’s thoughts and practices. Through what mechanisms, and by whose initiative did the idea of kokutai develop into a system of national ideology and practice? In the following section, I would like to present an overview of the development of the ideology of National Polity in the context of the history of religion and thought in Japan from the eighteenth century to the promulgation of the Constitution of the Great Empire of Japan in 1899. National Learning Lineage The ideology of kokutai in the Tokugawa period branched into two lines: Confucianism and National Learning. Generally speaking, National Polity in Confucianism stressed a political system, while National Learning

Bitō Masahide, “Kokutai-ron,” in Kokushi dai-jiten (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1985). 11 Tsujimoto Masashi, “Kokutai shisō,” in Koyasu Nobukuni, ed., Nihon shisōshi jiten (Tokyo: Pelican-sha, 2001). 10

60

shimazono susumu

stressed spiritual tradition. It was Motoori Norinaga and other scholars of National Learning who extolled kokutai as a spiritual tradition. In their writings, the ideology of National Polity became an explicit Shintoist national ideology.12 Here are two examples: Our respected emperor, as a successor of the imperial line from the creator god of this land, continues to govern this country, which has been designated from the beginning of earth to be ruled by the emperor. In the edict of Amaterasu Ōmikami, there is no instruction to disobey the orders of an emperor even if he is a bad monarch. Whether an emperor is good or bad, he cannot be deprived of his throne. As long as the earth exists and the sun and moon shine, the emperor will be our irremovable lord through all generations.13 Because the land where Amaterasu Ōmikami was born and where she is shining is the origin of all lands, there are countless numbers of things in that land which are superior to those in other lands. First of all rice, which is essential to human life. The rice in this country is incomparably better than the rice in other countries. This example alone shows the superiority of our country.14

It is significant that the palace rite niinamesai (Harvest Festival), in which the emperor eats the just-harvested rice in communion with the gods, is the core ritual of Imperial Shinto. When the admiration of the Japanese spirit that Nagao emphasizes is added, then the ideology of kokutai becomes a potent religious sentiment. The National Learning-inspired ideology of kokutai spread a religious form of emperor veneration among the common people and produced a grassroots ideological movement. It attempted to exclude Buddhism, Confucianism and other philosophies and direct the people’s life toward emperor veneration and the veneration of Jimmu Tennō, the legendary founder of the empire. In the late eighteenth century, when Motoori Norigana advocated these ideas, the ideology of kokutai as spelled out by the National Learning scholars was a cultural movement of a small group of intellectuals. At that time, it did not lead to a new vision of national integration under a central government or to pragmatic reforms, and it did not present a vision of concrete policies to involve the public.

12 13 14

Kiyohara Sadao, Kokutairon-shi (Tokyo: Tōyō Tosho, 1939). Naobi no mitama, 1771 (Quoted in Kiyohara, Kokutairon-shi). Tamakushige, 1786 (Quoted in Kiyohara, Kokutairon-shi).

state shinto and emperor veneration

61

The Confucian Lineage: Mitogaku The reforms of the Meiji Restoration were the outcome of the Confucian ideology of kokutai as developed by the Mito School of Learning (mitogaku). The Mito School derived its ideas from the teachings of the Chinese Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi in the twelfth century. But while Zhu Xi emphasized individual morality, the Mito School claimed that a country is governed well when its ruler practices proper morality.15 The book Shinron (1825) by Aizawa Seishisai, of the latter Mito School, was of great influence in its time because it combined the ideology of emperor reverence with the ideology of rejecting western imperialism. The ideology of kokutai as outlined in Shinron was behind the attempts to revive court rituals, to make these rituals the pillar on which to build a strong and unified government system, and to draw the people’s loyalty toward the emperor. The chapter on kokutai, which is the core of Shinron, advocates emperor veneration as the basis of the state. At the time when the western powers pressured Japan to open its gates, the leaders of the Mito School feared the negative influences of western culture, and especially of Christianity. They thought that they should build a strong political system and formulate a unified will to cope with the aggression of the western countries. This was the ideology of kokutai of the Mito School of Learning. The ideology of kokutai had the characteristics of a political theory. Its aim was to build a nation state and to motivate the people to be involved in political action. It wished to provide the people with a vision of the state in which the emperor and the people are united through rituals. It made emperor veneration and the rituals of worshipping the founder of the dynasty the pillars of the unified state and the way of enhancing the people’s loyalty to the state. It advocated a government by a divine ruler, under one religion. Religion was the means for achieving political integration. This Japanized Confucianism emphasized state formation while paying tribute to personal virtue. Its essential component was reverence for the emperor, which is deeply associated with Shinto and supported by Shinto court rituals. The Mito School of Learning integrated Confucian and Shinto traditions. It regarded

15 Bitō Masahide, “Mito-gaku no tokushitsu,” in Imai Usaburō, Seya Yoshihiko, Bitō Masahide, eds., Nihon shisō taikei 53: Mitogaku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1973), p. 565.

62

shimazono susumu

the people’s participation in the nation state through Shinto rituals as a necessary step for building the nation. The Meiji Restoration: Kokutai and the Rebuff of National Learning Bito Masahide explains how the ideology of kokutai became the core of the Meiji regime: The concept of kokutai was systematized by the Mito School of Learning. The first chapter of Aizawa Seishisai’s book Shinron, which is devoted to kokutai, advocates the need of unifying the ‘people’s will’ in order to strengthen the unity of a state. To achieve that, the book stresses the tradition of governance by a divine emperor. Later, from around the end of the Tokugawa era and the opening of Japan, the term kokutai started to appear not only in the political discourse among scholars but also in official documents, including imperial edicts of the new government. The term came to mean the unified order of a state, or the state system of a unified order. Before long, it came to mean support of the unified state as instituted by the Meiji Restoration.16

The Confucian ideology of kokutai emphasized the political function of the modern state rather than a religious belief. In Bito’s interpretation, the ideology of kokutai in this sense played a major role in the reforms of the Meiji Restoration. Indeed, at the time of the Meiji Restoration the ideology of kokutai, emphasizing the unbroken line of emperors and the rule by a divine monarch, became the central concept behind the reforms and played a major role in building the state. Despite the fact that Shinto beliefs appeared at its center, the ideology was based on a realistic wish to establish a modern state. Shinto rituals and emperor veneration were means for achieving national unification. This ideology did not intend to establish a system in which emperor veneration would direct the daily lives of the people. In contrast to this realistic approach of Confucianism to kokutai as an ideology of government, the National Learning scholars, who were in favor of the revival of Shinto as a religious culture, interpreted the ideology of kokutai literally. They gave it a totalitarian meaning and expected their religious concepts to be realized. But nationalist scholars like Yano Harumichi, who advocated the revival of ancient Shinto, were

16

Bitō, “Kokutai-ron.”

state shinto and emperor veneration

63

dropped from the central government. The religious and educational policies of the Meiji government were far removed from the goals that they entertained. The scholars of National Learning intended to establish a system of Shinto rituals and imperial-family worship on a national level. Their outlook was exclusive, as they excluded not only western doctrines, but also Buddhism and Confucianism. On the other hand, the leaders of the Meiji government desired to establish a government system that would compare favorably with modern western countries. They tried to control the situation when conflicting thoughts competed with each other. On the whole, they had the realistic aim of using the ideology of kokutai to achieve national integration.17 Relativism and Flexibility in the Modern Ideology of Kokutai The ideology of kokutai which focused on government could be adjusted, to some extent, to modern political concepts such as the separation of religion and state, constitutional government, and civil rights. Kokutai, as it was reflected in the Meiji Constitution, was a combination of a religious element from the National Learning theology and a secular element of the Emperor-centered government. 18 The Meiji government promoted realistic policies, under a constitutional monarchy, while proclaiming the principle of kokutai. This principle formally meant worship of the emperors and the gods, but in fact it meant modernization and western civilization. This was how the modern Japanese state pragmatically used the ‘exoteric’ and ‘esoteric’ ideologies.19 Nagao summarizes this process in the following way: Following the principles of kokutai, the ceremony of the promulgation of the constitution was held on the morning of 11 February 1889 at the palace shrine. It began with the rite, in which the emperor asked permission from the divine spirits of his forefathers to enact the constitution, “by succeeding the imperial throne of the Way of Gods in accordance with the grand plan, eternal as heaven and earth.” The ceremony concluded with the rite, in which the emperor granted the constitution to his people by the

Sakamoto Koremaru, Meiji ishin to kokugakusha (Tokyo: Daimeidō, 1992). Nagao, Nihon kokka, p. 7. 19 Kuno Osamu and Tsurumi Shunsuke, Gendai nihon no shisō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1956). 17 18

64

shimazono susumu

‘authority inherited from the ancestors.’ Article 1 of the constitution said: “The Empire of Japan shall be reigned over and governed by a line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal.” This was an endorsement of the theory of kokutai that opposed abdication and the dismissal of emperors. Article 3, which said: “The Emperor is sacred and inviolable,” was modeled on royal exemption from liability as found in the western monarchies of that time. Yet, it was also based on the divinity of Japanese emperors, as explained in the kempō gige, the semi-official commentary on the constitution, which said: “the Emperor is a sacred being to be worshipped and never profaned.” As such, the Constitution of the Empire of Japan confirmed the exoteric theory of kokutai and vested the emperor with strong political powers. However, as the attitude of the constitution on this matter is ambiguous, on the secular level ‘exoteric’ and ‘esoteric’ contradictions emerged. Although Article 1 stipulated that the emperor was the ruler, his legislative power was shared with the Diet, budgetary powers were in the hands of the Diet, the judiciary was independent, and in administering the state the emperor was to be assisted by his ministers. If ruling means a combination of these powers, then the system of the emperor as ruler was a monarchy in name only.20 Although kokutai remained the official ideology until the end of the Pacific War, a system which limited the emperor’s powers was established.21 Kokutai, as an orthodox concept, meant a regime based on the sacred rule of an unbroken imperial line. However, this concept was combined with the constitutional system and with secularism based on modern western thought. This combination prevented the ideology of kokutai from thoroughly permeating people’s lives until the 1930s. The Shinto Base of the Confucian Ideology of Kokutai How could the politically-oriented Confucian ideology of kokutai become a component of State Shinto? As State Shinto exerted a great influence on people’s minds and behavior in modern Japan, how can we respond to the following two statements: That the ideology of kokutai, which was a core element of State Shinto, owed much to Confucianism; and that

Nagao, Nihon kokka, pp. 25–26. Suzuki Masayuki Kōshitsu seido (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1993); Shimazono, “Kokka shintō to meshianizumu.” 20 21

state shinto and emperor veneration

65

the theory of kokutai on the political level was applied only partially and for convenience sake. First, I would like to explain why I consider the ideology of kokutai after the end of the Tokugawa era to be Shintoist, or at least containing many Shinto elements, in spite of its Confucian origin. It should be noted that in the Tokugawa period, many Confucian scholars considered Shinto and Confucianism to be basically identical. As Itō Tasaburō, a scholar of early modern thought, has shown, many Confucian scholars in the Tokugawa period placed high value on Shinto in its political meaning. They thought that the ideal political way of our divine ancestors should be called Shinto (the way of gods), just like the politics of the sage emperors of ancient China, Yao and Shun . . . They identified Shinto with the Way of the Emperors Yao and Shun.22

The identification of Shinto and Confucianism can be observed among Confucian scholars in the Tokugawa period, such as Fujiwara Seika, Hayashi Razan, Yamaga Sokō, and Kumazawa Banzan. Kumazawa, for example, wrote in his Daigaku wakumon (1686) that the ways of the Chinese sages and the Japanese gods were both the Way of Gods (shintō). He also claimed that the three imperial regalia of Japan stood for wisdom, humanity, and courage, and in that sense they represented Confucian teachings. These scholars maintained that by the power of Confucianism, the virtuous governance of Amaterasu Ōmikami, could be restored and Shinto could be revived. In books that deal with the history of the ideology of kokutai, Fujiwara Seika, Hayashi Razan, and Kumazawa Banzan are not mentioned as its advocates. Yamaga Sokō is described as someone who had reached the idea of kokutai in his book Chūchō jijitsu (True Facts of the Central Realm, 1669), written in his later years.23 However, these scholars, including Yamaga, were close to the ideology of kokutai through their Shinto-Confucian thought. Later, after Kuriyama Sempō’s book Hōken taiki (Illustrious Record from Hōan to Kemmu, 1716), the ideology of kokutai was clearly established among Yamazaki Ansai’s students and in the Mito School.24

22 23 24

Itō Tasaburō, Kinsei kokutai shisōshi-ron (Tokyo: Dōbunkan, 1943), p. 6. Kiyohara, Kokutai-shi ron. Itō Tasaburō, Kinsei kokutai, pp. 61–62.

66

shimazono susumu Emphasis on Emperor Veneration and the Expansion of Shinto Elements

At the end of the Tokugawa period, Confucian scholars and patriotic samurai departed from Chinese-style Confucianism, by embracing the ideology of kokutai and shifting the focus of their loyalty from the feudal lords to the emperor. In the Meiji period, the formation of the modern state was accompanied by a rapid development of various schools of thought. Shinto elements became stronger in the ideology of kokutai, and more people came to believe that this ideology was based on Shinto. Emperor veneration and founder-god worship became the central part of this ideology. In the process of creating a modern state, the ideology of kokutai and emperor veneration became important tools for achieving national integration. This development influenced kokugaku, or National Learning. The modern reforms, through emperor veneration and the establishment of an independent state that could withstand foreign imperialism, became important common objectives. Thus developed the ideology of kōdō (the Way of the Emperor), which included Confucian studies, western studies, National Learning and Shinto elements. In this way, the field of learning that would later be called kōgaku (Emperor Studies) was conceived. The concepts of kōdo and kōgaku illustrate the characteristics of the modern ideology of kokutai, which emphasized emperor veneration. These concepts could be seen as theoretical expressions of the thought and practice of State Shinto. As soon as the leaders of the time realized that the ideology of kokutai and emperor veneration would effectively function as the focus of a modern, unified state, the concepts of kōdō and kōgaku gained prestige. History of the Term Kōdō In this section, I would like to examine the ideology of kokutai before and after the Meiji Restoration, focusing on the concepts of kōdō and kōgaku. I base myself on the comprehensive analysis by Kōno Shōzō of the history of the concept of kōdō in the ideology of kokutai and State Shinto.25 During the war, when State Shinto was at its peak, the word

25 Kōno Shōzō, Kokutai kannen no shiteki kenkyū (Tokyo: Nihon Dempō Tsūshinsha, 1942).

state shinto and emperor veneration

67

kōdō assumed its strongest significance. It was not by chance that the history of this concept was written by Kōno, who was a leading Shinto scholar at Kokugakuin University at that time. The term jin’nō (divine emperor), which is associated with the term kōdō, was used by the Ise School of Shinto in the Kamakura period. In his book Jin’nō shōtōki (Orthodox Notes on Divine Emperors, 1343), Kitabatake Chikafusa used the term jin’nō to describe the unity of the goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami and the emperor. It was in the Yamazaki Ansai School and the early Mito School that kōdō was used in reference to the Way of Divine Emperors. Early examples of this use can be found in the writings of Kuriyama Sempō (1671–1706) and Miyake Kanran (1674–1718). Toward the end of the Tokugawa period, with the rise of the demand to establish a unified state, the ideology of loyalty to the emperor was intensely promoted.26 In the loyalist statements, the term kōdō assumed great importance. There, the terms kōdō and kōgaku became linked with the terms kan’nagara (embodying the gods) and akitsumikami (god incarnate), and their use became inseparable from the religious reverence of the divine emperor. Kōno asserts that the definition of kan’nagara contained the meaning that the position of the emperor, as the embodiment of Amaterasu Ōmikami, and his government, was absolutely sacred and reflected the will of the goddess.27 With the rise of the loyalist ideology, the term kōdō became inseparable from the concepts of ‘unity of gods and emperors,’ ‘government by a divine ruler through Shinto rituals,’ and the ‘way of gods is the way of emperors.’ It became identical with such terms as kōkoku no tami (People of the Empire), kōkokugaku (Studies of the Empire), kōgaku (Emperor Studies), and such phrases like ‘the essence of Shinto is kōdō’ and ‘kōdō is the essence of Shinto.’ Kōno defines kōdō as the “national spirit of living under the imperial family, worshiping the gods, and leading a clean and honest life, thus enhancing the eternal life of the Japanese nation.”28

26 Watsuji Tetsurō, Sonnō shisō to sono dentō—nihon rinri-shi shisō-shi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1943, vol. 1). 27 Watsuji, Sonnō, p. 189. 28 Watsuji, Sonnō, p. 17.

68

shimazono susumu Kōdō Theories of Different Lines

Nakabayashi Narimasa (also known as Chikudō, 1776–1853), a painter versed in Zen Buddhism, explained in his book Gakuhan (Model of Learning, 1835), the essence of kōkoku (imperial country), by using elements from both Confucianism and National Learning: From the time of the gods, kōkoku worshipped the deities of heaven and earth. Government by a divine emperor through religious rituals represents the will of heaven and the will of the gods, and not the personal will of the emperor. The emperor conducts these rituals, or has members of the Imbe and Nakatomi families conduct them on his behalf. Hence, commissioners of Shinto are placed above the ministers of state. The commissioners devote themselves sincerely to serving the emperor. Their loyalty is a model for the people to follow. This is the way of the Japanese nation, and it is different from other countries where different systems of government exist. The three sacred treasures are symbols of peaceful government. When the position of the emperor and his subjects is clearly defined, the country remains in perfect order. This is the key to the eternal way of our government system. If a tree is not well rooted, it cannot bend without breaking. The emperor’s officers are important assets of the nation. The hearts of the people are bound tightly to them. In China, they use reason in governing the people, but they are not able to solidify the base. Therefore dynasties change there frequently.29

The Confucian scholar Hasegawa Akimichi (1815–97), a samurai from Shinshū Matsushiro, who studied under Sakuma Shōzan, wrote an unfinished essay by the name of Kōdō jutsugi (Description of Kōdō), the main part of which was published in 1861. Kōno summarizes the main points of that book as follows: Kōdō means that the divine emperors ( jin’nō ) of the past and the present possess virtue and dignity as deities. The way of the divine emperors is the teachings of these emperors. The emperor, as a descendant of divine ancestors, is the most sacred monarch in the world. The way of the divine emperors is sincere and persistent, and the great way of kōkoku (imperial country) is to maintain morality and guarantee the people’s lives. Therefore, the way of the subject is the fundamental duty of human beings. The emperor is a dignified saint whom the whole world should obey. The people living in the empire under the emperor’s rule should be worthy of this empire. They should follow the divine law, learn the ways of the empire, develop sincerity and devotion, and act accordingly.30

29 30

Watsuji, Sonnō, p. 198. Kōno, Kokutai kannen, pp. 215–216.

state shinto and emperor veneration

69

The book Kōdō-ron (Theory of Kōdō) by the kokugaku scholar Ikeda Zuisen, published in 1872, advocated government by a divine ruler in accordance with Shinto rituals. It used the term kōdō to indicate the political function of the Shinto rituals. Ikeda wrote: Kōdō is the way which the empire under the emperor’s rule leads without depending on other countries. In ancient times, when the gods ruled the country in peace, there was no need for such a word as Shinto, or the way of gods. However, in the reign of Emperor Kōtoku (645–654), the term ‘way of the gods’ was introduced for the first time. At that time, the ways of foreign countries entered Japan, and it became necessary to give a name to the way in which the country had lived under the gods, in order to distinguish it from the foreign ways. Later, the way of the gods of the empire, under the emperors’ rule, which is not dependent on foreign countries, came to be known as kōdō. The primary importance of kōdō is that the emperor himself performs the rituals. The second importance is that he himself governs the nation.31

Kōdō as a New Comprehensive Way The term kōdō was used by scholars, politicians and intellectuals of both the Confucian and the National Learning schools before and after the Meiji Restoration, as a political and nationalist concept that emphasized emperor reverence. This means that the ideology of kokutai and emperor veneration came to be perceived as a new kind of ‘way,’ ‘teaching,’ and ‘learning,’ different from the traditional meanings of these terms. It was an ideology to establish an emperor-centered political system, and to spread emperor reverence among the people in order to promote national integration. Considering the goal, one group of people thought that there was not much difference between Confucianism and Shinto. Another group, which included the National Learning supporters, claimed that Shinto was more important. The former group won, and therefore kōdō came to emphasize emperor-people relations—that is, the political and religious management of people. It was believed that kōdō could accommodate both Shinto and Confucianism. Okita Yukuji, a scholar of educational thought history, quotes the following passage from the 1862 essay Kyūkyōdan sōron hyōsetsu (Analyzing the General Critiques of the Nine Discussions) by Hasegawa Akimichi, 31

Kōno, Kokutai kannen, p. 217.

70

shimazono susumu

which criticized the exclusive inclination among the National Learning scholars: Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, the various schools of early China, Dutch studies and western studies, originated in different countries and at different times. Although their teachings are apparently different, when we examine them in depth, we realize that they are all part of the way of our divine emperors. Therefore, it is no use in asking whether their teachings are right or wrong. Since the followers of Confucianism, Buddhism, the various Chinese schools, Dutch and western studies are all children of the divine emperors, none of these teachings should be considered wrong.32

Ōkuni Takamasa, the leading scholar of the Tsuwano School of National Learning, whose students Kamei Korekane and Fukuba Bisei held important positions in the Meiji government, claimed that Shinto was a comprehensive way centering on imperial rituals and could therefore support Confucian and Buddhist ways. He pointed out that there were elements in Shinto which were similar to other religions and elements which were uniquely Shinto. Shinto could embrace the Buddhist and Confucian ways, with which it shared common aspects, and consider Japan as the leading country of the world, and kōdō as the true law.33 The Kōdō Concept in the Early Meiji Period The religious and educational policies of the early Meiji years were directed by Kamei Korekane and Fukuba Bisei of the Tsuwano School of National Learning. The basic documents of these policies, drafted by Hasegawa Akimichi, were the “Edict on the Proclamation of the Great Teaching,” and “Inquiry on the Rise of kōdō.”34 National integration through emperor reverence, as advocated by Hasegawa Akimichi and Ōkuni Takamasa, had a dual basis. From 1871 to 1877, the ministry of education and its Institute of Great Teaching instructed the various religious organizations on emperor reverence and the Three Great Teachings. The system, like the concept of kōdō, had a dual structure. 32 Okita Yukuji, Nippon kindai kyōiku no shisō-shi kenkyū—kokusaika no shisō keifu (Tokyo: Nippon Tosho Center, 1992), p. 69. 33 Kōno, Kokutai kannen, p. 207. 34 Shimazono, “Kokka shintō to kindai nihon,” p. 13; Mure Hitoshi, “Hankō to kōgaku,” in Kōgakukan daigaku shintō kenkyūsho jaanaru, No. 62 (March 2002), p. 7.

state shinto and emperor veneration

71

In 1882, the holding together of the posts of Shinto priest and ‘spiritual guide’ (kyōdō-shoku) was abolished, and this was followed by the abolishment in 1884 of the position of ‘spiritual guides.’ Shrine ( jinja) Shinto was elevated above all other religions as a system of national rites. This policy of separating shrines from other religions reflected the dual structure of the system. The dual structure of kōdō was also reflected in the Imperial Rescript on Education, which was issued in 1890. It extolled ‘the teaching bequeathed by Our Imperial Ancestors’ as ‘the glory of the fundamental character of Our Empire’ and called on all subjects to follow them. Inclusiveness and Totalitarianism of Kōdō during the Pacific War The term kōdō was used widely during the Asia-Pacific War in its inclusive meaning. For example, Tokutomi Sohō, in his book Kōdō nihon no sekaika (Globalization of the Imperial Way of Japan, 1937), wrote that the ‘infinity of kōdō’ embraces ’Sakyamuni, Confucius and Jesus Christ.’35 There were other books with similar titles, such as Kōdō to butsudō (kōdō and the Buddhist Way) and Kōdō to mikkyō (kōdō and Esoteric Buddhism).36 During this period, kōdō was centered on the emperor. Some writers commented that the proper term might be shimmindō (The Way of Subjects), which teaches people how to be loyal to the emperor.37 The people’s aspect in the modern ideology of kokutai influenced the theory of kōdō. This shows the process by which kōdō was transformed into a totalitarian concept of national mobilization by the total war system. In a broad sense, both shimmindō and kōdō were carried over into the ideology of kokutai and emperor veneration. In kōdō, the practice of emperor veneration was emphasized, while the modern ideology of kokutai, by advocating popular grassroots participation in emperor veneration, provided the ideology for the totalitarian national mobilization system. Nagao Ryūichi attributed the people’s readiness to die in war to the religious aspect of National Learning, but we can see that the religious aspect of kokutai was also responsible for it. Tokutomi Sohō, Kōdō nihon no sekaika (Tokyo: Minyūsha, 1937). Teramoto Enga, Kōdō to butsudō (Tokyo: Mokudōsha, 1936); Yamaoka Zuien, Kōdō to mikkyō (Tokyo: Gingo Shintaku-sha, 1943); Akegarasu Haya, Kōdō, shintō, butsudō, shindō (Tokyo: Kōsōsha, 1937). 37 Ōkura Seishin Bunka Kenkyūsho, Saisei itchi to shimmindō (Tokyo: Ōkura Seishin Bunka Kenkyūsho), 1937. 35 36

72

shimazono susumu The Concept of Kōgaku

In order to better understand the influence of kōdō, we must examine the usage of the term kōgaku (Emperor Studies). Hasegawa Akimichi, who joined the Meiji government in 1868 and was involved in educational policy-making, advocated that kōgaku, that is the education of kōdō, should be taught in the same way as Chinese studies. On the other hand, the scholar Yano Harumichi advocated that Japanese education should be centered on National Learning and the revival of old Shinto ( fukko shintō ).38 The revival of old Shinto, as promoted by Yano and others, which emphasized National Learning, conflicted with the schools of Confucian and Chinese Learning. Hasegawa proposed the establishment of an institute of kōgaku that would integrate these schools. His proposal drew the attention of Iwakura Tomomi, one of the leaders of the new government. When he was put in charge of schools in 1868, Hasegawa tried to establish an institute that would center on kōgaku and would offer Chinese and western learning to both samurai and commoners. Later that year, two institutions were established in Kyoto, the kōgaku-sho (Institute of Emperor Studies) and kangaku-sho (Institute of Chinese Studies). However, these institutes were both closed the following year, when the three academies of higher education—the Medical School, the Shōhei School, and the Kaisei School—were united to form the Tokyo University.39 Hasegawa was not the first one to propagate the idea of kōgaku. As early as 1799, the Nisshinkan School of the Aizu han taught kōgaku as part of its curriculum, as did the Chidōkan School of the Tsuruoka han in 1816. The number of han schools in which kōgaku was taught increased rapidly around the time of the Meiji Restoration. According to the survey by Mure Hitoshi, there were forty-two han schools that taught kōgaku by the time the modern school system was promulgated in 1872.40 There was a widespread trend to place importance on kōgaku, in order to realize the educational concept of kokutai, until the modern school system was imported from the west. Many of the functions that were later served by the Imperial Rescript on Education and moral education were first carried out by kōgaku education in the han schools.

38 39 40

Sakamoto, Kokka shintō, chap. 6. Okita, Nippon kindai kyōiku, pp. 71–76. Mure, “Hankō to kōgaku”, pp. 3–5.

state shinto and emperor veneration

73

Predominance of Shinto Elements The ideology of kokutai and the concept of emperor reverence that gained strength toward the end of the Tokugawa period and became influential after the Meiji Restoration, were forged from both the Confucian and National Learning schools of the Tokugawa period. At the end of the Tokugawa period, it became recognized that kōdō was associated with both Confucianism and National Learning. It is difficult to identify this ideology as merely Confucian or Shinto, because it contained elements from both. The ideology of kokutai and kōdō was developed out of Confucian and Shinto sources that influenced each other. It is therefore wrong to conclude that the ideology of kokutai and kōdō belong entirely to Shinto or State Shinto. They contain many Shinto elements, but also some non-Shinto elements. During the Tokugawa and early Meiji periods, they contained Confucian influences, but later western ideologies and modern political concepts were included in them as well. Yet, the Shinto elements remained prominent. The ideology of kokutai and kōdō emphasized reverence of the divine emperor, the link between the emperor and the sun goddess, and state-oriented Shinto rites. In the evolution of Confucianism in the Tokugawa period, kokutai and kōdō represent the ideological shift from practicing the basic virtues of Confucianism to placing emperor reverence and rituals for the founder goddess at the center of the political order and of morality. This means that Japanese Confucianism at that period became more Shinto oriented. On the other hand, in the evolution of National Learning and Shinto ideology in the Tokugawa period, kokutai and kōdō represent a shift of emphasis from a nativist culture and a holistic Shinto lifestyle to a political order centering on the emperor. As Ōkuni Takamasa and the Tsuwano School have shown, there was a clear trend among National Learning scholars to adopt political realism and to incorporate Confucian elements, while maintaining the basic principles of National Learning. The Shinto Characteristic of Emperor Veneration in the Nation State The Shinto emphasis on kokutai and kōdō could be the result of Confucian influence, but it could also be the result of a nation-state building. ‘Religious education’ was connected with kōdō. In the Shinto ideology,

74

shimazono susumu

the unity of rituals and government (saisei itchi) was stressed. As the theory of kōdō advanced, ‘religious education’ was given importance, and Shinto was developed into an ideology of the unity of rituals, religion and government. This ideology combined the Confucian principle of elevating the people through education, with the nationalist principle of achieving national unity through guidance of the people. Yet this ideology continued to be based on the Shinto tradition. After the Meiji Restoration, kokutai and kōdō became associated with political activities based on emperor veneration. Their Shinto aspects strengthened as they turned from literal expressions to political actions and daily practices. Shrine ( jinja) Shinto played an important role in the growth of nationalism. The position of the Ise Shrine, Yasukuni Shrine, Kashihara Shrine and Meiji Shrine was enhanced as worshipping in them became part of the ideology of kokutai and kōdō. The Shinto characteristics of court rituals became more important as the public started to participate in them through the media. In this way, the state ceremonies, like the daijōsai enthronement rite, the emperor’s funeral, and the wedding of the crown prince, came to play important roles.41 For these reasons, it seems that State Shinto was based, to a great extent, on the ideology of kokutai and kōdō. The expansion of that ideology after the Meiji Restoration strengthened the foundations of State Shinto. The Ideology of kokutai in the Early Meiji Period At first, the ideology of kokutai and kōdō was the domain of politicians, scholars and intellectuals, but gradually it spread to the common people through the educational and religious policies of the Meiji government. Over time, as the institutional base of State Shinto was established, this ideology came to exert great influence on the people. How were the goals of the ideology of kokutai and kōdō achieved in the political arena? What changes did it produce in the people’s consciousness and daily lives? What transformations did this ideology undergo? To answer these questions, the formation and development of State Shinto in the Meiji period should be examined.

41

Fujitani Takashi, Tennō no pejento (Tokyo: NHK Press, 1994).

state shinto and emperor veneration

75

According to the writings of the prewar advocates of kokutai, in the period between the Meiji Restoration and the end of the nineteenth century no significant ideological development occurred in that field. Kiyohara Sadao, in his book Kokutairon-shi (History of Theories of kokutai), published by the shrines bureau of the ministry of home affairs in 1921, discussed the ideology of kokutai and the theories of state at the beginning of the Meiji period. He wrote: Western ideologies flourished in Japan from around 1873–74 to the 1880s. In the political sphere, the typical ideology was the French-inspired civil rights theory, followed by British and American liberalism. A small group of scholars advocated the German ideology of sovereignty, but it was little understood by the public at that time. There was hardly any discussion of the centrality of kokutai worthy of mentioning. Only a few books in those years, like Senke Takatomi’s book on the ‘Great Way,’ Satō Moichi’s book on the Meiji constitution, Soeki Tetsujirō’s book on sovereignty, and Miki Hitoshi’s book on the unity of government and religion, related to that topic. Some people thought that kokutai was established by an oracle; some said that the country was created by the emperor’s divine ancestors, and therefore the emperor and the country are sacred; some opposed the French civil-rights ideology; while others maintained that Great Japan was established by the gods and would last forever like the way of the emperor. None of these theories was new.42

Kiyohara discussed the nationalist theories that were inspired by Confucian thought and the place of kokutai in them: In the Confucian community, there was a movement to develop nationalism on the basis of the morality of East Asia. In 1874, Nishimura Shigeki and others established the Tōkyō shūshin gakusha (Tokyo Institute of Morals), which in 1884 was renamed Nihon kōdōkai ( Japan Morals Society), in order to strengthen the movement. In December 1881, Minister of Education Fukuoka Takachika instructed prefectural school inspectors that teachers should be learned and virtuous Confucianists. He told them that moral education should be based on Japan’s morality as well as on Confucianism. In 1881, the emperor’s tutor Motoda Nagazane, on the order of the Meiji Emperor, compiled the ‘Elementary Education Guidelines,’ which were based on Confucianism and western ideas.43

Kiyohara, Kokutairon-shi, p. 136; Naimushō, Kokutairon-shi (Tokyo: Naimushō Jinjakyoku, 1921). The latter book was also written by Kiyohara Sadao, but it does not carry his name. 43 Kiyohara, Kokutairon-shi, pp. 136–137. 42

76

shimazono susumu

In addition to Nishimura Shigeki and Motoda Nagazane, there were several other influential Confucian scholars in those days. But the Confucian tradition, which had exerted a great influence on the ideology of kokutai before the Meiji Restoration, rapidly weakened in the Meiji period. This coincided with the process by which the religious aspect grew stronger in State Shinto. Realization of Kokutai and the Spread of State Shinto Although there was little discussion of the ideology of kokutai and kōdō in the books of the middle and late Meiji period, this ideology was realized in State Shinto of that time, where national integration was pursued by emperor veneration. The process included setting up an extensive emperor-related rite system, the institution of festivals which fostered reverence for the imperial family, the separation of Shinto from Buddhism to enhance the position of Shinto shrines, the establishment of the state shrine system, and the construction of shrines that would promote nationalism and reverence of the imperial family. A nationalist education movement, as shown in the Imperial Rescript on the Great Principles of Education of 1879, and The Imperial Precepts to Soldiers and Sailors of 1882, promoted these ideas. These documents established the system that the ideology of kokutai and kōdō was aimed at and spread the thinking and lifestyle of emperor veneration. The system of venerating the emperor and the founding-goddess did not spread quickly among the public, but was steadily materialized. The ideology of kokutai and emperor veneration was at the center of the efforts to integrate the people and build a modern nation state. The system was solidified in three ways: the development of court rites to worship the gods and the souls of the imperial ancestors since the first Emperor Jimmu; the formation of a national ritual system of emperor and imperial family reverence; and the institution of emperor-reverence education through the Imperial Rescript on Education and the school curriculum. The system that developed was based on emperor reverence with the background of the ideology of kokutai and kōdō, as it had developed at the end of the Tokugawa and the beginning of the Meiji period. The emperor-centered system of symbolism and rituals made the Shinto-

state shinto and emperor veneration

77

oriented philosophies and practices settle into the people’s daily lives. This was enhanced by the model of rituals and festivals common to modern western countries at that time.44 The Dual Structure of Modern Japanese Religions Although various elements existed in the ideology of kokutai and kōdō, the Shinto elements, such as the veneration of the emperor as the conductor of religious rites and worship of the founder goddess, constituted its core. This congregation of religious concepts and practices can be called State Shinto. State Shinto exerted a great deal of influence on people’s lives. From the beginning, it was designed in such a way that it could be compatible with other ‘ways,’ ‘teachings’ and ‘learnings,’ as kōdō and kōgaku were, and would be able to coexist with other religions and ideologies. State Shinto was a religion that was established for the political integration of Japan as a nation state. It functioned in a dual system, with the existing religions and ideologies, and showed a certain level of tolerance as was common in the west at that time.45 Murakami Shigeyoshi claimed that State Shinto ‘reigned over Shinto, Buddhism and Christianity.’46 But this is an exaggerated and incorrect interpretation, which fits only the wartime period. The keystone of State Shinto was laid in the early Meiji period, when it combined the ideology of kokutai with emperor reverence, to form an orthodox norm of religious dimensions for the sake of political integration. Within this framework, other religions and ideologies maintained a certain level of freedom, so that ‘freedom of belief ’ was allowed. This was the dual structure of religion in modern Japan. As the influence of State Shinto grew, and the impact of State-Shinto oriented ideologies and practices on the grassroots level expanded, it assumed a more totalitarian and exclusive nature.47 In the 1930s it was often argued that non-State Shinto ideologies and practices, as well as modern political and social systems, had to be curtailed and excluded, 44 45 46 47

Fujitani, Tennō no pejento. Shimazono, “Kokka shintō to kindai nihon.” Murakami, Kokka shintō, p. iii. Shimazono, “Kokka shintō to meshianizumu.”

78

shimazono susumu

in order to overcome the alleged national crisis. After the Manchurian Incident of 1931, and particularly after the launch of the movement to clarify the kokutai in 1935, the exclusive nature of State Shinto was enhanced. At this point, State Shinto had become the orthodox ideology of a totalitarian state.

ISE JINGŪ AND MODERN EMPERORSHIP Rosemarie Bernard Introduction Jingū (the Grand Shrines of Ise), the sanctuary dedicated to the imperial deity Amaterasu Ōmikami, is one of Japan’s most sacred religious sites.1 During the Tokugawa period, mass pilgrimages (okage mairi ) brought millions of worshippers to Ise on foot, via the Tōkaidō. Ise Jingū’s importance in Japanese society derives not only from its place in popular religion, but also from ceremonial history associated with emperorship. In the wake of the Meiji Restoration, as the modern state made visible the new emperor, the Inner Shrine (Naikū) in Ise was placed at the pinnacle of a state-sponsored Shinto hierarchy. No other shrine was better suited for this prominent position: the Naikū possesses a direct link to emperorship by serving as the repository for the sacred mirror ( yata no kagami), the most valued item among the three imperial regalia. Made to serve the interests of the modern state, Jingū became a key symbol to unite Japan and its empire in the ceremonial celebration of the emperor’s pre-eminence and the timelessness of the nation. After the Meiji Restoration, the symbolic relationship between state authority and emperorship was integrated by means of ceremonies in the new capital of Tokyo, by imperial pilgrimage within Japan, and at Ise where a crafted rhetoric of eternity blurred the break between ancient times and modernity. In 1869 the Meiji Emperor made a pilgrimage to the Ise shrines, the first visit in nearly twelve centuries by a reigning monarch. This new ceremony displayed the emperor as a national symbol and assigned a modern form to the imperial-Ise relationship. After the war, the allied occupation severed the link between shrines and the state. To this end it targeted State Shinto (kokka shintō), which it

Research for this paper was conducted between 1990 and 2007. Some information and arguments appeared previously in my doctoral dissertation The Image World of Jingū: Media Representation and the Performance of Rites of Renewal at the Grand Shrines of Ise, 1869–1993 (Harvard University, 2000). 1

80

rosemarie bernard

distinguished from popular or Shrine Shinto ( jinja shintō), by swiftly drafting and promulgating a Shinto Directive and a new constitution.2 These measures effectively terminated the financial, political and ideological dimensions of the imperial-state relationship. In Ise as well, postwar constitutional law financially severed the state-shrine relationship, yet it had only limited bearing upon ceremonial symbolism and the imperial-shrine connection. This was in accordance with the occupation’s benevolent treatment of the emperor, and with the spirit of postwar laws guaranteeing freedom of religion. Thus, ironically, postwar law, as drafted by the American officials under General MacArthur, granted imperial ritual a legitimate afterlife under postwar democracy by guaranteeing the right of the newly independent religious body of Jingū Shichō (Administration of the Grand Shrines of Ise) to maintain its ceremonial system, and by allowing the modernized ceremonial customs of the imperial house at the palace, at Ise, and at other shrines and mausolea, to be retained as private religious practices of the emperor. As a result, the shrines at Ise have remained key ceremonial arenas for Japanese emperorship, albeit with a new status, legally independent from the state and the imperial institution. A rich icon of historical continuity and of the modernization of ritual tradition, Jingū remains of central importance to the present-day imperial institution. After the Meiji Restoration, the shrines at Ise were used to sacralize the increasingly political role of emperorship. Since 1945, they have sustained and adapted the symbolic apparatus of imperial pre-eminence to the age of democracy and secularism. The Imperial Pilgrimage of 1869 In order to unify the new modern nation, the Meiji government drew upon existing imperial symbolism and ritual to create new ceremonial practices. At Ise, modern-style political and ritual culture required that the link be made visible—or at least understood if invisible in the case of esoteric rites—between the imperial body of the Meiji emperor, the ’divine body’ (shintai) that is the sacred mirror in Jingū’s keeping,

For detailed accounts in English, see William Woodard, The Allied Occupation of Japan 1945–1952 and Japanese Religions (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1972); also Kyoko Inoue, MacArthur’s Japanese Constitution: A Linguistic and Cultural Study of Its Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 2

ise jing~ and modern emperorship

81

and the imperial ancestral deity Amaterasu Ōmikami. Early on in the Meiji period, efforts were made to raise popular consciousness of Ise as a center of national political significance, beyond its religious and cultural attractions as propagated by the proselytizing and fundraising of priests in the Tokugawa period. This was first achieved by an imperial pilgrimage to the Ise shrines in 1869. Beginning on the 12th day of the third month of the second year of Meiji (a date which corresponds to 28 February 1869 according to the Gregorian calendar), the Meiji Emperor made the first of four formal pilgrimages to Jingū’s Outer (Gekū) and Inner (Naikū) Shrines. This event was an extraordinary development, for no emperor had made a pilgrimage to Ise before, save for perhaps Empress Jitō in 692, as recorded in the Nihonshoki.3 Labeled by contemporary sources as goshin’etsu no gi (imperial audience), jingū goshimpai (imperial worship in Jingū), or Ise taibyō gosampai (imperial pilgrimage to the great mausoleum of Ise), the imperial pilgrimage to the shrines in Ise was conceived as a rite of worship by the emperor before the primary symbol of the deity Amaterasu Ōmikami enshrined in the ‘great imperial ancestral mausoleum’ (taibyō). In keeping with early Meiji social values, the pilgrimage evoked the symbolism of ancestor worship, in support of the new ideal ‘family state’ whose ancestral pedigree led back to the deity Amaterasu Ōmikami. Coming from his Kyoto palace, after a stopover in Seki—one of the two entry points on the pilgrimage routes to Jingū—the emperor was transported in a carriage (ohaguruma) until he reached the Miyagawa River some 50 kilometers away. There, in the ancient fashion of the imperial princesses (saiō) who presided at the shrines, he was purified and placed in a palanquin (sōkaren). Riding inside the palanquin, he was carried until he had entered the grounds of Jingū—as a sign of his lofty status, for all others were required to walk within shrine precincts as a sign of humility. Although the palanquin was highly visible at the center of a long cortège, the emperor himself, dressed in special ritual garb, remained invisible to the masses. Before entering the shrines he underwent ritual purification, after which he proceeded under a canopy toward the inner shrine grounds. There he deposited a sacred branch Nihongi (tr. W.G. Aston. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972), vol. II, p. 406. Yatsuka Kiyotsura notes that on at least nine occasions before Meiji, emperors performed worship from afar ( yōhai) in the direction of Ise or expressed the desire to visit it, as reflected in poetry. Yatsuka Kiyotsura, Kōshitsu to jingū (Ise: Jingū Shichō, 1957), pp. 52–60. 3

82

rosemarie bernard

offering (tamagushi) on a table set before the enshrined deity, to whom he then paid formal respects.4 Ironic and semantically redundant (because it brought together in close proximity the two parallel embodiments of emperorship and its historical continuity—the mirror and the body of the emperor), this rite of imperial pilgrimage to the Ise Shrines, imagined in the wake of the Meiji Restoration and still performed today, reflects a modern concern with the spatiality and materiality of imperial symbolism. The pilgrimage combined a public performance of imperial authority to and from sacred terrain, together with a hidden rite in the inner sanctum, making it one of the first major Meiji events in the sacralization of imperial power and the politicization of the sacred. Importantly, at the beginning of the period of State Shinto, the imperial pilgrimage initiated the state’s administrative control of the shrines; the shrines’ historical relationship to the imperial institution was reaffirmed by means of the spectacle, and came to define the modern hierarchy of spatial access to shrine grounds. In this manner, the sacred mirror worshiped at Ise’s Inner Shrine came to be perceived not only as a holy object venerated at a distance from court, but as one with deep political ramifications. Ise and Shinto Shrines after the Meiji Restoration In 1869 the Jingikan (Department of Divinity)—first established in the Nara period to oversee Shinto affairs and later dismantled in the late fifteenth century—was re-established and surpassed in authority the Dajōkan (Council of State). Beginning in 1869, there began a process for the consolidation of rituals performed in shrines all across Japan. Ceremonies performed at court were defined as rites of the state, as were those in other Shinto shrines, foremost among which was the Inner Shrine at Ise, ranked as the premier shrine in the nation.

4 Main sources in the secondary literature include Jingū Shichō, ed., Jingū yōkō (Osaka: Tōhō Shuppan, 1928), pp. 449–549; Sakamoto Kōtarō, Jingū saishi gaisetsu (Ise: Jingū Bunko, 1965), pp. 382–392; Nishikawa Masatami ( Jundo), Kindai no jingū (Ise: Jingū Bunko, 1988), pp. 52–78; Nakanishi Masayuki, Eisei e no inori: kingendai no shikinen sengū (Tokyo: Shinto Bunkakai, 1989); Yoshikawa Tatsumi, “Meiji tennō no Ise gyōkō: Meiji ninen no gosampai shidai o chūshin to shite,” Meiji seitoku kinen gakkai kiyō, 21 (1997), pp. 1–35; Fujii Sadafumi, “Meiji ishin to jingū,” in Jingū Shichō, ed., Meiji ishin hyakunenshi (Ise: Jingū Bunko, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 1–23.

ise jing~ and modern emperorship

83

During this period other regulations were implemented to allow for centralized state control of shrines and temple affairs, including property and the constitution of the priesthood. On 14 May 1871, for the purpose of conducting rites of the state, the Jingikan reorganized Shinto shrines in a hierarchical ranking under Jingū (the new unified institution of the Naikû, Gekû, and their auxiliary sanctuaries) at its pinnacle.5 In this scheme, Jingū’s special status and its centrality to the national shrine system, as the main institution for the worship of the deity Amaterasu Ōmikami, were further enhanced by the creation of designated locations for worship toward Jingū ( jingū yōhaisho) at shrines all across the country, beginning in 1871.6 Furthermore, in order to create an integrated Shinto priesthood, the Jingikan declared that hereditary positions were to be abolished in favor of a new system for the centralized selection of priests.7 The Meiji concept of Shinto as a nationally homogenous ritual practice was developed in legislation. The unprecedented intensity of this process was an essential part of the creation of the modern state and nation, carried out by the administrative hand of the bureaucracy.8 Behind this was a new spirit of modernity that accentuated the historical authenticity and continuity of ritual, especially as related to the imperial institution. Having undergone significant cumulative historical change, ritual was revised by the legal intervention of the bureaucracy for the sake of the performance of state ceremonial (kokka no sōshi ). Ritual was made to replicate ‘original’ ancient forms, while nonetheless exemplifying the spirit of rationality (gōri-shugi), progress (shimpo-shugi) and enlightenment (keimō)—characteristic of the modern age. Jingū’s ceremonial traditions were systematized, beginning with the jingū kaisei

5 Nishida Hiroyoshi, “Meiji igo jinja hōseishi no ichidanmen,” in Meiji ishin shintō hyakunenshi (Tokyo: Shinto Bunkakai, 1968), volume 4, pp. 59–144. 6 Okada Yoneo, “Daijingū sūkei no chihōteki hatten.” In Jingū Shichō, ed., Jingū meiji hyakunenshi (Ise: Jingū Bunko, 1987), volume 1, pp. 617–652. 7 Dajōkan proclamation No. 234 on 14 May 1871. On this and related issues, see Sakamoto Ken’ichi, Meiji shintō-shi no kenkyū (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 1983). 8 Sakamoto Ken’ichi, ed., Meiji ikō jinja hōrei shiryō (Tokyo: Jinja Honchō, 1968); Sakamoto Ken’ichi, Meiji shintō-shi no kenkyū; Takeda Hideaki, Ishinki tennō saishi no kenkyū (Tokyo: Taimeidō, 1996); John Breen, “The Imperial Oath of April 1868: Ritual, Politics and Power in the Restoration,” Monumenta Nipponica vol. 51, No. 4 (Winter 1996), pp. 407–429.

84

rosemarie bernard

(Ise Shrine reforms) of 1871 and followed by further ceremonial regulations as set by the jingū meiji saishiki ( Jingū Meiji Ritual) in 1875.9 During the Meiji period, many rites were reinstituted or created by the state for nation-wide performance, including the practice of periodic rites of purification (ōharae) in the ancient fashion. Cosmological and practical havoc was wreaked in 1872, when the Chinese lunar calendar was abandoned in favor of the Gregorian solar calendar, into which had to be translated the annual rhythms of Shinto ritual performances. The same year, a national holiday was declared on the anniversary of the accession of the first (mythical) Japanese emperor Jimmu, which came to be known as kigensetsu. Furthermore, the annual ritual of tenchōsai was created to honor the birthday of the reigning emperor. Dates of all Shinto rituals performed in Japan, from the inner sanctum of the imperial palace and Jingū to outlying shrines, were all set under the authority of the Kyōbushō (Ministry of Religion), which had replaced the Jingishō in 1872. In this fashion, political symbolism was merged with the nationally integrated annual rhythms of the ritual cycle.10 By the process of bureaucratic management and legislation, Shinto was fashioned as the performative ethic of the state, or ‘State Shinto.’11 Links between political office and responsibilities in the ritual domain were underlined on 26 February 1883 by a decree from the Ministry of Home Affairs, to the effect that local government officials should be in attendance at the kinensai (Offering of Prayers for a Plentiful Harvest) and niinamesai (First Fruits Festival) performed annually in shrines of higher rank across the country, first and foremost at the palace and at Ise. The implementation of these laws concerning rituals was effective in symbolically uniting the nation around the emperor as sovereign and ceremonial leader of agricultural ritual.12

Nakanishi Masayuki, Jingū saishi no kenkyū (Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai, 2007), pp. 593–661. 10 Sakamoto Ken’ichi, Meiji shintō-shi no kenkyū. 11 B.H. Chamberlain, The Invention of a New Religion (London: Watts and Co., 1912); T. Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Sakamoto Ken’ichi, Meiji shintō-shi no kenkyū; Ashizu Uzuhiko, Kokka shintō to wa nan datta no ka (Tokyo: Jinja Shimpōsha, 1987); Sakamoto Koremaru, Kokka shintō keisei katei no kenkyū (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994). 12 Rice agriculture and symbolism in ancient and modern Japan are important in relation to the modernization of Shinto and emperorship. For a historical and anthropological commentary on the culture of rice in Japan, see Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self: Japanese Identities through Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 9

ise jing~ and modern emperorship

85

As Jingū came into the limelight of the reimperialized social and political world of the 1870s, enthusiasm ruled among the leadership in Ise for further performances that would emphasize the centrality of Jingū and its sacred mirror to the emperor and to the nation. Early in the Meiji period, in keeping with the notion of the symbolic inseparability of the mirror and the emperor, a revolutionary idea was put forth by the Jingū shōgūji (second to the Head Priest), Urata Nagatami (Chōmin), the so-called Jingū godōzaron ( Jingū Relocation Argument). For the sake of physical proximity to the emperor, by whose side they should remain as symbolic sources of his legitimacy, the regalia mirror and sword, as well as the Ise and Atsuta shrines that housed them, respectively, were to be relocated to the inner grounds of the imperial palace in Tokyo despite ancient roots in their respective regions.13 Ultimately unsuccessful, this radical plan reflected the spirit of an age in which tradition provided new terrain for grand schemes of ‘rational’ experimentation. Changes implemented in Jingū by the Meiji state bureaucracy intensified over time. On 27 December 1887, the periodic reconstruction of the sanctuaries in Jingū was declared a state program by the promulgation of an imperial order for the creation of the Office for the Reconstruction of Jingū (zōjingū shichō).14 On 26 January 1914, Jingū ritual was further systematized by the official proclamation of a Law on Jingū Ritual ( jingū saishirei). This officially categorized the shikinen sengū (the periodic reconstruction of the main and auxiliary shrines in Ise once in every twenty years) as a ‘great rite’ (taisai), along with other annual ceremonies considered to be of great importance to the nation.15 As a complement to the public display of state power in the context of the shikinen sengū, the elaboration of secrecy was an essential component of the sacralization of the Ise shrines as politically valuable sites for imperial ritual. The first measure to be taken was the replacement of the inner receptacle for the sacred mirror (mihishiro), historically made of wood, by a container made of gold (ōgon no mihishiro). This notion had predated the Meiji period, and originated in the mid-sixteenth

13 Miki Shōtarō, “Urata Nagatami o chūshin to suru jingū shikan no katsudō” in Meiji ishin shintō hyakunen-shi (Tokyo: Shintō Bunkakai, 1971), vol. 5, pp. 215–233; Nishikawa Masatami ( Jundo), Kindai no jingū. 14 Sakamoto Ken’ichi, Meiji ikō jinja kankei hōrei shiryō, p. 17. 15 Nakanishi Masayuki, Jingū shikinen sengū no rekishi to saigi (Tokyo: Taimeidō, 1995), p. 139.

86

rosemarie bernard

century following the reinstitution of regular sengū rites after more than a century of civil war. However, the golden container was not produced until 1709, only to be set aside for future use. In 1882, the preparation of the golden container was ordered for the next shikinen sengū, thus making the ceremonies of 1889 the first occasion for the transfer of the Inner Shrine’s sacred mirror in a series of containers, the innermost of which was encapsulated in gold. Upon the completion of yet another, unexpected, full reconstruction of the Inner Shrine in the wake of a fire in 1900, the golden container for the sacred mirror was forever sealed at the imperial will by an envoy in 1901, thus doing away with the risk that the mirror might be revealed to high priests in the process of its regular transfer to a series of new wooden containers every twenty years for the shikinen sengū.16 By placing the mirror out of sight forever, the imperial envoy, acting on behalf of the state and as the hand of the emperor, reclaimed the mirror as a forbidden, awe-inspiring object whose sacredness had to be protected even from Jingū ritualists. State Sponsorship of the Shikinen Sengū Later Meiji years witnessed irregular state support of Shinto, yet this was not the case for the shrines in Ise, especially the Naikû, which was accorded the privileged status of highest ranking Shinto shrine as the ‘great mausoleum’ (taibyō) for the worship of Amaterasu Ōmikami. Unlike other Shinto shrines, Jingū was not the object of state regulations that aimed to limit the government’s financial support. Instead the Ise shrines were recipients of increasing financial and administrative support from the government from 1869 until 1945, in spite of the so-called ‘slump of the Middle Meiji,’ which afflicted most Shinto shrines in the 1880s and 1890s,17 and the worldwide depression of the 1930s. Jingū was no longer a mere ‘imperial shrine’ in the sense evoked by Naikū’s official name ‘the great imperial shrine’ (kōtaijingū), following precedent as early as the seventh century. A performative center for rituals structured by the prerogative of the court since ancient times, the Naikū in particular was now also a site for performances of state

Nakanishi Masayuki, Ise no sengū (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai 1993), p. 212. This term is Helen Hardacre’s in her Shinto and the State, 1868–1988 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 16 17

ise jing~ and modern emperorship

87

power centered upon icons of emperorship. In the name of the emperor, Jingū’s affairs—especially its vicennial reconstruction and ceremonies, the shikinen sengū—were now dictated by the state bureaucracy, under whose yoke they would remain until 1945. The shikinen sengū has been performed since the late seventh century at intervals of twenty years. In the ritual process, the shrine that houses the mirror is renewed along with dozens of other structures. Historical continuity is celebrated in the worship of Amaterasu Ōmikami, the ancestral deity of the imperial house. Meanwhile, the emperor remains in the palace, bowing in the direction of Ise during the transfer of the mirror to the new sanctuary grounds. Since its inception, presumably in 690, it was funded by the government (regional, shogunal or the modern state until 1945). For most of history, the shikinen sengū has been an ostentatious exercise in capital accumulation, in exploitation of timber, and in ceremonial splendor. The government was legitimized by its support of the sengū, which celebrated the pre-eminence of the emperor as a symbol for the nation, yet not—at least in pre-modern Ise—as the embodiment of state authority. From 1871 until 1945, financial support of the shikinen sengū was made systematically possible by the government.18 Taking place immediately after the Meiji Restoration, the 55th sengū of 1869 was performed according to pre-Meiji precedent under the direction of the imperial representative, yet also under the supervision of the Jingikan.19 Beginning in 1871, funds were provided by the Ministry of Finance. In the early 1880s, funding was made available from the government via the Office of Shrine and Temple Affairs (shaji-kyoku). From 1888 funds were obtained from the Ministry of Home Affairs’ Office for the Reconstruction of Jingū, created in 1887, via the prefectural authorit y.20 Thus, during the era of State Shinto, expenses for the vicennial reconstruction of the shrines—300,000 yen in 1889; 1,500,000 yen in 1909; and nearly 10,000,000 yen in 1929—as well as funds for annual and periodic imperial offerings of silk, and for the reproduction of the sacred treasures and apparel, were all borne by the state.21 18 Okada Hiroshi, “Jingū no zaisei” in Jingū Shichō ed., Jingū meiji hyakunen-shi (Ise: Jingū Bunko, 1988), vol. 2, pp. 321–332. It is important to note that, before Meiji, the government (whether of the daimyō or the shoguns) supported the shrines as well. 19 Kojima Shōsaku, Ise jingū no kenkyū (Tokyo: Yoshikawa, 1985), p. 18. 20 Okada Hiroshi, “Jingū no zaisei.” 21 For 1889 data, see Zenkoku Shinshokukai Kaihō Kisha, “Jingū shikinen sengū o kotobuki tatematsuru,” Zenkoku shinshokukai kaihō 132 (20 October 1909), p. 3. For 1909

88

rosemarie bernard

For the fifty-seventh shikinen sengū, performed in 1909, the government made a special grant to Jingū, supplemented by shrine revenues. In 1915, to compensate for the economic impact of the First World War, government subsidies were even increased for Jingū. In 1929, the fifty-eighth sengū was performed on a grand scale as a state event, with subsidies distributed to Jingū via the ministry of home affairs in the amount of 9,831,652 yen, equivalent to a remarkable 0.5 percent of the national budget that year.22 In the 1940s, state subsidies to Jingū were not reduced despite funding shortfalls in government and economic duress in the country at large. Given Jingū’s importance as the spiritual center for the nation, extra funds were allotted by the state for the celebration in Jingū of the 2,600th anniversary of the establishment of the imperial dynasty in 1940, as well as for the extraordinary emergency kariden sengū (temporary removals in the case of damages caused by typhoons or fires) performances of 1940 in the Outer Shrine and of 1942 in the Inner Shrine.23 State funds allotted to Jingū for the fiscal year of 1943 for the shrines’ other annual expenditures, in addition to sengū subsidies, totaled just under 2.3 million yen.24 However, throughout this period, state funding of Jingū was complemented by private donations made by members of worshippers’ organizations. According to Sakurai Katsunoshin, only seven to ten percent of Jingū’s total revenue came from state funds; according to SCAP records, for 1944 this figure was eight percent. The remaining 92 percent came from private sources, primarily as offerings, fees for the performance of sacred dances, or proceeds from the sale of talismans.25 These figures indicate that in spite of state intervention in shrine affairs for the funding, orchestration and performance of the shikinen sengū, Jingū remained an institution funded primarily by the people during the period of State Shinto. The political economy of the shikinen sengū, from the Meiji Restoration to 1945, was an essential part of the gradual transformation of Jingū data: Zenkoku Shinshokukai Kaihō, “Gozōei no shingū,” Zenkoku shinshokukai kaihō 132 (20 October 1909), p. 49. For 1929 data: Zōjingū Shichō, ed., “Jingū shikinen zōei yōran,” Jinja kyōkai zasshi 28 (1 November 1929), p. 11. 22 “Ise jingū shikinen sengū no genjō”, Chūnichi shimbun, September 19, 1993. 23 Okada Hiroshi, “Jingū no zaisei.” 24 Jinja Honchō, Jingiin shūsen shimatsu: jinja no kokka kanri bunri shiryō (Tokyo: Jinja Honchō, 1964), p. 99. 25 Sakurai Katsunoshin, “The Grand Shrines of Ise since 1945”, in Proceedings of the Conference of Shinto since 1945 (Claremont, CA: Blaisdell Institute, 1965), p. 17. Civil Information and Education Section, 27 March 1946 (SCAP records, file SJ/G27Is/7, National Archives II, Maryland).

ise jing~ and modern emperorship

89

into an imperial shrine for the modern state by means of ceremonial programs of nation-making. This was underlined by pilgrimages to the shrines by the Meiji, Taishō and Shōwa emperors, the modern symbolic trappings of which infused an increasingly military atmosphere in the shrines. The more Jingū became a performative site for the confluence of imperial authority and state spectacle, the more sacred did the authority of both emperor and state become, according to the reigning nationalist imagination. In this period ceremonies in Jingū were carried out by means of state- and emperor-centric symbolism that was made more visible and more public, such as military guard presence at the shikinen sengū. Conversely, a thicker aura of secrecy was woven around the shrines’ sacred rites in the inner sanctum. Such a combination of publicness and secrecy had the effect of channeling popular attention toward Jingū and emperorship, while reinforcing a sense of awe before their sacrality. Yet the social and political effectiveness of shikinen sengū between 1889 and 1929 was equally predicated on the institutionalization of nationwide participation by ordinary people through didactic initiatives in schools and popular festivities. In this way, the shikinen sengū and the symbolic intervention of the emperor in Jingū affairs were ritual occasions for the fashioning of the ‘nation’ in a dual sense: as both state apparatus and as the people (kokumin), united in the project of the polity’s symbolic integration. The effectiveness of the shikinen sengū in the construction of the modern nation-state may be attributed to a Shinto symbology of power. Certainly, the accretion of explicit symbolism of the state in Jingū between 1869 and 1929, such as police presence,26 or the direct involvement of the emperor or his envoys, in conjunction with the restructuring and control of sacred space, no doubt made a deep impression on audiences and those with restricted access to the shrines. However, in addition to the awe inspired by such performances of power, and beyond the political economy of Jingū ritual (state subsidies, sales of Jingū talismans and amulets), the public relations measures taken by 26 The practice of placing guards of honor (gijōhei) along the path of ceremonial processions at the Inner and Outer Shrines began with the establishment of modernized ritual practices as set by the Jingū Meiji Saishiki in 1875 (see Jingū Shichō, ed., Jingū meiji saishiki (Ise: Jingū Shichō, 1875), vols. 1–19. For detailed photographic representations of the gijōhei at the 1929 periodic ceremonial transfer (sengyo) at the Outer Shrine, see Jingū Shichō, ed., Shōwa yonen jingū shikinen sengū shashinchō (Ise: Jingū Shichō, 1930).

90

rosemarie bernard

the state administration and the modernized priesthood, to enlist the participation of the people in the shikinen sengū as a national event, was effective in uniting the population around a key imperial symbol. The national significance of the Ise shrines and their cyclical reconstruction was outlined in detail in a pamphlet widely distributed in schools and government offices a few months before the ritual transfers of 1929.27 Furthermore, school children and local organizations all across the country were taught a shikinen sengū theme song.28 October 2nd, the day of the ritual transfer of the deity to the new sanctuary at the Inner Shrine, was even declared a national holiday.29 Jingū, State Shinto, and the Nation at War Between the late 1930s and 1945, nationalism found expression in increased shrine pilgrimage to Ise. Pilgrimage reached its peak in 1940, the year of the 2,600th anniversary of the foundation of imperial rule in Japan, and of the establishment of the Axis alliance, when 7,982,533 pilgrims visited Jingū.30 In 1944 near-record numbers of 7,931,570 individual pilgrimages were again recorded despite dangers posed by allied bombing. A significant percentage of all pilgrims to Jingū from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s were schoolchildren who came as part of organized school pilgrimages, begun by order of the Ministry of Education in September 1932.31 The association between Jingū and patriotism was further reinforced by the newspaper publication of images of imperial pilgrimages. Since the Meiji Emperor’s initial gyōkō (formal pilgrimage) to Jingū on 12 March 1869, several imperial pilgrimages had taken place, including an official pronouncement to Amaterasu Ōmikami by the Meiji Jingū Shichō, Sengū yōkai (Ise: Jingū Shichō, 1929). Ministry of Education regulation 323 on 4 September 1929. See Jingū Shichō, ed., Jingū kōhō 60 (9 September 1929), p. 79; Aoki Nobuyoshi, “Jingū hōjō shōka no seitei ni yorite,” Jinja kyōkai zasshi 11 (1 November 1929), pp. 63–67; Mase Sadao, “Jingū hōshō shōka,” in Jingū Shichō, ed., Jingū meiji hyakunen-shi (Ise: Jingū Bunko, 1988), vol. 2, pp. 713–738. 29 This was mandated by imperial order (chokurei). See Jingū Shichō, ed., “Chokurei, kokuji,” in Jingū kōhō 60 (19 September 1929), pp. 79–81. 30 All data is from shrine records, Public Relations Section, Jingū Shichō. 31 In 1934, 28 percent of the total number of pilgrims to Jingū were school children, and in 1942 the percentage was 25.3. See Sakamoto Ken’ichi 1968, Meiji shintō-shi no kenkyū, p. 31; Suzuki Yoshikazu, “Jingū to kokumin hōsan,” in Shintō Bunkakai, ed., Meiji ishin shintō hyakunen-shi (Tokyo: Shintō Bunkakai, 1966), vol. 1, pp. 466–510. 27 28

ise jing~ and modern emperorship

91

Emperor in 1905 of Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War. The Taishō Emperor performed the goshin’etsu no gi in 1915 following his enthronement. The Shōwa Emperor’s formal pilgrimage to Jingū in 1928 was an unprecedented dramatic performance of state power by the display of military authority. When the emperor arrived in Ise at Ujiyamada Station, he was greeted by a huge chrysanthemum gate constructed specially for the occasion, which was studded with flowers. Moreover, the cavalry that led the imperial procession into the shrines did not dismount, even as it passed through the sacred gates in its progress toward the inner shrine grounds. This spectacle of combined imperial and military presence at the shrines, manifested within the most sacred grounds of all Japan, was a powerful admixture that underlined the political importance of ritual activity at the shrines.32 On 12 December 1941, the Shōwa Emperor performed a pilgrimage, five days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Made by the tennō as ceremonial head of the Japanese nation, the purpose of the pilgrimage was to pray to Amaterasu Ōmikami for ‘peace in the world.’ The entire first page of the Asahi shimbun’s 14 December 1941 edition was devoted to it, and included a large photograph showing the emperor, dressed in formal decorated garb, descending the stairs from the inner sanctum of Naikū. In this way, Jingū was reaffirmed as the spiritual center of the nation at war, by the emperor who performed the ideal of paying respects to his apical ancestor, the great deity Amaterasu Ōmikami, in the most sacred shrine. In June 1942, new local military headquarters were built in Ise, following a merger with the shrine security personnel. In the winter of early 1943, security reinforcements were made in four areas in the Inner Shrine: at the Uji Bridge that leads into shrine grounds, along the pilgrimage path, at the entrance to the inner sanctum, and behind the latter. By April 1945, there were 700 state troops in Ise, of which 120 were assigned to Jingū shrine security.33 On 23 November 1944, an air raid was announced on the day of the annual niinamesai (First Fruits Festival). Twenty-five soldiers were placed on duty in Jingū. However, as the ritual process had already started, its full course took place nonetheless, in keeping with a tradition of

Jingū Shichō, Gotairei shashinshū (Ise: Jingū Shichō, 1989). Sugitani Fusao, “Daitōa sensō senchū sengo no jingū,” in Jingū Shichō, ed., Jingū meiji hyakunen-shi (Ise: Jingū Bunko, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 653–830. 32 33

92

rosemarie bernard

duly performing rituals regardless of storms or calamities.34 To protect the symbols of the deities enshrined at the Inner and Outer Shrines, underground fortified chambers—deity storehouses—were constructed in secret locations in adjoining forested areas. Although completed in 1939, they were allegedly first used for the temporary safekeeping of the sacred mirror and other deity-symbols in 1944, when allied aerial attacks intensified over the Jingū area35—a topic which present-day Jingū priests deny out of discomfort at the revelation of institutional secrets, especially concerning the sacred mirror that may have been moved without direct imperial approbation at a moment of crisis in the last stages of the war. As the war progressed, the state of affairs in Jingū, as in the rest of the country, became increasingly difficult. Restrictions on travel by train by civilians reduced the number of pilgrims. Nonetheless, on New Year’s Day 1945, 28,600 pilgrims visited Naikū, while 21,836 were recorded in Gekū. On several occasions, beginning in January 1945, American reconnaissance flights were made over the shrines. On 14 January 1945, Gekū was bombarded, and there was some damage by fire of several marginal structures within shrines grounds.36 Jingū was vulnerable to an attack by American bomber planes, for it housed the sacred regalia mirror; moreover, its wooden architecture itself placed it at risk. On 31 July 1945 cabinet ministers and the emperor discussed the urgent question of what to do about the regalia—Ise’s mirror and Atsuta’s sword—in the latter stages of the war. A secret destination in the Japanese Alps was discussed, but before a decision could be reached the war ended.37 On the evening of 28 July 1945 several shrines in Ise were bombed. Gekū’s auxiliary sanctuaries were damaged, and two priests died.38 Thus Naikū survived the war unscathed, while Gekū suffered some damage. This was not the case, however, for other major shrines in Japan. Nationwide, 1,457 Shinto shrines were destroyed or sustained damage by aerial bombings and related fires.39 Most notable among the shrines whose main structures were destroyed are the Meiji Jingū Ibid., p. 667. “Kūshū no toki, Ise no goshintai wa chika kyūden e”, Chūnichi shimbun, 6 September 1953. 36 Sugitani Fusao, “Daitōa sensō senchū sengo no jingū,” p. 670. 37 Okada Yoneo, Ise, atsuta ryōjingū no jingi goji ni tsuite kinjō heika-ge goshinnen. Typescript, Jinja Honchō Shiryōshitsu, 1957. 38 Sugitani Fusao, “Daitōa sensō senchū sengo no jingū,” p. 690. 39 Jinja Honchō, Jinja honchō jūnenshi (Tokyo: Jinja Honchō, 1958), pp. 31–2. 34 35

ise jing~ and modern emperorship

93

in Tokyo and Atsuta Jingū in Nagoya. The latter was bombed on the night of 17 July 1945, only hours after the transfer of the sacred sword to an underground bunker within shrine precincts.40 Ise Jingū and Emperorship under Postwar Law In the aftermath of the war, the legal and symbolic connections between Shinto institutions and the state were severed on 3 December 1945 by the Shinto Directive (shintō shirei). This directive was conceived by the allied occupation authorities for undoing the cult of the emperor, which was identified as the driving force behind Japanese militarism. Its impact was seen in all Shinto institutions, especially so in Jingū. The eventual constitutional fate of the emperor and of imperial ritual and pilgrimage to Shinto shrines had repercussions in Ise. With the promulgation of the new constitution and of the new Imperial House Law (kōshitsu tempan) in 1946, the emperor was redefined as a symbolic figurehead, unlike his definition according to the Meiji Constitution as ‘sacred and inviolable.’ Public aspects of religious Shinto ceremonies that linked the emperor with the state were terminated both at the financial and the symbolic levels. The redefinition of imperial ritual (kōshitsu saishi) as the private worship of the emperor, rather than as public ceremony or state affair, was achieved by the abolition of the regulations on imperial ritual established in 1908. The reconfiguration of laws regarding imperial household finances, as outlined in the Imperial Economy Law (kōshitsu keizaihō, promulgated in 1947), has limited imperial household spending of funds allotted for private use to internal court matters, and not for such external uses such as funding ritual performances in other, now private, institutions like Jingū.41 As with other matters of significance to the emperor, the end of hostilities and apologies for losing the war were pronounced ceremonially to the deities in Jingū. This was first carried out by priests on 17 August 1945, and again by the emperor on the occasion of a formal pilgrimage to the shrines on November 12th that same year.42 In contrast to the Meiji-period and wartime pilgrimages that had been performed

Atsuta Jingū Kyūchō, Atsuta jingū shōwa zōeishi (Nagoya: Atsuta Jingū, 1966). Gendai Hōsei Shiryō Hensankai, ed., Sengo senryō-ka hōreishū (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai 1986 [1984]), pp. 16–20. 42 Sugitani Fusao, “Daitōa sensō senchū sengo no jingū,” pp. 699–712. 40

41

94

rosemarie bernard

with great fanfare as state ceremonies, this pilgrimage was conducted under the gaze of the allied occupation, with modesty, sobriety and an economy of hierarchical symbolism. No longer preceded by cavalries or transported by carriage or limousine, this time the emperor walked toward the inner sanctum grounds dressed in a humble monochrome suit in lieu of the elegant and elaborate official garb he wore until 1945. Moreover, unlike in the modern past, the emperor and his chamberlains in assistance did not bear the two court regalia—the sword and the jewels—in keeping with occupation-period policies that curtailed the performance of imperial ritual with politically potent symbols that harkened to military or ‘mythological’ pasts.43 Since 1945, the emperor’s performance of ‘matters of state’ has been limited to formalities and ceremonial functions. Imperial ceremonies—including daily offerings to Amaterasu Ōmikami at the imperial palace, or pilgrimages to Ise and imperial mausolea—have been categorized as private religious events. Yet, in their outward form, the emperor’s ceremonial activities, especially those at Ise, appear much like the formal pilgrimages that were originally created by the Meiji state. Semantic play in the face of pragmatic change makes for interpretive ambivalence: does pilgrimage to the Ise shrines by the emperor today constitute a performative expression of the emperor, as a politically valent monarch, if the ritual itself is defined as a private, rather than a public, act? Since the implementation of laws for the separation of religion and state after the war, Ise has been spared criticism of the kind directed at Shinto’s most problematic site, the Yasukuni Shrine, where pilgrimages by prime ministers have attracted international controversy. Ise Jingū’s role in the ongoing performance of imperial ritual has not been problematized by the media: pilgrimages by the emperor to Ise have been the object of only limited journalistic commentary or public outcry,44 43 During an interview which he granted me in May 1999, William K. Bunce, responsible for religious and educational affairs at GHQ during the occupation, explained that this pilgrimage had been planned without his knowledge. Therefore its performance should not be misinterpreted as a GHQ strategy to use Shinto symbolism in order to demythologize—or to protect—emperorship after the war. 44 Since the 1960s, newspapers have not treated negatively the prime minister’s or the emperor’s visits to Jingū. However, left-wing organizations have protested against what they described as the illegitimate use of the symbolic imperial institution for political ends. In Jingū, as in other Shinto shrines, imperial pilgrimages have been catalysts for arson and rocket-bomb attacks. The first of these in Jingū was a case of arson in 1975. The second took place following the enthronement ceremonies of 1990.

ise jing~ and modern emperorship

95

and regular patterns of ritual on behalf of the emperor at Ise—such as daily food offerings to the imperial ancestral deity, regular ceremonies with the participation of imperial envoys, or the cyclical rites at intervals of twenty years—are generally dismissed by newspaper and television reports as a tradition that poses no threat to constitutional laws against governmental sponsorship of religious activity.45 Postwar constitutional law in Japan guarantees the freedom of religion and the separation of religions and state (Article 20); it also prohibits public funding of religious activity (Article 89). The state no longer financially supports imperial pilgrimage, the periodic rebuilding of the shrines and associated ceremonies, or the reproduction of thousands of costly art treasures and apparel (onshōzoku shimpō) as offerings from the emperor to the deities. The shikinen sengū is now carried out by the shrine authorities in Ise without state money and with only limited and indirect participation by the imperial house. Although the implementation of the Shinto Directive of late 1945 brought about some amendments to the system of imperial envoys to the shrines, Ise rituals as developed between the Meiji Restoration and the early Shōwa period have survived the allied occupation almost intact. Ise Jingū remains undiminished since the era of State Shinto at the level of ritual and aesthetics, although its political significance has waned. It has become an icon of nostalgia in a secular world no longer centered on the emperor.46 For the sake of the delegitimation of the emperor’s symbolic authority and for the creation of a ‘symbol emperor’ system, postwar constitutional changes brought about the official separation between the public affairs of state and government on the one hand, and the ritual performances that take place in Ise for the emperor on the other hand. In addition, the ensuing termination of state subsidies to shrines forced the Shinto community to seek support exclusively from private sources in order to perform Jingū’s costly periodic rituals. Jingū was transformed It consisted of the launching of missiles toward the Outer Shrine (Toyouke Daijingū) in the wake of a formal pilgrimage (goshin’etsu no gi) by the emperor, the empress, and several other members of the imperial house. Missiles missed key structures within the shrine grounds, but burned down another building nearby. 45 A notable exception was a television program in October 1973, produced by NHK, in which it was mentioned that the perpetuation of the shikinen sengū in postwar Japan was fraught with difficult memories of wartime. 46 For a commentary on Ise, modernity and nostalgia, see my article, “Mirror Image: Layered Narratives in Photographic and Televised Mediations of Ise’s Shikinen Sengū,” in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) pp. 339–375.

96

rosemarie bernard

into an independent religious corporation (shūkyō hōjin) in 1946, with the official name of Jingū Shichō, and with the special status of head shrine (honsō) within the Shinto community.47 Jingū remains unrelated to either the state or to the imperial household agency, the branch of government that overlooks imperial affairs. Nevertheless, in spite of this new postwar legal status, Jingū’s raison-d’être as custodian of the sacred mirror—and its dedication to its ritual care—remain constant. Mirror of Democracy: The Revisionist Debate over Ise Jingū and the Emperor From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, appeals were made to re-establish state funding for the shikinen sengū, and hence to reinstitute the periodic performance as a rite of state. In spite of the evidential success of fundraising among the population at large for the shikinen sengū of 1953, parliamentary debate was instigated twice by Shintoists and their sympathizers in government in 1960 and in 1965. The purpose of this debate was to obtain official state recognition of Jingū’s status as the main shrine for worship of the imperial ancestral deity; of the significance of the sacred mirror in Jingū’s keeping, as an object integral to the imperial status and office, and subject to the same rules and privileges as the court regalia; and of all ritual that takes place in Jingū in name of the emperor, including imperial pilgrimage to Jingū, as national ceremonies rather than as the private religious activity of the emperor. This motion also aimed at making the state assume responsibility for the grounds of Jingū and all other Jingū infrastructure related to the performance of ritual on behalf of the emperor, and to regard these grounds and infrastructure as ‘national property for imperial use.’ Also sought were the maintenance of Jingū and the performance of its rituals, including the shikinen sengū, according to the mutual agreement and cooperation of the state and Jingū.48 Known as the ‘Jingū amendment problem’ ( jingū kaisei mondai ), it was unsuccessful at the level of legal amendment, or as a means of guaran47 For summaries of the legal and bureaucratic process behind these transformations, see Okada Yoneo, “Jingū to jinja honchō,” in Jingū Shichō, ed., Jingū meiji hyakunen-shi, pp. 831–848; Shibukawa Ken’ichi, Honsō no teigi ni tsuite, manuscript, 1984; Ono Sokyō, “Honsō no teigi,” Jinja shimpō, 3 July 1978, p. 4. 48 Jinja shimpō seikyō kenkyūshitsu, ed., Kindai jinja shintōshi (Tokyo: Jinja Shimpōsha, 1976), pp. 284–285.

ise jing~ and modern emperorship

97

teeing state financial support for Jingū’s future cyclical rites. Nonetheless, it engendered some degree of recognition of Jingū as the keeper of the sacred mirror. In this process the government set the limits of its willingness to reinterpret existing laws that maintain the separation of state and religion, a fact that has structured subsequent configurations of Jingū’s identification with emperor and nation. According to ancient mytho-histories, copies of the sacred mirror and sword were produced prior to the transfer of the originals from court to Ise and Atsuta, respectively. It is said that, on several occasions in history, the replica mirror barely escaped destruction, and that the substitute sword was allegedly lost at sea with Emperor Antoku in 1185, only to be replaced later by a sword from Jingū. Nevertheless, the substitute mirror and sword, along with the original jewels (magatama) which have remained in the possession of the emperor, continue to be worshiped at the palace where they are essential to rites of succession. The symbolic complementarities of the mirrors—the original and the copy—expressed in pre-modern texts, have not been reflected in modern legal codes. Only one overt reference was made to the regalia—as opposed to the copies—in Meiji period law. Section 2 of Article 10 of the 1889 Imperial House Law stated that upon the death of the emperor, the imperial heir would assume the throne and receive the ‘ancestral regalia’ (sosō no jingi ). However, the postwar Imperial House Law, revised in 1946 and finalized in 1947 during the occupation, does not make any reference to the transfer of any items among the regalia, even in the section on imperial succession (Articles 1 through 4). Instead, it merely states that, upon the death of the emperor, the imperial heir immediately assumes imperial status. Nonetheless, an oblique and ambiguous reference is made to the transfer of the regalia in Article 7 of the 1947 Laws Governing Imperial Finances (kōshitsu keizaihō), according to which the imperial heir, upon accession to the throne, receives ‘historical objects that should be transferred along with the imperial status.’ Although not spelled out clearly, this phrase has been understood to refer first and foremost to the regalia. Yet the question remains: which ‘regalia?’ Neither Meiji laws nor postwar legal codes specify whether they refer to the regalia in the palace, or to the original mirror and sword worshiped respectively in Ise and Atsuta, or to both. In other words, at the level of the letter of the law, the original mirror and sword are not specified, in spite of having been celebrated as metaphors of the idea of uninterrupted imperial succession from Amaterasu Ōmikami to the present monarch.

98

rosemarie bernard

In their modern guise, ceremonies for the symbolic transfer of the regalia at court take place at the ceremony of kashikodokoro no gi, in which the mirror is symbolically transferred to the new emperor by means of an imperial statement pronounced to Amaterasu Ōmikami via the head priest at court, and the kenji togyo no gi, in which the imperial heir receives the substitute sword and the original jewels. Subsequently, in the palace ancestral hall, the new emperor proclaims to the ancestors the fact of succession, and thus becomes tennō. Yet there is no separate or equivalent ceremony in which Ise’s original mirror and Atsuta’s original sword are passed on to the new emperor. There is, however, a modern ceremony, goshin’etsu no gi, that was devised in 1915 for the Taishō Emperor to pronounce to the deities the fact of his enthronement following the sokui no rei and daijōsai ceremonies.49 However, this pilgrimage to Ise is not an occasion for the transfer of the original regalia to the emperor. In the logic of Jingū ritual, whether pre-modern or modern, the emperor does not ever come into contact or receive the original mirror, nor is he involved directly in its worship, which is conducted instead in ritual by proxy. Since the early Meiji period (except for a short period after the war), imperial chamberlains have carried along two of the court regalia (the kenji, or substitute sword and original jewels) from the palace when the emperor made a proclamation to the deity at Ise. In this way, the emperor addresses the imperial ancestral deity, bringing in close proximity to the sacred mirror its two courtly complements, the substitute sword and the original jewels, as effective portable emblems of the imperial status. The Meiji state envisioned the sacred mirror, and therefore Jingū, as the main seat for the spirit of Amaterasu Ōmikami, and accordingly granted support for the shikinen sengū, whose immediate purpose is to keep the mirror in perfect surroundings. The Shinto community’s struggle for official recognition of the mirror by the state in the 1960s was one of several politically charged motions to revise the postwar laws that redefined emperorship shortly after the occupation. As early as the late 1950s, the state increasingly recognized special imperial rites as public: the performance of the

49 The pilgrimage to Ise by the Meiji Emperor in the second month of 1869, known as the ōsei fukko tōkyō sento gohōkoku (pronouncement to the deities of imperial restoration and of the removal of the capital to Tokyo) was, in spirit, like the structured goshin’etsu no gi that was instituted as regular practice following the enthronement of the Taishō Emperor.

ise jing~ and modern emperorship

99

Crown Prince Akihito’s wedding (kekkon no gi ) at the Kashikodokoro Shrine in 1959 as a state event (kokuji kōi ), as well as the 1966 re-establishment of kigensetsu as a national holiday under the name of kenkoku kinenbi (National Foundation Day) on February 11. However, given the longevity of the Shōwa Emperor, it was not until 1989 that the status of imperial funeral and of enthronement ceremonies as rites of state would become hotly debated subjects. In 1957 the Association of Shinto Shrines submitted a statement to the minister of education.50 It argued that the shrines at Ise were wrongly subjected to the laws governing legal religious bodies, and raised the proposition of performing the shikinen sengū as a state-sponsored national event. Members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party established a task force to investigate the laws governing religions.51 However, the investigation was carried out within the ruling party for the sake of Jingū and the Shinto community, rather than as an open debate in the public domain. It became a political issue in a society highly sensitive to the protection of political freedom and established religious law. Major newspapers, and an NHK radio program in February 1959, alerted the public to the matter. Despite criticism, further discussion took place between Shintoists and members of the ruling LDP party. Against these developments, a popular monthly magazine, Sekai, ran a long editorial, warning against the impending nationalization of Jingū.52 In October 1960, a formal message was submitted to the minister of education by leading members of the Shinto community. It asked whether the ministry considered the sacred mirror and sword, kept in Ise and Atsuta, to be the regalia ( jingi ) of the emperor as symbols of Japan, or instead whether it regarded them as mere religious treasures (shūkyō zaisan) distinct from both the state and the emperor. The message stated that Ise Jingū and Atsuta Jingū, keepers of the respective regalia, did not have the authority to have full control over them. It further argued that as the imperial office is a public one, so the regalia too should be recognized to have a public status, and therefore not be subjected to the laws governing religious institutions or objects.53

50 Hatakake Seikō, “Jingū seido zesei mondai,” in Jingū Shichō, ed., Jingū meiji hyakunen-shi (Ise: Jingū Bunko, 1988), vol. 2, pp. 63–93. 51 Jinja Honchō Chōsabu, “Jingū seido kaisei mondai no ikisatsu”, manuscript, 1962. 52 “Ise Jingū no kokuyūka,” Sekai 72 (1), June 1960, pp. 178–183. 53 Jinja shimpō seikyō kenkyūshitsu, Kindai jinja shintōshi, pp. 295–296.

100

rosemarie bernard

At a meeting of the House of Representatives on 18 October 1960, Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato was asked to clarify the state’s legal interpretation of the status of the sacred mirror in Jingū.54 In his response, filled with honorific language and allusions to the mythic passages from the Nihonshoki, the prime minister referred to the sacred mirror as ‘the divine mirror’ (shinkyō) in Jingū, a special entity which cannot be subjected to disregard of its original character, and hence could not be said to ‘belong’ to the Inner Shrine at Ise. However, continued Ikeda, because the practice of effective communication between the imperial household agency and Jingū regarding the ritual care of the mirror already existed, further stipulations concerning these practices were not necessary. This was a partial victory for the Jingū priesthood: the mirror in Jingū’s care was recognized as a key symbol in imperial succession, and hence was to be considered a matter of concern to the state. Yet, the cost to Jingū’s and the Shinto community’s public image was significant, for the new interpretation drew the ire of political opponents who saw the state’s imprimatur on Jingū’s struggle for political and symbolic legitimacy as a conspiracy to undermine postwar progress made in the demythologization of emperorship. There were further issues to be addressed by the government.55 First and foremost among these was state funding for the shikinen sengū. In February 1965, a question was raised at a meeting of the House of Representatives by Nakasone Yasuhiro (the future prime minister), who addressed the problem of state responsibility for the shikinen sengū. Citing the great cultural value of Jingū’s characteristic architectural style, Nakasone called the shikinen sengū a special source of pride for the Japanese people and equally for the international community. However, the government responded that religious ceremonies were subject to the legal separation of religion and state, and therefore money earmarked for use by the emperor for palace rituals might be used for contribution to the shikinen sengū only if this was considered to be an expression of the personal religious belief of the emperor.56 54 Jinja Shimpōsha, Shintō shirei to sengo no shintō (Tokyo: Jinja Shimpōsha, 1971), pp. 304–305. 55 Hatakake Seikō, “Jingū seido zesei mondai,” p. 71. 56 Transcriptions of key segments of parliamentary debates on these questions in 1965 are included in Jinja Honchō Chōsabu, ed., Ise jingū shikinen sengūhi ni tsuite no kokkai no rongi, manuscript, 1 April 1965. I thank former Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro for discussing with me those events in June 2001.

ise jing~ and modern emperorship

101

The early postwar parliamentary debate did not lead to statutory change for the sacred mirror at Ise, or for the funding of the shrines and the shikinen sengū. Thereafter, instead of legal recognition, symbolic and institutional management became the means through which imperial ritual was preserved by adaptation to postwar contingencies. Postwar Continuities and the Adaptation of Imperial Ritual at Ise Since 1945, rites performed in Jingū for the worship of the imperial ancestral deity Amaterasu Ōmikami no longer bear official relationship to the state or to the emperor, even if, symbolically and according to the Shinto religious view, the rites of worship of the sacred mirror have always been performed on behalf of the emperor. The architectural and ceremonial renewal of the shrines in Ise for the shikinen sengū, as well as the reproduction of sacred treasures and apparel offered to the deities, are now subsidized by Jingū itself as a private endeavor, though one nonetheless imbued with the sacrality of things imperial as before 1945. Prewar rituals that reaffirmed the involvement of the emperor in the shikinen sengū, such as the imperial inspection of the sacred treasures and apparel prior to their offering, have been retained.57 The tradition of performing the shikinen sengū on behalf of the emperor, with imperial permission to begin preparations toward the rites, has also continued. At eight o’clock on the evening of the shikinen sengū, for both the Inner and Outer Shrines, the emperor still bows in the direction of Jingū. On an annual basis, the emperor continues to make a private contribution to Jingū for the shikinen sengū. Since 1945 this has been a small and insignificant amount in financial terms, yet the imperial gift, known as gonaidokin—which has accounted for a mere 0.5 percent, 0.16 percent and 0.079 percent, respectively, of the total budgets for the 1953, 1973 and 1993 shikinen sengū—is nonetheless of great symbolic importance to Jingū.58 In this way, the symbology of emperorship remains essential to the performance of cyclical rites in Jingū.

57 Known as the tenran no gi (‘view from the heavens’) in 1929, in the postwar period it has been renamed goran no gi, a less grandiose term. 58 Figures for gonaidokin for 1953 in Jingū Shichō, Dai gojūkyūkai shikinen sengū kankei shuyō gyōji nempyō (Ise: Jingū Shichō, no date [circa 1966]), p. 24. For 1973 in Jingū Shichō, Dai rokujukkai jingū shikinen sengū nempyō (Ise: Shinto Insatsu, 1986), p. 87. For 1993 in Dai rokujūikkai jingū shikinen sengū nempyō (Ise: Jingū Shichō, 2002), as well as personal communication, General Affairs Section at Jingū Shichō and the office for

102

rosemarie bernard

Imperial envoys (chokushi) and other imperial palace priests, regularly sent from the court to Jingū for the performance of imperial offerings to the deities, have become private employees of the emperor, rather than state officials. Consequently, by mutual agreement between the imperial palace and Jingū, ritualists in both institutions continue to cooperate for the continuity of imperial implication in Jingū. Imperial offerings of silk and money for sake and food offerings to the deities have continued to be delivered by envoys sent from the palace. At three of the five largest ceremonies in Jingū, the imperial envoy travels to Ise to bear the offerings and to pronounce an imperial prayer (gosaimon). On the surface, there is no visible difference between pre- and post-1945 versions of these ritual performances, except that they are now considered the private affairs of Jingū and of the emperor.59 Also retained from the pre-1945 era is the performance of the relationship between the emperor, Jingū, rice production, and its calendrical ritual system. At the kannamesai (First Fruits Festival) every year in October, stalks of rice grown at the palace are offered to Jingū, where they are displayed on the second inner fences at the Inner and Outer Shrines, alongside similar rice stalks offered by local producers. This practice, which dates to the early Shōwa period—conceived as a revival of mythological tropes and ancient ritual practices—continues to stress the sacrality of rice production as a matter of imperial as well as popular importance, although now without any link to the state. The complexity of Jingū ritual makes it adaptable to change, despite a rhetoric of changelessness that is associated with the Ise shrines in the popular imagination. Postwar law imposed change upon Jingū, yet some transformations to Ise ritual can be attributed to priestly design, subject to palace approval, in response to the allied occupation as well as to public opinion. This is notable in three areas in particular: the institution of the Master of the Ceremonies (saishu), the language and classical grammar of purification prayers, and the transportation of the regalia copies (sword and beads) on the occasion of imperial pilgrimage to Ise. These have provided the symbolic means to defuse the politicization of emperorship and subsequently to re-emphasize its ancientness, purity, and metonymic power. fundraising for the sengū at the Association of Shinto Shrines ( Jinja Honchō) in Tokyo. Also, the late Sakurai Katsunoshin of Ise was kind to explain to me the postwar history of these processes. 59 Sakurai Katsunoshin Ise jingū (Tokyo: Gakuseisha, 1969), p. 18.

ise jing~ and modern emperorship

103

Early on during the occupation, the potential political threat of the Ise shrines was drawn to the attention of General MacArthur and his aides when the shrines’ titular head or saishu (Master of Ceremonies), Field Marshal Prince Nashimoto Morimasa, was arrested as a war criminal (he was later released from prison due to his princely status). As former members of the imperial family who had had military careers were purged and thus made ineligible for the saishu post, appropriate male candidates could not be found.60 By default, a woman—Kitashirakawa Fusako, the seventh daughter of the Meiji Emperor—was chosen.61 The selection of female members of the imperial family to fill the role of saishu has since become tradition.62 The postwar woman saishu evokes the saiō 63—imperial princesses sent from court from the Heian to medieval era—a fact which has softened Jingū’s wartime image. After the end of the occupation, Jingū priests could easily have reverted to electing former princes to the post, but they have chosen not to, given evident appreciation by the public of Ise’s Heian aesthetic legacy embodied by the female saishu. The second aspect of Jingū symbology that has served to transform, only to reaffirm, emperorship at the shrines, is language. To reflect new legal conditions for shikinen sengū, the language of incantations prepared for the ritual purification of the sacred treasures and apparel (harae kotoba), offered to the deities prior to their transfer to the new sanctuary grounds, was amended by priests in 1953, despite the fact that potential occupation-period supervision need no longer be dreaded. Subsequently, with each subsequent performance, in 1973 and 1993, further classical language amendments have re-emphasized the pure character of the objects offered to Amaterasu Ōmikami on behalf of the emperor.

60 Woodard, The Allied Occupation of Japan 1945–1952 and Japanese Religions, p. 173. 61 Sugitani, “Daitōa sensō senchū sengo no jingū,” p. 805. 62 Rosemarie Bernard, “Shinto and the Invention of Tradition: Reconfigurations of Gender and Imperial Symbolism at the Grand Shrines of Ise Since 1945,” manuscript, 1999. 63 Saiō were celibate imperial princesses, generally daughters, sisters, or grand-daughters of reigning emperors, though not their wives. As outlined in Book 5 of the Engishiki, following the enthronement of an emperor, a saiō would be selected by divination at court, following which she would undergo a long period of seclusion and ablutions. Her principal duty was the offering of tamagushi—sacred branches—to the deity on the occasion of the three grand ceremonial occasions in the Ise calendar: twice at the tsukinamisai (bi-annual special offerings) and at the kannamesai (offering of first fruits). The institution of the saiō lasted from the late seventh century to the fourteenth century.

104

rosemarie bernard

The third area in which imperial symbolism was modified and later reintensified is pilgrimage to Jingū by the emperor. The Shōwa emperor performed a total of eight postwar pilgrimages to the shrines, the last of which took place in 1980. By 2008, Akihito has made three pilgrimages to Jingū since assuming the throne in 1989. The first of these was on 28 and 29 November 1990, in the wake of the daijōsai enthronement ceremony, orchestrated on the model of the equivalent Shōwa pilgrimage of 1928. The same ceremonial paraphernalia was used, including a special carriage and attendants whose allure evoked Meiji to early Shōwa aesthetics of monarchical authority. In keeping with conventions established during the occupation that repressed overt religio-political imperial symbolism, from 1945 until 1974 the court regalia (sword and jewels) were not brought by the emperor to Ise at the time of pilgrimage.64 The post-shikinen sengū pilgrimage by the Shōwa Emperor in 1974 became an occasion for the imperial chamberlains to carry the sword and the jewels to Ise, despite the fact that, at the first historical post-shikinen sengū pilgrimage of 1954, the regalia had not accompanied the Shōwa Emperor to Ise. Later, as part of a pattern for the gradual reinstitution of ceremonial conventions abandoned in the wake of the war, at the post-enthronement pilgrimage of Akihito in 1990, the court regalia were brought along with the emperor all the way to the inner sanctum, on the model of the Taishō and early Shōwa period practices of goshin’etsu no gi.65 Ise and the Future of Imperial Ritual Historical scholarship on the subject of modern imperial ritual and State Shinto has drawn attention to the ways in which modern rituals were fabricated as performative displays of state policy, or on how the publicness and modern aesthetics of performance have been persuasive in centering national consciousness on the emperor.66 Concerning the 64 Jinja Shimpō Seikyō Kenkyūshitsu, Kindai jinja shintōshi (Tokyo: Jinja Shimpōsha, 1976), pp. 319–334. 65 Personal communication, Imperial Household Agency, Ritual Affairs Department, 2007. 66 T. Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); John Breen, “The Imperial Oath of April 1868: Ritual, Politics, and Power in the Restoration,” Monumenta Nipponica 51/4 (Winter 1996), pp. 407–429; Takashi Fujitani, “Electronic Pageantry and Japan’s Symbolic Emperor,” Journal of Asian Studies vol. 51 No. 4 (November 1992), pp. 824–850.

ise jing~ and modern emperorship

105

politics of imperial ritual and symbolism in the postwar period, critics have shown, with alarm, how attempts at re-establishing a national political culture focused on emperorship have had some success in recent decades.67 On the one hand, the nationalist lobby influences conservative politicians to reimplement practices and symbolism that focus on the emperor, either by legislative measures (such as the reestablishing kigensetsu as a national holiday) or moral pressure (such as influencing the contents of television programming during the Shōwa Emperor’s funeral). On the other hand, there is widespread opposition to the perpetuation of imperial culture, and to the state’s reinsertion in the delicate relationship between imperial symbolism, religious practice, political ideology, and the means by which these are made nationally significant. However, the subject of Ise Jingū and its ongoing performance of imperial ritual in the postwar period presents other issues concerning the interrelationship of law, ideology, and ritual practice in modern Japan. Indeed, modern-style displays of the symbolic authority of the emperor still take place in Jingū. Yet, beyond the rhetorical echoes of ideology and the structuring power of law that have modernized Japanese emperorship, at Ise one is reminded of other factors that preceded modernity and that still constitute essential elements of imperial ceremonies at the shrines: namely, ritual proxy and the adaptability of tradition. The relationship between the emperor and Ise Jingū has been sustained throughout history by rites performed on behalf of the emperor, rather than by the emperor himself. The basis of the imperial-Ise connection presumes the emperor’s physical absence from Ise and the indirectness of the palace’s implication in its affairs. Despite modern ceremonial creations, new ideologies or legal revisions, these principles were not displaced, but merely overlaid or enhanced by modern state management and its creation of rites that feature the emperor in person.

67 About general developments in Shinto’s relationship to the state, see Helen Hardacre, Shinto and the State; concerning the funeral of the Shōwa Emperor, see Fujitani, “Electronic Pageantry”; for a summary of the movement that led to the re-establishment of kigensetsu as a national holiday, see Kenneth J. Ruoff, The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945–1995 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); for a critique of trends in the rapprochement between Shinto and the state in Japan, including the Yasukuni question, see Koyasu Nobukuni, Kokka to saishi: kokka shintō no genzai (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2004), and John Breen, ed., Yasukuni, the War Dead and the Struggle for Japan’s Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

106

rosemarie bernard

Whether in the pre-modern past, during the era of State Shinto, or still today, at Ise the emperor is neither a priest, nor the austere figure depicted in Meiji period secular pageantry and photography, nor the benign persona who has appeared before the people in postwar travels. Except for pilgrimages to announce to the deity important developments (rites of passage, enthronement and, until 1945, major matters of state such as the beginning and end of hostilities with the United States), at Ise the emperor figures primarily in his absence from worship of the deities, that is carried out instead by specialist priests. The tradition of ritual by proxy at Ise has defined members of the Ise priesthood as keepers of pre-modern and modern imperial ceremonies. Institutional commitment to the retention of imperial ritual—in addition to a desire for Jingū’s modern prominence in Japanese society—has compelled the priests to adapt Ise Jingū and its rituals to postwar law, yet all the while to assert the sacrality and pre-eminence of the emperor as the paramount symbol of the Japanese nation.

THE EMPEROR AND THE LEFT IN INTERWAR JAPAN Rikki Kersten Introduction When we contemplate the nature of the relationship between the left and the emperor between the two world wars in Japan, logic suggests that this is a simple matter. Surely the left, comprised of communists and socialists, would implacably be opposed to the imperial institution, its ideology and its institutionalization in the form of the Emperor System. According to Marxist-Leninist theory, the overthrow of the monarchy was an essential precursor to the advent of socialist revolution. Indeed, an absolutist monarchy (as opposed to a constitutional monarchy) was an obstacle to the intermediate stage of bourgeois-democratic revolution. Accordingly, the abolition of the Emperor System was a stated priority for Japan’s first communist party that was formed in 1922.1 Historians present the experience of the left during this period principally as a time of oppression of the left for ‘thought crimes’ against the emperor, and of imprisonment and coercion leading to recantation and apostasy (tenkō) in the early 1930s. And yet, it was not so simple. When addressing the interwar period in Japan, intriguing problems disturb the tidiness of this logic. One of these problems involves understanding the theoretical and emotional twists and turns that led to Japan’s version of national socialism, whereby socialism and the emperor were theoretically reconciled.2 A second problem is the stark and acrimonious differentiation that arose between two core streams of intellectual activists on the left during this period. The so-called Kōza (Lecture) and Rōnō (Labor-Farmer) schools of Japanese Marxism differed in fundamental ways on the direction

1 Draft Platform of the Japanese Communist Party, November 1922. Reproduced in George M. Beckmann and Okubo Genji, The Japanese Communist Party 1922–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969), pp. 279–283. 2 For one case study of the journey from socialism to national socialism, see Rikki Kersten, ‘Painting the Emperor Red: the Emperor and the Socialists in the 1930s,’ in R. Kersten and D. Williams eds., The Left in the Shaping of Japanese Democracy: essays in honour of J.A.A. Stockwin (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 21–41.

108

rikki kersten

revolutionary strategy should take in Japan. This debate arose because each school read differently the nature of Japan’s modern socio-economic development, and the contemporary reality in Japan. The theoretical and tactical consequences of this interpretative split were profound: was Japan ready for a bourgeois-democratic revolution, or a socialist revolution? Was the 1868 Meiji Restoration a bourgeoisdemocratic revolution, or was it an example of ‘incomplete modernity’? Who was the immediate enemy of the proletariat: the emperor or the bourgeoisie? What was the substance of Japan’s imperialism and fascism, if pre-modernity was part of the equation? Addressing these issues involved a forensic theoretical examination of the development of Japanese capitalism and its social consequences during and following the Meiji era. The Kōza theorists argued that the emperor was a significant component of the feudal, authoritarian entities that oppressed Japan’s proletariat, and performed a significant negative ideological role that continued to prevent a bourgeois-democratic revolution in the 1920s and 1930s. This theoretical conclusion attracted brutal attention from the Thought Police, invited swift repression and censorship, and ultimately forced the appearance of compliance upon Kōza Marxists. The Rōnō school theorists on the other hand regarded the emperor as incidental to the thrust of capitalist development in modern Japan post-1868, and apparently extended this judgment to the ideological dimension of the Emperor System. As a result of this theoretical split, the Rōnō group left the Japan Communist Party ( JCP) in 1927, and soon thereafter began to describe themselves as ‘non-communist party Marxists.’ Consequently, the Rōnō Marxists were left in relative peace by the authorities until much later than their Kōza counterparts (until the late 1930s),3 a fact that continued to poison relations amongst the left in postwar Japan as Kōzatype leftists brooded upon and reproached their fellow leftists for these disparate interwar fates. Some have even blamed the interwar Rōnō group for deliberately altering their attitude toward the emperor in order to remove themselves from the line of fire and switch the attention of the authorities toward the Kōza group in an act of shameless self-preservation. Uchida Jōkichi and Nakano Jirō are typically harsh in According to Hoston, the self-depiction of the Rōnō group as ‘non-Japanese Communist Party Marxists’ and their separation from the JCP in 1927 spared the Rōnō group from police intimidation until 1936. Germaine A. Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 330. 3

the emperor and the left in interwar japan

109

their assessment on this score, writing “the bourgeois, militarist, police Emperor System was poised to launch a great attack against the vanguard. For the social democrats [the Rōnō group], it was necessary to draw a clear line between themselves and the vanguard.”4 To pro-Kōza analysts, the Rōnō founder Yamakawa Hitoshi (1880–1958) was a ‘rat leaving a sinking ship,’ motivated mainly by a fear of imprisonment. While scholars have paid much attention to the emperor-related trauma experienced by those Kōza Marxists who committed apostasy in the early 1930s, much less effort has been made to comprehend the mindset of the Rōnō group.5 In one way, this makes a lot of sense. It is difficult to research a void, as the presence of the emperor was seemingly insignificant to Rōnō Marxist interpretations. Moreover, censorship even of Rōnō articles renders this task difficult for researchers working with primary sources of the period, when the words ‘Emperor System’ and ‘revolution’ were systematically censored before publication (and replaced in the text with crosses for each censored character). However, the debate is accessible through verbal ciphers, allusion, autobiographies and postwar reminiscences. If we can assume that the Rōnō view of the emperor was driven by more than opportunism and self-preservation, then we can acquire a better understanding of how and why the emperor was seen by some leftists to be incidental to interwar Japan’s revolutionary situation. How did the Rōnō group of Marxists manage to forge a theoretical approach that enabled them to be seen by the guardians of ideological orthodoxy as benign, if not pro-emperor leftists? What had to happen to their Marxism in order for them to achieve this seemingly countertheoretical, counter-intuitive outcome? What was their view of the emperor, and in what sense can we call it ‘Marxist?’ Did the Rōnō group develop an effective way to ‘oppose’ the emperor through replacing direct confrontation with a more oblique approach? In answering these questions, we can fill out the spectrum of leftist thinking on Japan in the interwar period, and provide a more holistic appraisal of the intellectual possibilities and perspectives that were articulated in the

4 Uchida Jōkichi and Nakano Jirō, Nihon shihonshugi ronsō (Tokyo: Shinkō Shuppansha, 1949), p. 97. 5 Laura Hein has written a superb monograph that deals with Rōnō-related economists. Laura Hein, Reasonable Men, Powerful Words: Political Culture and Expertise in Twentieth-century Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

110

rikki kersten

interwar era. We can also use the Rōnō group as a medium through which to interrogate Japanese Marxism per se. While the conflict between the Kōza and Rōnō theorists was ostensibly about Japanese capitalism (and was indeed called ‘the debate on Japanese capitalism’), the debate reveals the vibrant undercurrent of politics in the midst of socio-economic analysis. Hoston has called this a Marxist debate concerning the ‘theory of the Japanese state,’6 but this chapter will examine the more fundamental tension involved when Marxist theorists were confronted with the political when they considered socio-economic realities and, interestingly, failed to acknowledge that this is what they were doing (or alternatively, felt unable openly to acknowledge this). It is my contention that a failure to communicate the political foundations of theoretical tension was as significant as opposing interpretations of capitalist development to the Kōza-Rōnō conflict. I shall argue that it was the political aspect of Rōnō thought that led them to their particular reading of the emperor in modern Japanese history. Finally, I will suggest that theoretically marginalizing the emperor can be considered as a viable oppositional strategy. I shall first consider the background of the Kōza and Rōnō dispute in the context of the emergence of organized Marxism in Japan, including an examination of the influence of Comintern pronouncements (Theses) on Japanese Marxism, particularly their perspective on the emperor. I shall then examine the debate between two representative thinkers, the Rōnō theorist Inomata Tsunao (1889–1942) and the orthodox, Kōza analyst Noro Eitarō (1901–1934), before drawing some conclusions concerning the locus of the emperor in interwar leftist thought. The Arena of Interwar Japanese Marxism One of the cruel realities of retrospection concerning interwar Japanese Marxism is the premise that one is setting out to explain failure. While the supremacy of the Emperor System state in this period is indisputable, we can retrieve positive examples of theoretical and intellectual vitality from this era too. The fact of relentless state oppression should not automatically be equated with the failure of Japanese Marxist theory or strategy. What is remarkable about interwar Marxism in Japan is its 6 Germaine A. Hoston, The State, Identity and the National Question in China and Japan (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994).

the emperor and the left in interwar japan

111

intellectual resilience in the face of recurrent organizational collapse. It was the eruption of the theoretical dispute between the Kōza and Rōnō schools in the 1920s and 1930s that stimulated this intellectual vitality, adding a vibrant element of contestability to the iron law of orthodox communist strategy as defined by the Soviet Union-based authority on international Marxism, the Comintern. At the same time, it is clear that the role of the Comintern, particularly its pronouncements concerning Japan, contributed to the weakening and ultimate annihilation of Japan’s Marxists as a visible and viable force between the wars. The challenge for all Marxist theorists outside of the Soviet Union after 1917 was to fit each country’s particular circumstances into a universal Marxist formula for revolution. This involved exercises in categorization and classification in what stage each country was at in terms of their revolutionary development (which was another way of asking how far had capitalism advanced in that country); what was the composition and consciousness of each class; what were the relations between them; which entity (or entities) should lead revolution—a vanguard movement such as a communist party, a broader social and class alliance between workers and farmers (the proletariat), or a segment of this group (the urban industrial proletariat). In the case of Japan, particularism posed especially tricky challenges for the delineation of agreed categories and classifications. Identifying the function of the emperor in class terms was complicated by the ideological role of the Emperor System. The transcendental nature of the emperor’s political status was compounded by the spiritual absolutism of the Emperor System ideology.7 However, the emperor was a member of the economic elite (as a large landowner), and the state-led and sponsored growth of industry blurred the lines between capitalist and political/spiritual authorities. Another complexity was the unbalanced nature of Japanese capitalist development, which saw urban and industrial growth occur alongside ongoing backwardness and impoverishment of the rural sector. A third problematic aspect was the late-developer character of Japan as a modern capitalist society and economy, a status that was not developed in the theories of founders

7 On the Emperor System see Tanaka Sōgorō, Tennō no kenkyū (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō, 1951); Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

112

rikki kersten

Marx and Engels beyond the somewhat patronizing, sweeping category of ‘the Asiatic mode of production.’8 Not only was Japan a category-stretching capitalist economy, but it emerged into the post-First World War world torn by conflicting, competing imperatives. Drawn to both Wilsonian idealism and the thrill of the 1917 Russian Revolutions, Japan’s intellectuals were galvanized by the aspiration of universalism, and integrating Japan with world history as an equal people, culture and polity. On the other hand, as the 1920s progressed, particularist perspectives became entrenched as Japan found itself demoted by fellow imperialist nations (for instance through the Washington and London naval conferences), demeaned by discriminatory immigration policies, and outcast from global councils when it left the League of Nations in 1933 in a dispute over Manchuria. Domestically, particularism emerged in the form of identity-projection as an imperial state, enforced by repressive legislation such as the Peace Preservation Law of 1925, which criminalized criticism of the emperor. Both nationalism and resistance by necessity revolved around a preoccupation with particularism, a circumstance that led policymakers and rebels alike to define their respective positions vis-à-vis the emperor as well as what the emperor symbolized for them. This essential tension between universalism and particularism coursed through the nascent organized Marxism of the early 1920s in Japan, and eventually underpinned the Rōnō-Kōza conflict. The Kōza (orthodox) group was fundamentally committed to the universal relevance of Marxist revolutionary theory, and strove to achieve this even in the face of capricious flip-flopping on the part of the Comintern. The Rōnō group on the other hand, was less obsessed with fitting Japan into the Comintern-defined mould (as inconsistent as that was), and more concerned with addressing what they saw as the indigenous revolutionary potential in contemporary Japan. For them, reading the particularistic circumstances accurately and determining a suitable revolutionary strategy mattered more than reaffirming Japan’s status as a universallyconsistent example of Marxist revolutionary theory. Founder of the Rōnō faction, Yamakawa Hitoshi, accordingly argued that “the socialist revolutions in countries with different circumstances will develop out of that country’s own soil . . . and cannot be directed from one global

8 For background on the Asiatic mode of production and its relevance to Japan, see Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development, pp. 127–178.

the emperor and the left in interwar japan

113

center.”9 Interestingly, some scholars associate the Kōza and Rōnō factions with opposite attributes: the Kōza group were obsessed with particularism because of the primacy of the emperor in their approach, whereas the Rōnō group were universalist precisely because they were not committed to such particularistic measures.10 We can say that both the Kōza and Rōnō groups wanted Japan to experience socialist revolution along the lines elaborated by Marx and Engels. Determining the relevance of particularism effectively plagued both sides in their quest for a viable revolutionary strategy for Japan. Another manifestation of the particular-universal paradigm was the European (western) origin of Marxist thought. In the interwar era, anti-western feeling abounded in intellectual as well as official political circles. Fascism was derided by the Japanese as a description of Japan in the 1930s because of the widespread aversion amongst many Japanese to any association with a European identity.11 Similarly, capitalism too was seen by both the left and the right as a product of western, European origin, and therefore undesirable in cultural terms (as it was too individualistic, selfish and profit-oriented). It is not surprising that Marxism would be subjected to similar scrutiny and assessed in particularistic terms. It seemed that for both Kōza and Rōnō Marxists, the ‘indigenization’ (or ‘Japanization’) of Marxism would require including the emperor, either through making the imperial institution the centerpiece of revolutionary strategy, or by building an argument that put the emperor on the periphery. Japanese Marxism and the Comintern The first official statement of policy direction for Japanese Marxism, the 1922 Draft Platform of the Japanese Community Party ( JCP), displayed the beginnings of the serious theoretical trouble that was to follow. The emperor was depicted as emblematic of the peculiar nature of Japan’s capitalist development, not as an absolutist ruler but mainly in his role

9 Yamakawa Hitoshi, in Yamakawa hitoshi jiden (Autobiography of Yamakawa Hitoshi). Yamakawa Kikue and Sakisaka Itsurō eds. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1961), p. 429. 10 Hoston also argues that the Rōnō group had a blindspot where the emperor was concerned precisely because they were so attached to Japanese exceptionalism and the Emperor System ideology. Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development, pp. 183–184. 11 For an elaboration of this view see Rikki Kersten, ‘Japan,’ in R. Bosworth ed., The Oxford Handbook on Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), in press.

114

rikki kersten

as ‘the biggest semi-feudal landlord.’ Japan had not yet completed a bourgeois democratic revolution, it was argued, so achieving this was the interim objective of the JCP: “although the Japanese Communist Party is the enemy of bourgeois democracy, it should nevertheless use such transitional slogans as ‘overthrow the imperial government’ and ‘abolish the emperor system’ . . . democratic slogans mean nothing more to the Japanese Communist Party than a temporary means of struggle against the imperial government.”12 Overthrowing the emperor (the Emperor System) was identified as ‘the most pressing task,’ and accordingly, the abolition of the Emperor System was at the top of the list of ‘demands in the field of politics.’ The clear acceptance of the need for a two-stage revolution underpins this document, as does the failure to elaborate the function of the emperor and the nature of the obstacle the Emperor System represented for achieving either a bourgeois-democratic or a socialist revolution. We should note that the consolidation of the ideologies and myths, surrounding the emperor as an institution at this time, had not advanced much beyond the articulation of imperial ‘transcendence’ in the 1889 constitution, and the introduction of imperial worship in schools through the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education. The parallel development in Japan of communist revolutionary strategies and the construction of imperial myths is a fascinating example of concurrent historical dissonance, though the communists had been acutely aware of the potential for state violence since 1911.13 At this juncture, the Comintern made concerted efforts to manage communism in Japan by releasing a series of Theses concerning the organization and direction of the JCP. The respective Theses involved basing revolutionary strategy on an interpretation of Japan’s revolutionary readiness, which was informed by the stage Japan had reached in its capitalist development and class consciousness, and not surprisingly, the need for a Leninist vanguard-equivalent in Japan to achieve these revolutionary objectives. It was a big task for Russia-based theorists to accurately assess Japan in this way, and although there was a spasmodic traffic of individuals traveling between the two countries,

Draft Platform of the Japanese Communist Party, in Beckmann and Okubo, p. 280. In 1911, anarchist Kōtoku Shūsui was hanged for plotting to assassinate the emperor, ushering in the ‘Winter of Japanese Socialism.’ 12

13

the emperor and the left in interwar japan

115

ultimately the Theses became a frustrating attempt to fit square pegs into round holes. The consequences for the beleaguered JCP were significant. Having disbanded in 1924 only to reform in 1926, and then to be banned in 1928 (having suffered regular persecution since 1923), the JCP was saddled with conflicting and sometimes contradictory directions from the Comintern. The Comintern was in its own way trying to accommodate Japan’s particularistic circumstances into Marxist-Leninist theory without compromising its essential tenets. In the process, the Comintern unwittingly lent comfort to both the Kōza and Rōnō schools, both of which were able to find support for their approaches in the bosom of the moving feast that was international Marxist orthodoxy. Locating the emperor in Japan’s capitalist development was the touchstone for repeated vacillation concerning the correct revolutionary strategy for Japan. The Moscow Theses of 1926 and the 1931 Theses argued for a one-stage revolution for Japan, on the basis that there was sufficient evidence of the advanced nature of Japan’s capitalism to justify a socialist revolution. On the other hand, the 1927 and the 1932 Theses envisaged a two stage revolution, in which the emperor signified the feudal attributes that had to be obliterated through a bourgeois-democratic revolution. The Rōnō theorists rushed to agree with the 1926 and 1931 Theses, whereas the 1927 and 1932 Theses became the guiding light for Kōza theorists. The Moscow Theses were motivated by the imminent reformation of the JCP after its leader Yamakawa Hitoshi had led its dissolution in 1924. The primary concern of this Thesis was therefore to provide the new party with a manifesto for action, and to ensure that Yamakawa was discredited. While doing so, this short document stated that Japanese capitalism was now ‘completely under the hegemony of the bourgeoisie.’ The only oblique reference to the emperor or the Emperor System was to the ‘semifeudal political machinery’ that was being mobilized to suppress the proletariat.14 These hints were overturned in the more substantial 1927 Theses, where the need to present Japan as a serious imperialist threat (particularly in China) was balanced by a lingering tendency to regard Japan as essentially ‘feudal’ and backward in some respects (namely in rural class relations, and because of the presence of the emperor). Positing Japan as both ‘imperialist’ and ‘feudal’ was

14

The Moscow Theses of March 1926, reproduced in Beckmann and Okubo, p. 293.

116

rikki kersten

a theoretical challenge, and gave both Kōza and Rōnō thinkers cause for optimism. The emperor featured heavily in this mixed portrait of a Japan that would undergo two revolutions, but in rapid succession, given the advanced state of Japanese capitalism. The 1927 Theses noted the imperial institution’s role in supporting the growth of capitalism, describing its feudal façade as ‘convenient’ rather than contradictory. “The feudal traits of the Japanese state [in 1868] were not mere traditional relics, rudimentary survivals of the past, but a very convenient instrument of primitive capital accumulation.” The feudal character of the imperial institution was fused with an unmistakable capitalist role, in that “the Mikado is not only a big landowner, but also a very rich stockholder in many stock companies and combines.” The 1927 Theses stressed the dominance of the capitalist aspect over the feudal one, stating that despite its “feudal attributes and relics,” the Japanese state was “the most concentrated expression of Japanese capitalism.”15 However, the feudal contamination that was evident in the rural sector, notably in the form of large landholders, meant that the bourgeois-democratic revolution had to be completed before socialist revolution could become the priority. As Japan menaced China (which was itself in the throes of revolutionary upheaval) in the 1930s, the Comintern flip-flopped twice more to try to make theory meet political as well as orthodox requirements. Presenting Japan as properly fascist was a major motivation behind the 1931 Theses, which returned to the premise of a one-stage revolution in order to give credence to its charge of fascism. Just as imperialism required advanced monopoly capitalism to be in evidence, so too did fascism—conventionally understood—necessitate the existence of advanced monopoly capitalism to be credible. So we see in this 1931 version of strategy that the Meiji Restoration of 1868 is restored to a status of a full bourgeois-democratic revolution “that paved the way for the development of capitalism.” Complications intrude though when we read that “the state power of Japan is in the hands of the bourgeoisie under the hegemony of finance capitalism and the landlords.” Despite this separation of economic and political power, the Theses argue that “the fundamental class contradiction of this period is the struggle

15 Theses on Japan Adopted in the Session of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Comintern on July 15, 1927, reproduced in Beckmann and Okubo, pp. 297–298.

the emperor and the left in interwar japan

117

between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.”16 One-stage revolution was back on the table for Japan. Another significant element driving the 1931 Theses was the perceived imperative on the part of the Comintern to wipe out Japanese deviationists who claimed Marxist credentials. The Socialist Masses Party, the Rōnō group and the so-called ‘dissolutionist factions’ were attacked in the 1931 Theses for their anti-JCP stance (in the case of the Rōnō group), and their pro-emperor syncretism of socialism and the emperor (in the case of the national socialist groups). The Rōnō faction was singled out in the 1931 Theses as ‘a group of traitors’ who were trying to ‘split the revolutionary workers of Japan.’17 As Russia moved to underscore its ‘socialism in one country’ line, effectively asking Japanese Marxists and others to repudiate their own nationalism, the pressure to resolve socialist and nationalist imperatives became acute. By 1933, when two stalwarts and leaders of the JCP, Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika, committed apostasy in prison and declared their willingness to embrace the Emperor System, the dam had broken, and Kōza-style Marxists began to defect in droves. Those who clung to Marxist strategy on the Kōza side were buoyed by the appearance of the 1932 Theses, which seemed to them to restore theory to a much better approximation of reality in Japan. The ruthlessness of state suppression and censorship under the auspices of the Emperor System ideology, and the advent of military cabinets in place of political party cabinets, made any notion of bourgeois democracy in Japan seem ludicrous. Although Japan was by then a rampant imperial power in China, the stark reality of rural poverty (dramatically accentuated by the Great Depression of 1929), combined with the emphasis on emperor-myths as an integral part of imperialist policy, made two-stage revolution the clear Kōza revolutionary strategy for the duration of the war. In the 1932 Theses we see Japanese particularism once more accentuated, with its imperialism described as ‘feudal,’ yet backed by an ‘aggressive monopoly capital’ and an ‘absolutist military.’18 As Kojima indicates, the hybridity of the Comintern’s portrayal of Japanese fascism and imperialism, possessing both feudal and advanced

16 The Political Theses of the Japanese Communist Party, April–June 1931, reproduced in Beckmann and Okubo, p. 313. 17 Ibid., p. 325. 18 Theses on the Situation in Japan and the Tasks of the Communist Party, May 1932, reproduced in Beckmann and Okubo, p. 334.

118

rikki kersten

capitalistic features, reinforced a similar reading of Japanese politics as a ‘hybrid’ entity. It also meant that while the Rōnō group could point to the perils of Japan’s fascism without qualification, the Kōza group were left to create new categories of political trauma (such as Emperor System fascism), and were distracted by the absolutist dimensions of a quasi-fascist threat.19 The 1932 Theses set out to ‘correct’ mistaken readings of Japanese capitalist development. Firstly, the Theses stated that Japan was indeed an unusual case, in that there was “a combination of very strong elements of feudalism with an advanced development of monopolistic capitalism.” In this strange conglomeration, the 1932 Theses argued, it was important to start with the monarchy, because “the monarchy is the main pillar of political reaction and of all the relics of feudalism in the country.” As such, “its destruction must be considered the first of the fundamental tasks of the revolution in Japan.” In an impressive display of theoretical acrobatics, the 1932 Theses describe the role of the emperor as simultaneously ‘feudal,’ ‘bourgeois’ and ‘fascist’ in function: A few historical peculiarities must not be allowed to obscure the all-important fact that the absolutist regime in Japan is a form of dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the landlords over the workers every bit as oppressive as fascism in other countries. The party must expose the manoeuvers of the ruling classes and the social democrats that are designed to cloak the monarchist regime and the growing reaction behind the bogey of a fascist menace, and thus to preserve and strengthen the dying monarchist illusions of the masses and divert them from the struggle against the chief enemy under present conditions—the bourgeois landlord monarchy.20

In the 1932 Theses, the primary function of the emperor is represented as ideological, yet at the same time, he is represented as the class enemy of the proletariat. Ten years after the 1922 Draft Platform of the Japanese Communist Party, the overthrow of the monarchy is restored as the primary objective of the revolution. However, according to the 1932 Theses this will only pave the way for the bourgeois-democratic revolution. While the 1932 Theses became the mantra of the Kōza school, it did not completely discourage the Rōnō group either. The recognition 19 Kojima Tsunehisa, Nihon shihonshugi ronsō-shi (Tokyo: Ariesu Shobō, 1976), p. 194. 20 Theses on the Situation in Japan 1932, p. 337.

the emperor and the left in interwar japan

119

of the emperor as a mainly ideological entity without a substantial material base, in alliance with the bourgeoisie and the landlords, was, to some extent, in accord with their reading of the emperor as present, but not pivotal. The Kōza school would soon publish their own extended analysis of the nature and history of Japanese capitalism in their seven-volume series of essays entitled Nihon shihonshugi hattatsu-shi kōza (Lectures on the History of the Development of Japanese Capitalism).21 This series gave the Kōza group their name, but it was written before the 1932 Theses had reached Japan. The 1932 Theses therefore reinforced what was now known as the ‘Kōza’ viewpoint, but at a time when the Kōza theorists were poised to submit to their ideological demons and commit apostasy. The Birth of the Rōnō Group The Rōnō group was born out of a cauldron of opportunities and threats that surrounded leftist activists in the early 1920s. Yamakawa Hitoshi was a seasoned socialist, and was in the thick of the fray when the first JCP was created in 1922. Yet a mere five months later, Yamakawa advocated a fundamental ‘change of direction’ for the JCP in the party mouthpiece, Zen’ei. His essay Musan kaikyū undō no hōkō tenkan (The Change of Direction of the Propertyless Classes Movement) precipitated the early disbandment of the JCP in March 1924, and can rightly be regarded as the catalyst for the debate on capitalism that followed. In his Change of Direction essay, Yamakawa argued that the energy of the organized left should be invested into a mass party rather than a vanguard elite movement, in the belief that the petit-bourgeoisie was poised to exclude the proletariat from the political sphere. In a repetitive and somewhat superficial manner, Yamakawa urged the JCP to move beyond polishing an advanced class consciousness amongst an elite few, to facilitating the growth of class consciousness amongst workers and tenant farmers by forming a mass political party: . . . if we simply passively deny bourgeois politics, the result is affirming bourgeois politics, the same as if we are supporting it. If we merely deny bourgeois politics intellectually, this is by no means the equivalent

21

Nihon shihonshugi hattatsu-shi kōza, 7 vols (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1932–1933).

120

rikki kersten of actively confronting bourgeois dominance. What we have to do is fight . . . we must oppose bourgeois politics with propertyless politics.22

It is tempting to substitute ‘bourgeois politics’ with ‘Emperor System’ in the above quotation, something the Kōza intellectuals would trumpet in the postwar era as the fatal flaw in Yamakawa’s argument. The Marxist left was subsequently divided between pro-Yamakawa and pro-Fukumoto cohorts for the remainder of the 1920s, as Yamakawa squared off against the brilliant theorist Fukumoto Kazuo (1894–1983) in a fight over tactics: the formation of a mass party versus the necessity of a vanguard movement. Yamakawa was opposed by Watanabe Masanosuke, Sano Manabu and others from the orthodox (pro-Comintern, pro-Leninist) camp, as the journal Marukusushugi (Marxism) became the principle platform for criticism of the Rōnō/ Yamakawa-ist perspective. The implications of Yamakawa’s reading of the revolutionary readiness of Japan would subsequently spark several strands of debate concerning Japanese capitalism and Marxist revolutionary strategy, notably: a debate over the origins of capitalism in the late Tokugawa and early Meiji periods (the manufacture debate), and the debate over strategy (a one- or two-stage revolution). Yamakawa and others proceeded to examine the entrails of class relations in the countryside, the classification of the Meiji Restoration in revolutionary terms as either a bourgeois-democratic revolution or an incomplete version thereof, and the composition of the feudal ‘relics’ that lingered on in Japanese politics and society. His December 1927 essay Seijiteki tōitsu sensen e (Towards a Political United Front) combined with the release of the 1927 Theses, prompted Yamakawa and likeminded thinkers to exit the JCP. Yamakawa would not appear in the pages of Marukusushugi again. Initially inclined to set up a new journal entitled Rōnō as a vehicle to oppose Fukumoto-ism, the defectors ultimately set up a ‘Rōnō faction’ that was dedicated to providing the intellectual foundations for a one-stage revolutionary strategy in Japan. Yamakawa later declared that the idea to name themselves the ‘Rōnō faction’ was not their own, and that “being called a ‘faction’ had never occurred to us, and was

22 Yamakawa Hitoshi, ‘Musan kaikyū undō no hōkō tenkan,’ reproduced in Shakaishugi, Gendai nihon shisō taikei, vol. 15 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1963), pp. 341–342.

the emperor and the left in interwar japan

121

disagreeable.”23 The battle lines were hereby drawn, though as we have noted, the Kōza school would only find its name with the appearance of its series in 1932–1933. For Yamakawa Hitoshi, memories of the state repression meted out to socialists, labor and anarchists in the preceding decade (which had continued up to the ‘white terror’ unleashed against the left in the aftermath of the 1923 earthquake) was a significant part of his thinking in the early 1920s. Given his pivotal role in the launch of what would become the debate on capitalism between 1927 and 1938, understanding Yamakawa’s perspective on the emperor is important. Did Yamakawa regard the emperor as a significant part of revolutionary strategy, and avoid theoretically confronting the emperor merely as a survival tactic? Or did he view the imperial system as essentially irrelevant, and fail to address confronting the emperor out of theoretical imperatives? Much has been written on this subject, often from very partisan perspectives that can be identified with the Kōza or Rōnō schools. Many Kōza sympathizers identify the 15 March 1928 arrests of JCP members as the moment when Yamakawa became a traitor to the party and to Marxism. Thereafter the label ‘non-JCP Marxist’ was seen by Kōza writers such as Uchida Jōkichi and Nakano Jirō as blatant cowardice on Yamakawa’s part; even Rōnō luminaries such as Sakisaka Itsurō concede that an association with Yamakawa was enough to spare one from unwelcome attention from the Thought Police.24 Beckmann and Okubo have noted Yamakawa’s belief that working through an illegal party was useless in terms of tactics.25 Yoshimi Yoshiaki similarly concedes that avoiding repression was a conscious goal of Yamakawa and his colleagues.26 While we can accept Beckmann and Okubo’s observation that promoting a one-stage theory of revolution had the result of enabling Yamakawa and the Rōnō cohort to avoid confronting the Emperor System, it does not necessarily follow that this was a theoretical objective.

Yamakawa Hitoshi, Yamakawa hitoshi jiden, p. 427. Sakisaka Itsurō, ‘Nihon shihonshugi ronsō’ in Andō Yoshio, Shōwa keizai shi e no shōgen (Tokyo: Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1966), vol. 2, p. 59. 25 Beckmann and Okubo, The Japanese Communist Party, p. 76. 26 Yoshimi Yoshiaki, ‘Rōnō-ha no soshiki to undō,’ in Hōsei Daigaku Ōhara Shakai Mondai Kenkyūjo ed., Rōnō-ha kikanshi bekkan (Tokyo: Hōsei Daigaku Shuppankai, 1982), p. 61. 23 24

122

rikki kersten

Itō Takashi has crafted a more subtle assessment of Yamakawa’s views on the emperor in the 1920s and their tactical consequences for the left thereafter. Itō recalls that Yamakawa had avoided associating himself with the pro-democracy movement in the postwar era because he feared his presence (as a known socialist) would attract the attention of the authorities and impede the movement. But Itō takes this further in maintaining that as leader of the fledgling JCP, Yamakawa went on to attack the democracy movement as a practical means through which to oppose the Emperor System. Itō argues that Yamakawa derided Taishō democracy (minponshugi ) as ineffectual because it ignored class conflict, and was forced to be apolitical in order to evade the label of ‘dangerous thought.’ Itō states that Yamakawa adopted this view because indirect criticism was the only viable avenue for criticizing the emperor at this time. But Yamakawa also had theoretical foundations for this approach, according to Itō. Yamakawa believed, says Itō, that it was not the task of the proletariat to oppose a feudal entity, instead it was up to capitalists to take on this challenge. As a result, Yamakawa “never once mentioned that opposing the Emperor System was up to the proletariat, either through legal or illegal means.”27 This would in turn have consequences for the proletariat down the line, when they waged their struggle against capitalism. Yamakawa accordingly switched his focus to anticipation of this next historical stage of proletarian revolution, and devised his famous ‘change of direction’ policy for the JCP. For Yamakawa: If you do not presume a united front against capitalism, then it will become nothing more than a minority movement against feudalism that lacks a historical foundation, it will attract the unwelcome attention of the authorities, and inevitably will cause obstacles to appear in the struggle against capitalism.28

Itō affirms that in his opinion, Yamakawa did in his own way seek to oppose the Emperor System. However, he clearly believes that Yamakawa was worse than ineffectual. Itō concludes that in undermining the democracy movement, Yamakawa helped deprive Japanese society of the capacity to oppose fascism. Moreover, in failing to alert the proletariat of the dangers of the Emperor System (particularly its integrative aspects) and in encouraging socialists to overlook the Emperor 27 28

Itō Takashi, Tennōsei to shakaishugi (Tokyo: Impakuto Shuppansha, 2002), p. 139. Itō Takashi, Tennōsei to shakaishugi, p. 115.

the emperor and the left in interwar japan

123

System, Yamakawa did a great disservice to the left in postwar Japan: “Yamakawa only suggested general resistance to an abstract reaction emanating from the Emperor System, while talking of a leap from an economic struggle to a successful political struggle on the part of the people.” As a result, “the movement to secure a bourgeois democracy crowded out the reality of opposing the institutions comprising the Emperor System.”29 We can conclude from this nuanced approach to Yamakawa’s views on the emperor and revolutionary strategy that in the judgment of at least one commentator, Yamakawa had some theoretical underpinning to his views on the emperor, however mistaken they may have been. Subsequently, in 1924 when Yamakawa believed that bourgeois democracy was about to take a great step forward with the advent of universal manhood suffrage and party political cabinets in 1925, he encouraged the JCP to disband and implement the united front approach. It was only a matter of time before the Comintern vented its displeasure at this ‘left wing social democratic’ treachery, and Yamakawa was pilloried in the 1925 Shanghai and 1926 Moscow Theses. The Political Dimensions of the Rōnō Position on the Emperor The emperor was certainly not front and center in the Rōnō group’s intellectual approach, though he served as the element that tied together their core premises, provided underpinning for their assertions, and differentiated them from the orthodox Marxist obsession with the Emperor System as the principle obstacle to revolution. The Rōnō position built upon the notions put forward by Yamakawa in his late 1920s essays, as follows: what was required in Japan was a mass party, not a vanguard party such as the JCP; feudal forces in Japan had no material foundation, therefore they were insignificant (this included class relations in the countryside); and it was not necessary to oppose the emperor because it was a bourgeois monarchy, and the bourgeoisie held political power. The Kōza position argued that the combination of semi-feudal class relations in the countryside, plus the very existence of the emperor and the constellation of institutions forming the Emperor System, meant that Japan’s bourgeois-democratic revolution in Meiji had been incomplete.

29

Ibid., p. 134, p. 145.

124

rikki kersten

Feudalism had to be overcome before the proletariat could make the bourgeoisie their primary enemy. In essence, the Rōnō position saw Japan in the late 1920s as ‘modern’ in every significant respect, whereas the Kōza group saw Japan as permeated by feudalism. The emperor was present in both approaches. For the Kōza group, the emperor was one of the main ‘feudal remnants’ that had to be eliminated; his presence and function distorted Japan’s imperialism and fascism, making it even more difficult to fight; and the authoritarian flavor of the Emperor System was a serious impediment to bourgeois-democratic revolution. The Rōnō position acknowledged the existence of ‘feudal remnants’ but discarded their significance. Although Rōnō intellectuals posited the absence of a ‘material base’ for feudal elements as the reason for drawing this conclusion, their argumentation revolved around political rather than socio-economic factors. In his Seijiteki tōitsu sensen e (Towards a Political United Front), Yamakawa outlined what would later be elaborated in more theoretical terms by Inomata Tsunao. In his postwar autobiography, Yamakawa stated this position clearly, freed from the heavy hand of the censors: The object of our political struggle centers on the political forces that comprise the imperialist bourgeoisie that have gathered around finance capital and monopoly capital. Our country is a bourgeois (capitalist) state that has already seen a bourgeois government established. In our country, where the bourgeois democratic revolution has not yet reached its final stage, many feudal elements and institutions still remain, starting with the Emperor System. These remnants (including the Emperor System) are no longer independent political forces, as they have been absorbed into and assimilated with the political forces of the bourgeoisie, and have become an element of those forces, instruments for strengthening the domination of the bourgeoisie. Even the landlords have become somewhat bourgeois, and they are gradually ceasing to constitute the absolutist social foundation upon which opposition to bourgeois government is performed. Therefore the next revolutionary stage (meaning a revolution in which power is transferred from one class to another) is going to be not a bourgeois democratic revolution, where power moves to the bourgeoisie, but a socialist revolution in which the proletariat will seize political power. No other revolution is possible.30

The Emperor System emerges here as something that needed to be interpreted correctly if Japan’s revolutionary strategy was to fit its revolutionary circumstances. The implication is that misreading the 30

Yamakawa Hitoshi, Yamakawa hitoshi jiden, p. 430.

the emperor and the left in interwar japan

125

emperor could fatally misdirect, even squander, this historic revolutionary opportunity. For Yamakawa, the Kōza cohort’s fixation on the Emperor System made the emperor a mistaken focus of political struggle, and made bourgeois democratic revolution a flawed strategy for the proletariat. For the Rōnō group, unless the right kind of revolution was attempted, there was a danger that there would be no revolution at all.31 The opening line of Seijiteki tōitsu sensen e made the paramountcy of politics clear: “the object of our political struggle is the political authority of the imperialist bourgeoisie.”32 When he stated that Japan in 1927 was completely dominated by the bourgeoisie, Yamakawa meant ‘in our country bourgeois political power has been completely established.’33 Yamakawa then elaborated the circumstances that had led to this outcome. Specifically, he maintained that the Meiji Restoration had been a genuine bourgeois-democratic revolution, even though the bourgeoisie had been the beneficiaries rather than the agents of their own success (instead, this role had been fulfilled by the lower level samurai). “The Restoration revolution had not lost its character as a revolution of the bourgeoisie against absolutist dictatorship”, because the samurai had been forced to conduct their revolution on the borrowed material foundations of the bourgeoisie.34 The outcome was that political power was not transferred to the bourgeoisie, but fell into their laps. In this way the characterization of the Meiji Restoration was ‘spun’ by Yamakawa and portrayed as a process that did not complete a bourgeois-democratic revolution, but rather led to the development of one. The bourgeoisie became dominant through ‘absorbing’ the myriad feudal remnants, such as the samurai and landlords, which continued to serve the class interests of the bourgeoisie and therefore, did not need to be eradicated by that bourgeoisie in another ‘revolution.’ A cynic might call this a Marxist version of Immaculate Conception: there was no revolution, but there was a revolutionary outcome. Yamakawa was forced by circumstance to use euphemisms to refer to the emperor and the Emperor System state, but the thrust of his

31 This point is argued in Koyama Hirotake and Iwamoto Eitarō, Nihon no hi-kyōsantō marukusushugi-sha (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō, 1962), pp. 144–45. 32 Yamakawa Hitoshi, ‘Seijiteki tōitsu no sensen e!’, Rōnō, vol. 1 No. 1 (December 1927), p. 2. 33 Yamakawa Hitoshi, ‘Seijiteki tōitsu’, p. 3. 34 Ibid., p. 5.

126

rikki kersten

argument is clear. The rapid growth of monopoly finance capital led to the assimilation of ‘feudal remnants’ into the dominant class of bourgeoisie, as the rapid growth of capitalism compromised the state (instead of the state being strengthened through state capitalism), and the advent of reaction amongst the dominant bourgeoisie led to the incorporation of ‘absolutist dictatorship forces’ into the bourgeoisie under the auspices of imperialism. In this manner the essence of the ‘absolutist dictatorial remnants’ was transformed, eliminating the necessity for the bourgeoisie to confront and defeat them. The bureaucracy and the military likewise had no independent material foundations upon which to oppose the primacy of the bourgeoisie, and besides, the bourgeoisie both needed and facilitated their common interests through their imperialist policies. If there are any feudal remnants, wrote Yamakawa, they will be either assimilated into the bourgeoisie, or they will remain irrelevant to the consolidation of bourgeois political power. What mattered, according to Yamakawa, was the understanding that bourgeois political power had reached the stage where “the transfer of political power from the feudal forces to the bourgeoisie was now complete.”35 Because the political strategy of the bourgeoisie was to co-opt the petit bourgeoisie and isolate the workers and farmers, it was imperative that a political force be created to represent those propertyless classes. Arguments over political analysis, class composition, revolutionary strategy and tactics were founded on divergent readings of the historical significance of the Meiji Restoration, and its role in the bigger story of how capitalism had developed in Japanese history. But when Yamakawa looked back on this interwar debate from the 1950s, he bemoaned the fact that in his view, Marxists had failed to appreciate the importance of political rather than theoretical escalation in this debate: If we look at this theoretically, we commence from an analysis of Japanese capitalism and develop this into a debate over political analysis and strategy. However, because of the divisive confrontation within the Marxist camp, this debate developed in quite the opposite direction.36

As a result, the real victor of this debate was Japanese imperialism, lamented Yamakawa. For the next few years, vehement debate would rage between the various journals associated with the Rōnō and Kōza positions. On the 35 36

Ibid., pp. 12–13. Yamakawa Hitoshi, Yamakawa hitoshi jiden, p. 436.

the emperor and the left in interwar japan

127

Kōza side, Watanabe Masanosuke, Ichikawa Shōichi, Takahashi Sadaki, Hirano Yoshitarō, Noro Eitarō, Yamada Moritarō, Hani Gorō, Hattori Shisō and others would use Marukusushugi and Rekishi kagaku as their main intellectual vehicles. On the Rōnō side, Yamakawa accompanied by Inomata Tsunao, Sakisaka Itsurō, Ōuchi Hyōe, Tsuchiya Takao and others would publish principally in Rōnō, Zen’ei, and Zenshin.37 In the course of this furious tit-for-tat battling, Inomata Tsunao (on the Rōnō side) and Noro Eitarō (on the Kōza side) emerged as the most respected and substantial theorists supporting their respective positions. We now turn to these two challenging thinkers in order to flesh out Rōnō ideas concerning the emperor and revolution. The Inomata-Noro Debate Toyoda has noted that the theoretical battle between Inomata and Noro revolved around the unique locus of the emperor in evaluations of Japanese capitalism and imperialism.38 More than anything, this focus on the emperor indicates a theoretical approach that is political rather than materialist (or historical materialist) in impulse. While passing references were made to the emperor’s role in overseeing and entrenching feudal land relations, it is the absolutist character of the imperial institution that was Noro’s intellectual preoccupation. For his part, Inomata essentially agreed that the Emperor System was manifested in institutional and ideological guises, but saw this as proof that the emperor was a marginal rather than a fundamental force. According to Toyoda, these respective approaches condemned both Noro and Inomata, as they both hopelessly confused the superstructure and substructure in their analyses.39 Inomata became known as the Rōnō group’s most original and influential thinker, despite the fact that his interaction with the Rōnō group was fleeting and occasionally acrimonious, ultimately seeing him leave the group in 1929 (although this did not prevent him from being arrested along with the other Rōnō members in 1938). Inomata’s privileging of the political resurfaced repeatedly in his writings in the 37 For extensive membership lists of the two groups see Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan, p. 37. 38 Toyoda Shirō, Nihon shihonshugi ronsō hihan, Nihon shihonshugi kōzō ronsō, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Keizai Shimposha, 1958), p. 44. 39 Toyoda Shirō, Nihon shihonshugi ronsō hihan, p. 38.

128

rikki kersten

late 1920s and early 1930s, as the so-called ‘strategy debate’ took off. The basic question for Inomata was: “what are the class relations at the center of political authority?”40 If one looks at the landlords, then ‘politically they follow and depend on the bourgeoisie.’41 For Inomata, “the basic strategic issue is the transference of political power,” and the bottom line was: “if we move away from political power we cannot have strategy.”42 Following Yamakawa’s cue, Inomata threw down the gauntlet to the orthodox communists in his seminal 1927 essay, ‘Gendai nihon burujoajii no seiji teki chi’i’ (The Political Status of the Bourgeoisie in Contemporary Japan). Here again, we see the basic premise informing the analysis of Japan’s revolutionary readiness anchored in the realm of politics. Inomata’s core argument is that those who advocate a two-stage revolution for Japan have failed to appreciate the significance of the fact that the bourgeoisie are in command of political power. According to Inomata, logically this could not occur unless the bourgeoisie had an appropriate material foundation to support them. What is interesting here is that Inomata inverts the incidence of the political and the material in interpreting the revolutionary potential of Japanese society. In other words, it is not the ongoing political presence of feudal remnants after 1868 that matter, but the fact that logically these feudal elements had no independent material foundation now that the bourgeoisie were in political control: I recognise that strong feudal absolutist elements remain . . . We must not forget that the political forces that operate in a feudal absolutist manner do so only through institutions and ideological channels, in other words they have lost their own class and material foundations. The elements that can be seen as constituting this kind of political force are the aristocracy, the military, the bureaucracy, and the landlords.43

It was not the existence of the material foundation that put the bourgeoisie in charge politically; rather the fact of their political dominance implied the existence of an appropriate material base. Inomata under-

40 Inomata Tsunao, ‘Hiyorimishugi senryaku ka “senryakuteki” hiyorimishugi ka,’ Part 1, Rōnō. vol. 2, No. 2 (February 1928), p. 135. 41 Ibid., p. 138. 42 Inomata, ‘Hiyorimishugi senryaku’ ka, “senryakuteki” hiyorimishugi ka,’ Part 2, Rōnō, vol. 2, No. 3 (March 1928), pp. 111, 116. 43 Inomata Tsunao, ‘Gendai nihon burujoajii no seijiteki chi’i’, Taiyō, November 1927, p. 13.

the emperor and the left in interwar japan

129

scored his argument by explaining how this material base had historically emerged through the Restoration and post-Restoration process. In addition to dissecting the process and consequences of the Meiji Restoration, both Inomata and Noro were impelled to convey their understanding of Japan’s imperialism to shore up their arguments. Inomata and Noro agreed that Japan’s imperialist, expansionist frenzy was evidence of reaction, but this is as far as their agreement went. Inomata believed that imperialist reaction was driven by a bourgeoisie that was in fear of confrontation with the masses. Imperialism was not evidence that the reactionary bourgeoisie had merged with feudal absolutist entities for their survival, as the Kōza group maintained. In truth, argued Inomata, it was the other way around. By inventing a coherent feudal ruling authority, wrote Inomata, Noro and his followers were fooled into believing that the absolutist forces were the main enemy of the proletariat. This was not only wrong, but dangerously wrong in Inomata’s opinion. Inomata contested that this kind of approach probably made the bourgeoisie chuckle quietly amongst themselves. As they, the bourgeoisie, toyed with the feudal remnants, used them and even contemplated getting rid of them altogether, the proletariat suddenly came along and offered to do the job for them, saying: ‘you are not our ostensible enemy, rather it is those feudal remnants.’44 While Inomata and Noro engaged in an intense theoretical war about the extent to which the feudal nature of landholding had been affected by the reforms of the Meiji government, it was the implausible composition of the contemporary ruling authorities—comprising feudal, absolutist and monopoly capital entities—that kept resurfacing in their writings. Inomata stressed the fact that “since the changes brought about by the Meiji Restoration, the capitalists have progressed, while the landlord class has not held power once.”45 Inomata went on to repeat Yamakawa’s arguments concerning the process of the Meiji Restoration, and the gradual assimilation of feudal elements into the ruling bourgeoisie. Inomata stated that while feudal remnants were indeed present in politics, it should not be assumed that because they were absolutist in character, they were dominant. Rather, the act of

44 45

Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 10.

130

rikki kersten

undergoing the assimilation process had altered the nature of those feudal forces, much like ‘putting new sake into old barrels.’46 Noro knew that because of state repression, he could not challenge Inomata effectively by referring specifically to the Emperor System, let alone its totalitarian feudal character. Noro instead relied on an indirect mode of criticism of the Emperor System, and focused on Inomata’s error in declaring the feudal forces in the ruling bloc were irrelevant because they had no material foundation. The emperor could be included by inference in this approach, because in Noro’s view, the Meiji Restoration had seen the transfer of land ownership in name to the imperial house, which was part of the ruling bloc. While the Meiji government’s reforms affected the feudal practice of landholding, according to Noro they did not remove the feudal nature of class relations between landowners and laborers (tenants and farmers). When Noro criticized the persistence of feudal dynamics in rural Japan after 1868, he was including the emperor in that criticism. In this spirit, Noro pointed out that post-1868 landlords used more than material means to dominate rural laborers; they continued to use other feudal means that were political and social in nature to exploit rural workers. Inomata had set great store in the tax reforms and introduction of a cash economy in Meiji, and had interpreted that as evidence that feudal landholding practices were thereby abolished. But Noro argued that despite these reforms, landlords used tenants and took their surplus as profits, and were in a relationship of direct economic and political dominance over tenants. The era of feudal production had merely been transfigured into an era of feudal rents. Tenants worked for subsistence, not for profit; they were in fact the material foundation of the feudal absolutist forces that Inomata claims had been wiped out: “it is here we see the powerful material foundations of the semi-feudal authoritarian state structure that represents absolutist dominance in Japan.”47 Noro underpinned his argument concerning the persistent, political nature of feudal elements in post-1868 Japan with substantial analyses of the land reforms of Meiji, and their failure to eradicate the feudal dynamics of class relations between landholders, farmers and tenants

Ibid., p. 23. Noro Eitarō, ‘Inomata Tsunao cho “Gendai nihon burujoajii no seijiteki chi’i” o hyōsu,’ Shisō, April 1929, p. 123. 46 47

the emperor and the left in interwar japan

131

even as monopoly capitalism became dominant in the urban industrial economy. Noro further maintained that with the advent of Meiji, feudal forces had not only remained intact, but had become more systematized. On the face of it, Noro agreed with Inomata that the Meiji Restoration had been a political bourgeois revolution at the level of rulers and those with property: The Meiji Restoration was clearly a political revolution, and generally speaking, a social revolution as well. This was not, as is widely seen, just a return to imperial rule, instead it was a powerful social revolution whereby capitalists and capitalist landlords were put into a dominant position.48

But the limited ambition of the key revolutionary slogan—ōsei fukkō (Restoration of Kingly Rule)—was responsible for the fact that ‘the material power to overturn the feudal system did not develop.’49 In other words, Noro believed that it was the return to imperial rule that had provided the political foundation for the persistence and consolidation of feudal material remnants. Logically, the presence of this feudal political force was completely integrated with, and responsible for, its material foundations. The second Restoration slogan—sonnō jōi (Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians)—entrenched the role of the imperial house, and crucially, provided the momentum for capitalists to actively create the material foundations for Japan’s confrontation with the imperialist western capitalist powers. Crucially though, Noro seems to regard these two strands of revolution to be concurrent and complimentary, and yet separate in terms of social and class realities. The bifurcation of Japanese modernity, and the lesion between urban and rural development, is manifest in this reading of Japanese capitalism. The parasitic connection between the city and the country, the modern and the feudal, in Noro’s view, ensured that these feudal aspects were incorporated into the dominant capitalist regime as an integral part of Japan’s capitalism without losing their pre-modern, feudal character. Moreover, “because capitalist development of agriculture was insufficient, [the farmers] remained as before dependent on feudal, traditional

48 Noro Eitarō, Nihon shihonshugi hattatsu-shi (Tokyo; Iwanami Shoten, 1954 [1930]), p. 60. 49 Ibid., p. 59.

132

rikki kersten

means of production, and this means that capitalist domination could not directly reach them.”50 Noro was arguing that feudalism was integral to both the material and political dimensions of modern Japan after 1868: “because of the special nature of our state structure and the rapid high growth of the dominant, capitalist mode of production . . . the out-of-power, feudal mode of production has not been sufficiently eradicated,”51 and instead the feudal mode of production is at the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, despite the contradictions this arrangement incorporates. In effect, Noro saw that the presence of feudal entities in the political realm (the emperor and associated institutions) made the persistence of feudal class relations in the rural economy possible, and this in turn underpinned the capitalist domination of the national economy. Despite his apparent focus on the feudal material foundations of feudal political entities, Noro ended up making a case for the political foundations of material feudalism. For him, capitalist domination of modern Japan could not have happened without the influence of feudal entities entrenched at the top and bottom of Japanese society. While Noro attempted to build an argument based on the material dynamics or substructure of Japan after the Meiji Restoration, he implicitly prioritized the political function of feudal actors in the process. As Toyoda notes, Noro accepted that feudal (emperor) and capitalist (bourgeois) entities coexisted in political power, but he did not accept that ‘the growing power of the bourgeoisie constituted the bourgeoisification of the Emperor System’ as Inomata maintained.52 To the contrary, we can argue that for Noro, the feudal pulse of the emperor in politics and society fundamentally affected the substance of capitalism itself. Economic domination was clearly not enough of an argument for Noro to believe that the bourgeoisie were ‘in power’ in their own right politically. While feudal class relations remained dominant in the countryside, feudal forces would remain dominant in politics. Only the political supremacy of feudal remnants such as the emperor could ensure that these feudal class relations continued in rural Japan.

50 Noro Eitarō, ‘Nihon shihonshugi gendankai no mujun,’ Chūō kōron, January 1930, p. 57. 51 Noro, Nihon shihonshugi hattatsu-shi, p. 154. 52 Toyoda, Nihon shihonshugi ronsō hihan, p. 47.

the emperor and the left in interwar japan

133

Capitalists for their part were happy to function within this semi-feudal twilight zone, as their class interest continued to be served. When we are asked to categorize the interwar Kōza position on the emperor, it is invariably the focus on the ideological dimension of the Emperor System that is seen to constitute a Kōza view. Given our argument outlined above, we cannot neatly categorize Noro in this way. Noro was unable to address the ideological dimension explicitly and therefore tried to delineate the Kōza position in broader terms, paying attention to both substructure and superstructure, utilizing the former to implicitly attack the latter. Despite Noro’s close affiliation with the orthodox JCP line and his undoubted intellectual influence in the party, his premature death in 1934 in police custody truncated his long-term intellectual impact at a particularly traumatic time in the party’s history. Toyoda remarks that the Lectures on the History of the Development of Japanese Capitalism series, which had been planned and coordinated by Noro, did not correspond with Noro’s original intention when they finally appeared.53 Interestingly, Noro’s image as a martyr has seen overwhelmingly positive assessments of him published in the postwar era. Toyoda is representative of this when he writes: While tightly allied with the party, Noro debated the Fukumoto-ists and the Rōnō group, scientifically analysed the relations between classes in Japan, armed the labor movement with deeper ideas and theories orientated towards the 1932 Theses, and raised the theoretical level of Marxism-Leninism in Japan.54

Anti-communist authors, such as Ueyama Shumpei on the other hand, use Noro as a prime example of slavish adherence to the Comintern line, even at the expense of subjective intellectual integrity. Ueyama points to Noro’s landmark work Nihon shihonshugi hattatsu-shi (History of the Development of Japanese Capitalism) as an example of ‘the lack of subjective thinking’ that undermined a more scientific analysis of modern Japanese history.55 Yet we can observe that while Noro may have squirmed through layered qualifications concerning the feudal

Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 38. 55 Ueyama Shumpei, ‘Shisō ni okeru “heiwateki kyōzon” no mondai,’ in Iwanami kōza gendai shisō, Gendai nihon no shisō, vol. XI (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1957), pp. 217–237. See also Ueyama Shumpei, ‘Noro Eitarō,’ in Shakai kagaku kenkyū No. 38 (May 1965), p. 46. 53 54

134

rikki kersten

overhang of the Meiji Restoration, his interpretation of the emperor remained consistent. This interpretation was not narrowly aimed at the emperor’s ideological function, but instead at his socio-political role. Conclusion Our examination of the debate on capitalism, particularly the theme of the appropriate revolutionary strategy for Japan’s proletariat in the late 1920s and 1930s, leads us to some counter-intuitive conclusions. Orthodox Marxists of the Kōza school, such as Noro Eitarō who argued for a two-stage revolution for Japan, are best known for their focus on the emperor and the oppressive effect of the Emperor System, yet in Noro we see an attempt to focus on feudal class relations in the countryside to underpin the two-stage strategy. Despite the fact that their underlying concern was essentially political, the ostensible focus was with feudal modes of production and class relations in the countryside. With the Rōnō group, we would expect to find a primary concern with an analysis of imperialism based on evidence of monopoly capitalism to validate the call for a one-stage revolution. Although we do encounter this perspective in the work of signature Rōnō thinkers such as Inomata Tsunao, it is teamed with an overwhelming preoccupation with the political. Inomata’s contention that Japan had attained an advanced stage of capitalist development, emanated from his conclusion that the bourgeoisie possessed dominant political authority. Without this foundational notion, Inomata’s argumentation would have been entirely different, possibly even more ‘Marxist.’ There are obvious reasons why Marxist thinkers might have felt constrained from openly acknowledging this political obsession—even rudimentary Marxist strategy must be seen to emanate from a material foundation, not from an ideological or political one. In the context of crisis that over-ran Marxism in the 1930s, the imperative to stick to the orthodox line made these constraints even more binding. And yet, when faced with the contradictions of contemporary Japan in the economic and political spheres, self-designated Marxists found themselves compelled to place the political into the midst of their Marxism. We might assume that this caused more grief for the orthodox Kōza group than for the outcast Rōnō group, as the Kōza strategists were the guardians of the Japan Communist Party integrity in the eyes of the Comintern. But some scholars claim that Inomata cherished a desire for the

the emperor and the left in interwar japan

135

Rōnō group to be recognized as a more legitimate bearer of Marxist strategy than their Kōza counterparts, presumably because Inomata believed this to be true.56 The siren call of theoretical legitimacy clearly resonated with both Kōza and Rōnō thinkers, even though they both strayed rather significantly from an orthodox Marxist line in different ways. The mish-mash of substructure and superstructure in interwar Marxist thinking reflected a non-Marxist compulsion to consider the emperor in political as well as economic terms, or more accurately, to situate the emperor as a political actor in Japan’s modern revolutionary trajectory. Whereas national socialists achieved this synthesis through reconciling the emperor with socialism, Kōza and Rōnō Marxists did so by using the political sphere as a reference point for their analysis of the relations of production. This response points to deeper issues about how particularism forges and distorts the process of indigenization of theory, and the extent to which theory can be molded or managed to communicate relevance. Circumstances also dictated against any acknowledgement of likemindedness between Kōza and Rōnō interlocutors. After the arrests of communists in 1928, and especially after the communist apostasies of 1933, enmity dominated Kōza-Rōnō relations. The fate of the Kōza group only anticipated that of the Rōnō group by a few years in terms of imprisonment, but the Rōnō members’ apparent quest for legality—or personal safety—made any notion of genuine theoretical engagement between them impossible in the 1930s. But does this accusation of cowardice fully explain the Rōnō position? Was Yamakawa Hitoshi right when he insisted on a legal political party to represent the propertyless classes? Did this represent the most practical, or the only plausible, means of opposing the Emperor System from the mid1920s onwards? An optimistic assessment would be that the Rōnō position outlined by Yamakawa and pursued by Inomata and others represented a vote of confidence in the substance of Taishō democracy, and the era of party political cabinets. Shillony has outlined the surprising extent to which Japan continued to function as a parliamentary democracy

56 See for example Koyama and Iwamoto, Nihon no hi-kyōsantō marukusushugisha, p. 144.

136

rikki kersten

throughout the Second World War,57 though the advent of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association and the voluntary disbandment of political parties in early Shōwa is a sobering reminder of the darkness of those days. Another reading of the Rōnō line on the emperor is to consider whether theoretically marginalizing the emperor had the potential to lead others to actually see the imperial institution as a peripheral force in the future. By stressing the political as well as economic dynamics of modern Japan in terms that made the emperor an anachronism or an irrelevance in terms of historical momentum, the way was opened to consider alternative realities. In the crucible of Emperor System totalitarianism, challenging the emperor on political grounds, even if it was through omission rather than through direct confrontation, may be seen as the most daring strategy of all.

57 Ben-Ami Shillony, Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1981).

CONSERVATIVE DISSATISFACTION WITH THE MODERN EMPERORS Ben-Ami Shillony The Tragic Fate of Assertive Emperors In Japan, nationalism has usually been centered on the monarchy. The traditional belief in an unbroken line of emperors, descending from the sun goddess, has long provided the Japanese with national pride and a sense of uniqueness. However, unlike kings and emperors of most other countries, the Japanese monarchs have never been national leaders. They have not initiated policies, presented theories or addressed crowds. Since ancient times, the emperors of Japan have been ritualperforming sacred figures, manipulated by others who wielded power. There were very few assertive emperors in Japan, and their abortive attempts to actually rule had tragic results. The most famous emperor who wished to rule was Go-Daigō (r. 1319–1339) in the fourteenth century. His attempt to run the state on the Chinese model brought about a protracted civil war and a 56-year schism in the imperial family (1336–1392). Although Go-Daigō’s ‘Southern Court’ came eventually to be regarded as the legitimate branch, it was the illegitimate “Northern Court” that had prevailed and from which all the subsequent emperors have stemmed. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when Japan was coerced into opening its doors to the west, another assertive emperor, Kōmei (r. 1846–1867), occupied the throne. Alarmed by the prospect of western barbarians defiling the soil of Japan, he found himself in a quandary. On the one hand, he opposed the opening of the country and supported the nationalists who wished to drive out the ‘barbarians.’ But, on the other hand, he insisted on preserving the internal political status quo, and resisted the nationalists who wished to overthrow the shogunal government (bakufu), which had just opened the doors of Japan. He was thus for jōi (‘expel the barbarians’) and against sonnō (‘revere the emperor’), opposing the reformist samurai and nobles who wished to open the country and ‘restore’ power to the emperor.

138

ben-ami shillony

Unlike his predecessors, Kōmei could not be persuaded to change his convictions. In January 1858 he wrote to Chancellor Kujō Hisatada: Do they suppose I can be bought? If, as long as I am the ruler of the country, I allow myself to become a mere dummy and permit trading with foreign barbarians, I shall lose the confidence of the people and will leave a shameful reputation for generations to come.1

Kōmei dispatched envoys to the leading Shinto shrines, asking the gods to send a divine wind (kamikaze) that would destroy the ‘barbarians’ and punish the ‘disloyal’ Japanese who colluded with them.2 By this behavior, Kōmei became an obstacle to the opening of the country and to the establishment of a modern state.3 The unprecedented dilemma of how to cope with an emperor who endangers the interests of his country, opposes the policies of his government, and at the same time acts against those who wish to restore him to power, was solved by Kōmei’s sudden death in January 1867 at the age of thirty-six. The official explanation given for his death was smallpox, but well-informed figures, such as the British envoy Ernest Satow and Counselor Nakayama Tadayasu (Emperor Meiji’s maternal grandfather), believed that he had been poisoned. Satow wrote: I was assured by a Japanese well acquainted with what went on behind the scenes that he had been poisoned. He was by conviction utterly opposed to any concessions to foreigners, and had therefore been removed out of the way by those who foresaw that the coming downfall of the Bakufu would force the court into direct relations with Western Powers.4

Nakayama Tadayasu wrote in his diary that he thought Emperor Kōmei had been assassinated and that this fact had been kept as top secret information.5 Although the assassination theory has never been substantiated, the fact that knowledgeable people at the time believed it shows that the sanctity of an emperor could not protect him from murder.

1 Donald Keene, Emperor of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 712 n. 26. 2 Keene, Emperor of Japan, p. 38. 3 Fujita Satoru, Bakumatsu no tennō (Tokyo: Kōdansha sensho, 1994). 4 Ernest Satow, A Diplomat in Japan (London: Oxford University Press, 1968. Reprint from the 1921 original edition), pp. 185–186; See also: Keene, Emperor of Japan, pp. 94–97. 5 Asukai Masamichi, Meiji taitei (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1989), p. 103.

conservative dissatisfaction with the modern emperors 139 The Acclaimed Meiji and Taishō Emperors The reformist samurai, who seized power and carried out the Meiji Restoration of 1868, were fortunate to have Kōmei’s son, the fifteenyear-old Mutsuhito, known after his death as the Meiji Emperor, as their monarch. The young emperor, whose powers had been formally restored, could easily be manipulated. He sanctioned the reforms which his father had opposed, legitimized the opening of Japan, and blessed its transformation into a modern state. No major friction existed between him and the government, except for some initial grumbles that he was not serious enough in handling state affairs.6 When his views did differ from those of the government, as in the case of the wars against China and Russia which he had initially resented, he accepted the judgment of his government.7 The Meiji Emperor was given credit for all the state’s successes, while the failures were attributed to incompetent officials and advisers. Japan’s victories and progress in the Meiji era made the emperor into a towering figure, the central pillar of national loyalty and nationalist ideology. He symbolized tradition as well as modernization, ethno-centrism as well as cosmopolitanism, poetry as well as the arts of war.8 Although his personal impact on policy was marginal, both the government and the intellectuals invoked his prestige for promoting their political and social agendas. In 1875, the liberal educator Fukuzawa Yukichi called upon the Japanese people to manifest ‘complete loyalty’ to the throne. Adopting western civilization, he argued, was the most honorable way of serving the emperor.9 Open criticism of the throne was not permitted. The penal code of 1880 imposed prison terms on those who committed fukeizai (the crime of lèse majesté). Only a small group of anarchists dared to denounce the emperor and call for the abolition of the monarchy. In 1907 expatriate Japanese anarchists posted an ‘Open Letter to Mutsuhito, the Emperor

6 Kido Takayoshi, The Diary of Kido Takayoshi (trans. Sidney Brown and Akiko Hirota. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1983), vol. 3, pp. 32, 198–199, 204–205; Sidney D. Brown, “Kido Takayoshi and the Young Emperor Meiji, A Subject as His Sovereign’s Pedagogue, 1868–1877,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, fourth series, no. 1 (1986), pp. 2–3. 7 Meiji tennō-ki (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1968), vol. 8, p. 481; vol. 10, p. 598. 8 Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 78–83. 9 Fukuzawa Yukichi, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization (trans. D.A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst. Tokyo: Sophia University, 1973), p. 28.

140

ben-ami shillony

of Japan’ on the porch of the Japanese consulate in San Francisco. It said: “Your Excellency Mutsuhito, old friend! Poor old friend, Mutsuhito! Your time is just about up. The bomb is right in our surroundings, just to blow up.” Four years later, in 1911, the anarchist Kōtoku Shūsui and eleven of his friends were executed on charges of plotting to assassinate the emperor. Emperor Meiji’s death and state funeral in 1912 stirred nationalist feelings. His sickly son and successor Yoshihito, known after his death as the Taishō Emperor, bathed in the prestige of his illustrious father, and like him followed the government’s directions. Although he personally admired the German kaiser, he declared war on Germany in 1914 when the government decided to do so. Despite his poor health, Taishō was a popular monarch. In a public opinion poll conducted in 1924, which asked people to name the greatest figure in history, the Taishō Emperor led the list with 21 percent, far ahead of Emperor Meiji (5 percent), Buddha (5 percent), Confucius (1 percent), and Emperor Jimmu (1 percent).10 His physical feebleness increased his popularity. When the gravity of his sickness was made public in 1926, there was an outpouring of compassion for him, and several people even committed suicide.11 Both the liberal and the nationalist reformists of the time hailed the emperor in order to promote their goals. The advocate of democracy Yoshino Sakuzō claimed that the best service that the Japanese could render the emperor was to participate in his government.12 The radical nationalist Kita Ikki, in his treatise Nihon kaizō hōan taikō (Plan for the Reorganization of Japan), advocated a revolutionary empire, led by the emperor as the supreme representative of the people.13 Although Kita praised the monarchy, he called for the abolition of the aristocracy and for the nationalization of the emperor’s estates. These proposals were not allowed to be published, but they were included in clandestine copies of the book. 10 Nakamura Masanori, Sengo-shi to shōchō tennō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1992), pp. 51–53; Hara Takeshi, Taishō tennō (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 2000). 11 Dohi Akio and Tomura Masahiro, eds., Tennō no daigawari to watashitachi (Tokyo: Nihon Kirisuto Kyōdan Shuppankyoku, 1988), pp. 59–63; Stephen S. Large, Emperor Hirohito and Shōwa Japan (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 116. 12 Tetsuo Najita, “Some Reflections on Idealism in the Political Thought of Yoshino Sakuzō,” in Bernard S. Silberman and H.D. Harootunian, eds., Japan in Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 40–41. 13 Kita Ikki, Kita ikki chosaku-shū (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1959), vol. 2, pp. 372–373; Ryusaku Tsunoda, Wm. Theodore de Bary, Donald Keene, eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 778–784.

conservative dissatisfaction with the modern emperors 141 Hirohito Disappoints the Nationalists Emperor Taishō’s son Hirohito, known after his death as the Shōwa Emperor, became regent in 1921 and succeeded the throne in 1926. He was well educated, young, healthy, good looking, and serious, having all the reasons to be revered. However, the nationalists and the military harbored, from the beginning, strong reservations about his liberal views. In 1921, General Nara Takeji, who accompanied Crown Prince Hirohito on his tour of Europe, wrote in his diary with dismay: “The very rational-minded prince does not believe that the ancestors of the imperial house are truly gods nor that the present emperor is a living deity [arahitogami].”14 Two years later, Hirohito was a victim of an assassination attempt, when the anarchist Namba Daisuke fired a pistol at him. Namba missed, but was sentenced to death and executed. The conservatives’ disenchantment with Hirohito was due to the deteriorating external and internal circumstances. Instead of the victorious wars and progress of the Meiji era, at the beginning of Hirohito’s reign Japan became embroiled in a long struggle with Chinese nationalism and with western interests and suffered economic setbacks. Unlike the Meiji establishment, which was more or less united, the Shōwa establishment split into feuding camps. Hirohito, because of his liberal education and character, tended to side with the moderate leaders like Prince Saionji Kimmochi and Count Makino Nobuaki, and therefore was resented by the nationalists in the military and the bureaucracy. Initially, Hirohito was more assertive than his father and grandfather. In 1929, he rebuked Prime Minister General Tanaka Giichi for not punishing the army officers who had assassinated the Chinese warlord Zhang Zuolin. This rebuke forced the prime minister to resign, and was probably the cause of his sudden death two months later. Following that affair, Prince Saionji and Count Makino admonished Hirohito for his excessive interference in political affairs. These liberal statesmen, afraid of dragging the crown into controversial issues, persuaded Hirohito not to antagonize the government, but by doing so, they made him amenable to future pressures from the military-led cabinets. In his postwar “Monologue” Hirohito admitted: “ . . . after this incident, I resolved to

14 Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), p. 119.

142

ben-ami shillony

approve whatever the cabinet submitted to me, even if I harbored a contrary opinion.”15 The military and the right wing disapproved of Hirohito’s support of the conciliatory policy of Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi who, against the navy’s hawkish position, signed the London naval treaty of 1930. In the following year, they were displeased when the emperor hesitated to endorse the army’s seizure of Manchuria, carried out without government authorization. In 1931, Harada Kumao, the secretary of Prince Saionji, wrote in his diary that senior officers in the army were speaking ill of the emperor, referring to him as mediocre (bonyō).16 Several weeks later, Prince Saionji learned that the reservists were spreading a rumor that the emperor, instead of attending to state affairs, was playing mahjong with the empress.17 In 1933, Harada told the emperor that senior members of the army ministry and the general staff were ‘questioning the sagacity of His Majesty.’18 The military looked askance at Hirohito’s interest in science and his preoccupation with marine biology, contrary to former emperors, who had engaged in poetry. The Meiji Emperor composed about 100,000 waka poems, probably more than any other poet in the world.19 The Taishō Emperor wrote Chinese poems (kanshi). In 1933, the minister of the imperial household, Yuasa Kurahei, confided to Harada, that “there are those who think it inappropriate for the emperor to spend so much time on research in micro-organisms, time which should be devoted to a deeper study of his duties as sovereign.”20 Hirohito Rebuked by His Soldiers In 1935, a controversy broke out in Japan concerning the constitutional status of the emperor. Was he an ‘organ’ (kikan) of the state, as Tokyo Imperial University professor Minobe Tatsukichi had been teaching for many years, or was he, as the nationalists claimed, a sacred entity

Shōwa tennō dokuhaku-roku (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 1995), p. 28. Harada Kumao, Saionji-kō to seikyoku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1950–1956), vol. 2, p. 47. 17 Harada, Saionji-kō, vol. 2, p. 63. 18 Harada, Saionji-kō, vol. 3, p. 208. 19 Ben-Ami Shillony, Enigma of the Emperors (Kent: Global Oriental, 2005), pp. 144–146. 20 Harada, Saionji-kō, vol. 3, p. 133. 15 16

conservative dissatisfaction with the modern emperors 143 transcending the state? Hirohito, who was the subject of this controversy, sided with the liberal Minobe, and for that reason he was resented by the military. According to the diary of Hirohito’s chief aide-de-camp General Honjō Shigeru, the general told the emperor: The military worships His Majesty as divinity incarnate, and if His Majesty were to be treated just like any other person in accordance with the organ theory, it would create grave difficulties in the areas of military education and the supreme command.21

Hirohito, as he recounted in his postwar “Monologue”, rejected Honjō’s arguments, telling him: The structure of my body is the same as that of any other human being; therefore I am not a god. It irritates me to hear things like that.22

As Masuda Tomoko has pointed out, it was highly ironic that the army, which regarded the emperor as god incarnate, saw no problem in opposing his views on the Minobe theory.23 In February 1936, a group of young army officers, influenced by the writings of Kita Ikki and supported by higher echelons in the army, attempted a coup d’état to ‘liberate’ the emperor from his ‘evil advisers.’ Under the slogan of a Shōwa Restoration, they seized the center of Tokyo and killed the finance minister, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, and a senior army officer. To their astonishment, Hirohito, who did not wish to be ‘liberated,’ opposed the insurrection, warning that if the rebels were not suppressed he would personally lead troops against them. This was the most assertive action that Hirohoto had ever taken, but it was directed against rebels and not against the government. The emperor’s unequivocal opposition to the rebellion tilted the scales against it. The insurrection was suppressed and its leaders were court-martialed and executed, together with their mentor Kita Ikki.24 One of the rebel leaders, Isobe Asaichi, expressed his outrage against Hirohito in his prison diary: Oh Emperor Meiji, oh goddess of the Ise Shrine, where are you? Why aren’t you helping our emperor? . . . Eight million gods of Japan, why

21 Honjo Shigeru, Emperor Hirohito and his Chief Aide-de-Camp, The Honjo Diary, 1933–36 (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1982), p. 131. 22 Shōwa tennō dokuhaku-roku, p. 31. 23 Masuda Tomoko, Tennō-sei to kokka (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1999), p. 289. 24 Ben-Ami Shillony, Revolt in Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).

144

ben-ami shillony are you negligent? Why don’t you help our wretched emperor (itamashii heika)? . . . Your Majesty, how badly you conduct the affairs of state . . . If you pursue this course any longer, you will arouse the wrath of the gods. You are the emperor, but if you stray from the way of the gods, you shall forfeit your throne.25

Hirohito was probably unaware of this diary, but he was familiar with the assumptions on which Isobe’s threats rested. This can explain the emperor’s behavior on the eve of the Pacific War. Theoretically, he could have vetoed the attack on Pearl Harbor, but the only precedent in modern times of an emperor trying to overrule the government was Hirohito’s great-grandfather Emperor Kōmei. Coincidentally, at a meeting of the Kansai Division of the Society for the History of Japanese Medicine in July 1940, at the height of emperor worship in Japan, a medical doctor by the name of Saeki Riichirō announced that, after examining the diary of a court physician, he came to the conclusion that Emperor Kōmei had been poisoned by a woman who acted on the instructions of Iwakura Tomomi.26 In his postwar “Monologue”, Hirohito admitted that had he vetoed the war, “the men whom I trusted around me would have been killed and my own life would not have been guaranteed.”27 Hirohito sanctioned the war both as a constitutional monarch endorsing the decisions of his government, and as a traditional Japanese emperor accepting the judgment of the military lords. Like Emperor Meiji in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars and Emperor Taishō in the First World War, he approved the decision to go to war, which he initially did not like, and devoted himself to its success. His personal fondness of Britain, like his father’s fondness of Germany, did not affect his behavior. Demands that Hirohito Resign Japan’s defeat did not disgrace Hirohito. When he toured the devastated country a few months after the war, huge crowds greeted him wherever he went. As before, the people gave him credit for what went right, 25 Isobe Asaichi, “Gokuchū nikki,” in Hashikawa Bunzō, ed., Chōkokka-shugi (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1964. Gendai nihon shisō taikei, vol. 31), pp. 174–175; Kōno Tsukasa, ed., Niniroku jiken (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1972), pp. 282, 293. 26 Keene, Emperor of Japan, pp. 96, 741–742 n. 14. 27 Large, Emperor, pp. 113–114; Shōwa tennō dokuhaku-roku, p. 137.

conservative dissatisfaction with the modern emperors 145 such as the decision to surrender and the vision to build a New Japan, while placing the blame on the military and the politicians for what went wrong. However, some members of the establishment thought that it might be better for the imperial institution if the emperor assumed responsibility for the war and resigned. What bothered them was not the legal responsibility of a head of state for a war of aggression which was waged in his name, but the Confucian responsibility of a monarch for a defeat and a national calamity which might indicate moral deficiency. Hara Takeshi, in his essay on the Meiji Emperor in this volume, shows that in September 1945, the leading right-wing journalist Tokutomi Sohō complained that Hirohito had not exerted himself enough to make Japan win the war. Comparing him to his illustrious grandfather, he suggested that the outcome of the war might have been different had Hirohito established his imperial headquarters in Hiroshima, as the Meiji Emperor had done. Tokutomi did not say what would have happened to Hirohito had he stayed in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped. Before the nineteenth century it was common for Japanese emperors, despite their sacred status, to resign the throne for various reasons. In many cases, they were ordered to do so before they accumulated too much power. On other occasions, they did this in order to acquire more influence as ex-emperors, to enjoy life without the burden of religious rituals, to enter a monastery, to assure the succession of a certain heir, or to assume responsibility for some disaster. Richard Ponsonby-Fane quotes a seventeenth century book, Okinagusa, which claimed that Emperor Go Sai abdicated the throne in 1663, because a series of fires and earthquakes demonstrated that his ‘imperial conduct was not good.’28 The last emperor to abdicate the throne was Kōkaku in 1817. He resigned at the age of forty-five, after a reign of thirty-eight years, the longest reign until then (disregarding the long reigns of the mythical emperors). He stepped down in order to be able to manipulate his seventeen-year-old son and successor Emperor Ninkō. Since then, for almost two hundred years, all emperors remained on the throne until they died, even when they were sick, incapacitated, or associated with

28 Richard Ponsonby-Fane, The Imperial House of Japan (Kyoto: Ponsonby Memorial Society, 1959), pp. 283–284; Herschel Webb, The Japanese Imperial Institution in the Tokugawa Period (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 112.

146

ben-ami shillony

disasters. Emperor Kōmei, during whose reign the country was forcefully opened by the ‘barbarians,’ considered abdication but was advised not to do so.29 According to the memoirs of Tokugawa Yoshihiro (Hirohito’s grand chamberlain from September 1944 to May 1946), former prime minister Prince Konoe Fumimaro urged the emperor, before the end of the war, to resign in favor of his twelve-year old son Akihito. Konoe suggested that Hirohito enter the Ninnaji Temple in Kyoto, the monastery to which Emperor Uda had retired in 897 in favor of his twelve-year old son Emperor Daigō.30 Konoe even proposed that Hirohito assume the monastic name Yūnin Hōō (Yūnin is the Sino-Japanese reading of the name Hirohito, and Hōō is the title of a retired emperor who has taken Buddhist vows).31 According to the diary of the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Kido Kōichi, the emperor told him shortly after the end of the war that it was difficult for him to hand over the persons responsible for the war to the allies, and therefore he preferred ‘to assume responsibility and resign.’ Kido opposed the idea and convinced the emperor that an abdication at that crucial time would damage the imperial institution and play into the hands of those who wished to abolish it altogether.32 In 1951, Kido, serving a life-sentence as a war criminal, changed his mind and wrote to Hirohito from his prison cell: No matter how one looks at it, His Majesty bears responsibility for losing the war. Therefore . . . it is most proper for you to take responsibility and abdicate for the sake of your imperial ancestors and for the nation . . . If you do not do this, then the end result will be that only the imperial family will not have taken responsibility and an unclear mood will remain which, I fear, might leave an eternal scar.33

Keene, Emperor of Japan, pp. 39–42. Tokugawa Yoshihiro, Jijūchō no yuigon (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1997), p. 158; See also: Jōhō Yoshio, Tōjō Hideki (Tokyo: Tōjō Hideki Kankōkai, Fuyō Shobō, 1974), p. 286; Takahashi Hiroshi and Suzuki Kunihiko, Tennō-ke no misshitachi (Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, 1981), pp. 11–14. 31 Kawahara Toshiaki, Sengo rokujūnen, watakushi ga miete kita tennō-ke no ai to kunō (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2005), p. 172. 32 Kido kōichi nikki (Tokyo: Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai, 1966), vol. 2, pp. 1230–1231. See also: The Diary of Marquis Kido, 1931–45 (Frederick, Maryland: University Publications of America, 1984), p. 453. 33 Tokugawa, Jijūchō no yuigon, pp. 176–177; Masanori Nakamura, The Japanese Monarchy (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1992), pp. 115–116. 29 30

conservative dissatisfaction with the modern emperors 147 An imperial abdication might have also soothed the feelings of the bereaved families. In 1952, the future prime minister Nakasone Yasuhiro declared in the Diet: Some people think that if the emperor abdicated on his own initiative . . . it would console the feelings of the war-bereaved families and others who suffered from the war, consolidate the moral foundation of the emperor system, rejuvenate it, and enable it to be firmly and indomitably maintained.34

The Imperial House Laws of 1889 and 1947 had no provision for abdication, but they did not rule out such action either. Hirohito contemplated abdication on several occasions: in 1945 when Japan surrendered; in 1948 when the verdicts in the Tokyo War Crimes Trials were handed down, and in 1952 when the allied occupation ended. At each of these times he was persuaded by the authorities not to resign.35 Both SCAP and the Japanese government wanted him to stay in order to provide continuity and to assure the success of the postwar reforms. After the occupation ended, no establishment figure called on Hirohito to resign. Mishima Scolds the Emperor After the war, the laws which had protected the emperor from public criticism and lèse majesté were abolished, and people were free to say and write whatever they wanted about him. During the early postwar years, left-wing journals, such as Shinsō, carried derogatory articles and cartoons about Hirohito.36 In response, right-wing groups, wishing to protect the emperor’s dignity, resorted to intimidation and violence to silence his critics. The most notorious case occurred in 1961, when a right-wing youngster broke into the house of Shimanaka Hōji, the president of the journal Chūō kōron, which had published a defamatory fictional story about the crown prince and princess being beheaded. The attacker did not find Shimanaka, but killed his maid and seriously wounded his wife.

34 Watanabe Osamu, “The Emperor as a ‘Symbol’ in Postwar Japan,” Acta Asiatica, No. 59 (1990), p. 120. 35 Tokugawa, Jijūchō, pp. 172–173; Takahashi Hiroshi, Shōchō tennō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1993), p. 30; Nakamura Masanori, The Japanese Monarchy (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1992), pp. 114–116. 36 See, for instance, issues No. 20 (1948) and No. 30 (1949) of Shinsō.

148

ben-ami shillony

This act of terror frightened some editors and publishers, but not all of them. Books, stories and articles criticizing the emperor and ridiculing him continued to appear in Japan. In 1961 the novelist Ōe Kenzaburō wrote a sarcastic story about a youth who masturbates while imagining the emperor, and in 1975 the historian Inoue Kiyoshi wrote a book in which he branded Hirohito a war criminal.37 Open criticism of the emperor was not limited to the left wing. The right-wingers hailed the imperial institution, but some of them resented the man on the throne. Such a combination of admiration and criticism appeared in the writings of Mishima Yukio. Mishima venerated the emperor, claiming that the noblest act for a Japanese was to die for him. In his 1961 story Yūkoku (Patriotism), the two protagonists—a young officer who could not take part in the 1936 rebellion and his devoted wife—make love in front of the portrait of the emperor before they commit suicide. Mishima established a paramilitary group, Tate no kai (Shield Society), to protect the emperor from his enemies. In his address to the soldiers before committing suicide by harakiri, he called on them to rise up for the sake of the emperor and construct a new Japan. When they heckled him, Mishima shouted Tennō heika banzai! (Long Live the Emperor) and disemboweled himself. Despite this great veneration, Mishima accused Hirohito of letting down the patriotic young officers of 1936, who wished to save him from corrupt politicians, and the heroic kamikaze fighters who died for him in the war. In a symposium on the 1936 rebellion in the magazine Ronsō jaanaru in 1967, he described the emperor as a cold-hearted, latter-day monarch, oblivious to his sacred duties. “The tragedy of the present emperor was that being a third generation after Meiji, all that interested him was law and order . . . By clinging to such a policy he was defending the old order.”38 In 1966 Mishima wrote a short novel, Eirei no koe (Voices of the Heroic Dead), in which the ghosts of the kamikaze pilots reprimand the emperor for having betrayed them by renouncing his divinity. If the emperor is not a god, they exclaim, their death was in vain. “Scarcely a year after we had fired ourselves like bullets at an enemy ship for our emperor who was a god . . . Why

37 Shillony, Enigma of the Emperors, pp. 242–245; Inoue Kiyoshi, Tennō no sensō sekinin (Tokyo: Gendai Hyōronsha, 1975). 38 “Niniroku-jiken to junkoku no roman,” Ronsō jaanaru, March 1967, pp. 24–25.

conservative dissatisfaction with the modern emperors 149 did the emperor become a man?”39 This betrayal, Mishima claimed, created the postwar moral morass of Japan. In his 1968 essay “Bunka bōei-ron” (In Defense of Culture), Mishima claimed that whereas in the past the emperor personified both the feminine chrysanthemum and the masculine sword, the postwar constitution deprived him of the sword and left him only with the chrysanthemum. As a result, the emperor had become effeminate, a hero of weekly magazines. Mishima called to restore the sword to the emperor and to the Japanese people. He criticized Hirohito for having invited a Quaker American woman, Elizabeth Gray Vining, to tutor the crown prince and for allowing the crown prince to marry a Catholic-educated commoner. At a teach-in at Waseda University, he accused the palace official Koizumi Shinzō of destroying the imperial dignity: Koizumi went too far in his attempt to popularize the imperial family, ending up with a weekly-magazine imperial system . . . He did not realize that it was a mistake to bring the emperor nearer to the people by destroying his dignity. He invited a strange woman from America and entrusted her with the education of the crown prince.40

At a teach-in at Ibaraki University, Mishima said: “Koizumi’s attempt to enhance the popularity of the imperial family by introducing the romantic figure of Michiko, damaged the image of that family and made the emperor lose his dignity.”41 In an interview with the literary magazine Tosho shimbun in November 1970, a week before his death, Mishima said: “I do not like this personified emperor. I object to his postwar humanization . . . Koizumi Shinzō is bad, very bad. Such a bad person is a traitor . . . Koizumi Shinzō has destroyed the impersonal emperor.”42 Criticism of Hirohito Transcends his Death On 7 December 1988, the forty-seventh anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the conservative mayor of Nagasaki, Motoshima Hitoshi, answering a question at the city council, said: “From reading various

39 Mishima Yukio, Eirei no koe (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō, 1970); John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1975), pp. 210–211. 40 Hayashi Fusao, Tennō no kigen (Tokyo: Roman, 1974), p. 188. 41 Ibid. 42 Tosho shimbun, 12 December 1970, p. 1.

150

ben-ami shillony

accounts from abroad and having been a soldier myself, involved in military education, I do believe that the emperor bore responsibility for the war.”43 Left-wing politicians and writers had voiced similar opinions on many occasions before without being harmed, but Motoshima was a member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, and a Catholic. His statement, at a time when Hirohito was already gravely ill, provoked protests from his own party, as well as from right-wing organizations. The mayor of Hiroshima, Araki Takeshi, who belonged to the same party but was not a Christian, refused to support Motoshima’s statement. On 18 January 1990, a year after the death of Hirohito, a right-wing extremist shot Motoshima and wounded him severely. After Hirohito’s death, some conservatives still thought that he should have resigned. In the September 2005 issue of the journal Jiyū, a columnist, probably the journal’s conservative editor Kase Hideaki, wrote that the Shōwa emperor bore responsibility for the war and should have stepped down from the throne when the war ended or when Japan regained its independence.44 In May 2006, the publisher of Jiyū, Ishihara Hōki, wrote: Many Japanese, especially intellectuals, think that the highest responsibility for the war lay with the Shōwa Emperor. For that reason, when the war ended, various people, including the emperor’s brothers Princes Takamatsu and Mikasa, the philosopher Manabe Hajime, and the president of Tokyo University Nambara Shigeru, urged the emperor to assume responsibility toward the Japanese people and resign . . . The poet Miyoshi Tatsuji warned that if the emperor did not assume responsibility toward the soldiers who had died for him and did not resign, moral standards in Japan would deteriorate. But the emperor never assumed responsibility. His failure to do so contributed to the present moral deterioration when leaders in every field continue to evade responsibility for their actions.45

Right-wing dissatisfaction with Hirohito resurfaced in 2006, when a correspondent of the Nihon keizai shimbun found a 1988 memo of the former director of the imperial household agency Tomita Tomohiko. The memo quoted Hirohito saying that in 1978 he had ceased visiting the Yasukuni Shrine in protest of the shrine’s decision to enshrine fourteen Class-A war criminals, including Tōjō Hideki.46 This meant

43 44 45 46

Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt (London: Random House, 1994), p. 249. Jiyū, Sept. 2005, introductory column. Ishihara Hōki, “Kōi keishō o meguru ronsō, kō,” part II, Jiyū, May 2006, p. 60. Nihon keizai shimbun, 21 July 2006.

conservative dissatisfaction with the modern emperors 151 that Hirohito sided with the left-wing critics who opposed the prime ministers’ annual worship at that shrine. The nationalists were shocked. Some of them doubted the validity of the story, while others regarded it as additional proof of Hirohito’s unpatriotic behavior. Kamijō Shin’ichi, a right-wing activist, told The Japan Times on 15 August 2006: “If the emperor really said things like that, I don’t want to worship him.”47 The Tomita memo meant that the right-wing conservatives scorned Hirohito’s attitude toward the Tokyo trials. Despite his personal liking for General Tōjō Hideki, Hirohito accepted the verdicts of the Tokyo trials, and objected to the enshrinement of the executed Class-A war criminals, including Tōjō, in Yasukuni Shrine. On the other hand, the right-wing conservatives wished to enshrine Tōjō and the other war criminals as an expression of their rejection of the verdicts of the Tokyo trials. In 1978 Matsudaira Nagayoshi, son of the last minister of the imperial household (before it was demoted to an agency) Matsudaira Yoshitami, was appointed chief priest of Yasukuni Shrine. Matsudaira Nagayoshi was a former naval officer and a critic of the Tokyo trials, and his first act as chief priest was to enshrine the fourteen war criminals in disregard of the emperor’s opposition. This blatant behavior outraged Hirohito, who refused to visit the Yasukuni Shrine since then until his death.48 Dissatisfaction with Akihito Akihito was the first Japanese monarch to ascend the throne as a ‘symbol emperor’ under the new constitution. Although he had not been connected to the war and the defeat (he was only eleven years old when the war ended), the nationalists resented him even more than Hirohito. Ushijima Hidehiko writes that in 1981, when Akihito was srill crown prince, the faction of former prime minister Tanaka Kakuei, who had been indicted on charges of corruption, planned to change the Imperial House Law, so that the eighty-year-old Hirohito would abdicate and his son Akihito would declare, on the occasion of his enthronement, an amnesty which would include Tanaka. But the

47 48

The Japan Times, 16 August 2006. Nihon keizai shimbun, 1, 2, 3, 4 May 2007.

152

ben-ami shillony

plan was abandoned when the faction leaders realized that Akihito was less popular than his father.49 One reason for Akihito’a unpopularity among conservatives and right wingers was his liberal and pacifist education. Another reason was his lavish lifestyle. Akihito seemed to lack the selfless devotion to duty that had characterized his father. While Hirohito never stayed in commercial hotels when he traveled in Japan, lodging only in public facilities, Akihito used to stay in luxurious hotels. The critics also resented his marriage to a commoner, Shōda Michiko, and the fact that the two raised their children at home. Although loyalty to family had been a traditional virtue in Japan, the meaning of that virtue changed. Before the war, loyalty to family meant allegiance to one’s parents and ancestors, but after the war it came to mean allegiance to one’s spouse and children. Akihito’s devotion to his wife and children was in line with the new ‘my home’ ideal of postwar Japan. The conservatives regarded such behavior on the part of the crown prince and monarch as undignified. Hosaka Masayasu, in a symposium on the declining prestige of the imperial family, in the journal Shokun! of July 2004, stated that while Hirohito had been emperor twenty-four hours a day, Akihito, like a typical sarariman (white-collar worker), was emperor only eight hours a day, spending the rest of his time with his wife and children.50 Akihito’s most outspoken critics came from within the palace. One of them was Hamao Minoru, the Catholic chamberlain and tutor of Akihito and his children from 1951 to 1971. In an article in Chūō kōron in March 1989, following the change of emperors, Hamao rebuked the new emperor for his statement that he shared the joys and the sorrows of the people. He advised Akihito to put the joys aside and to concentrate on the sorrows. He revealed that when an airplane crashed on Mt. Osutaka in Gumma Prefecture in August 1985, killing 520 people, Akihito and Michiko were vacationing nearby in Karuizawa. They could have reached the disaster site by helicopter, consoled the bereaved families and encouraged the firefighters and policemen, but they failed to do so. Hamao urged Empress Michiko and her daughter Princess Nori to attend the graduation ceremonies of nursing schools, in order to bolster the prestige of the nursing profession and help Ushijima Hidehiko, Nonfuikushon kōtaishi akihito (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1987), pp. 245–247. 50 Kuze Teruhiko, Hosaka Masayasu, Kasahara Hidehiko, “Motto nikusei o, motto okimochi o,” Shokun!, July 2004, p. 63. 49

conservative dissatisfaction with the modern emperors 153 overcome the shortage of nurses in public hospitals.51 Four years later, in an interview in the magazine AERA, Hamao criticized the imperial couple for attending concerts and exhibitions, instead of devoting themselves to the people in need.52 Hamao’s advice was only partially heeded. The imperial couple went to console disaster victims, but did not give up its luxurious lifestyle. After the devastating Kobe earthquake of 1995, Akihito and Michiko visited the victims and hugged their children, but that same year a new palace was built for them at the cost of 50 million dollars. As Takie Lebra has pointed out, constructing such a lavish residence during an economic recession, instead of staying in the Fukiage Palace where Empress Dowager Nagako resided, provoked public criticism.53 The weekly magazine Shūkan bunshun wrote that the imperial couple should have provided a personal example of living together with an aging parent, instead of abandoning the elderly mother and moving to a new residence.54 Public opinion, which had sympathized with Michiko when she was a young bride, suffering from her parents-in-law, now criticized her for dominating her husband and neglecting her mother-in-law. In August 1993, a member of the Imperial Household Agency, writing in the magazine Takarajima 30 under the pen name Ōuchi Tadasu, accused the imperial couple of leading an extravagant lifestyle while mistreating the palace employees. He contrasted the pampered and family-oriented Akihito with his frugal and self-denying father Hirohito, who had always put nation before family. Ōuchi revealed that displeasure with Akihito in the palace reached such a degree that a palace employee refused to receive a decoration from him.55 This open criticism from an insider took its toll on the empress.

51 Hamao Minoru, “Heisei jidai no kōshitsu ni kitai suru koto,” Chūō kōron, March 1989, pp. 156–157. 52 AERA, 15 June 1993, p. 9. 53 Takie S. Lebra, “Self and Other in Esteemed Status: The Changing Culture of Japanese Royalty from Shōwa to Heisei,” Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer 1997), pp. 282–286; The Japan Times, 19 May 1993, p. 2; Watanabe Midori, Talking about the Imperial Family Q & A (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2000), pp. 37–45. 54 Shūkan bunshun, 23 September 1993, pp. 204–208. 55 Ōuchi Tadasu, “Kōshitsu no kiki,” Takarajima 30, August 1993. Reprinted in “Kōshitsu no kiki” ronsō (Tokyo: Takarajima, 1993), pp. 5–22, 32–34.

154

ben-ami shillony

On her fifty-ninth birthday, on 20 October 1993, Michiko collapsed and lost her voice for four months.56 A Leftist Emperor? Although the Japanese emperor is forbidden from making political statements, some remarks that Akihito has made, or that have been attributed to him, portrayed him, in the eyes of the conservatives, as a liberal, pacifist, and even left-wing emperor. In 1992, when the government announced that the imperial couple would visit China, many conservatives opposed the visit because of the dictatorial regime in Communist China (it was three years after the Tiananmen Incident) and the dispute with China over the Senkaku Islands. Muramatsu Takeshi, a conservative professor at Tsukuba University, called the visit ‘outrageous.’57 In order to abate the opposition, the government leaked that it was the emperor’s wish to visit China.58 This helped to mute the critics, but it seemed to reveal the emperor’s political leanings. In October 2004, Akihito made a surprising remark that upset the conservatives. At a palace garden party, he told Yonenaga Kunio—a shōgi master and a conservative member of the Tokyo Board of Education—that in his opinion, schools should not be forced to raise the national flag and to sing the national anthem. This was a direct affront to the conservative governor of Tokyo, Ishihara Shintarō, who had instructed the schools to raise the flag and to sing the anthem. When asked for his reaction to the emperor’s remark, Ishihara sarcastically replied that the emperor was right: the schools should not be forced (kyōsei) to raise the flag and sing the anthem, as it was their basic duty ( gimu) to do so.59 The left-leaning newspaper Asahi shimbun, usually critical of the emperor, lauded Akihito’s remark. On the other hand, the conservative intellectual Yagi Hidetsugu, in the January 2005 issue of Shokun!,

56 Miyabara Yasuharu, “Michiko kōgō fūin sareta kanashimi,” Bungei shunjū, Nov. 1997, pp. 277–279; Watanabe Midori, “Michiko-sama no inori,” Bungei shunjū, Dec. 1993, pp. 124–130. 57 His criticism, which appeared in Sankei shimbun on 5 Feb. 1992, was reprinted in Seiron, April 1992, pp. 190–191. 58 As related by Sakurai Toshiko in “Kiki no kōshitsu mitsu no nazo,” Bungei shunjū, March 2003, p. 132. 59 Asahi shimbun, 30 October 2004.

conservative dissatisfaction with the modern emperors 155 lamented that the views of Akihito were close to those of the left. He wrote: I am well aware of the rumor that His Majesty harbors liberal views, supports the present constitution, identifies in his heart with the attitudes of the Asahi shimbun, and opposes the opinions of the conservatives and of those who want to change the constitution.60

Yagi advised the emperor to abide by the constitution, that does not allow him to interfere in political affairs, and called on the left-wing newspapers not to use the emperor to promote their political agenda.61 Thus, ironically, a nationalist critic evoked the liberal 1947 constitution, which the right-wing opposed, in order to silence what he considered to be an anti-patriotic emperor. Dissatisfaction with Naruhito and Masako The conservatives’ criticism of Akihito has extended to his two sons, whose casual behavior was deemed unfitting for imperial princes. Naruhito’s two-year study in Oxford (1983–1985) seemed to have turned him into a western-oriented person. His 1986 visit to the kabukichō entertainment district of Tokyo, to watch an American musical, looked undignified.62 Above all, his choice of a foreign-educated career woman, Owada Masako, as his bride, and his publicized attachment to her, were scorned by the conservatives. They were dismayed that the crown prince, instead of putting nation before self, was even more family-oriented than his father Akihito. Fujitake Akira, a professor at Gakushūin University, where Naruhito had studied, complained that when the crown prince told reporters that he wished to have a happy and warm family, he sounded like a mere movie star.63 When Naruhito declared, at a joint press conference with Masako, ‘I shall protect her with all my might’ (zenryoku-de omamori shimasu), Kase Toshikazu wrote in Bungei shunjū: ‘The future emperor of Japan should protect the people with all his might, not his wife.’ Kase warned that such pronouncements

60 Yagi Hidetsugu, “Niwaka sonnō-ha: ‘asahi shimbun’ ni yoru ‘tennō hatsugen no seiji riyō,’ ” Shokun!, January 2005, pp. 108–113. 61 Ibid., p. 114. 62 Ushijima, Nonfuikushon, pp. 248–249. 63 Fujitake Akira, “ ‘Tennō e no kei-i’ wa kietaka,” Shokun!, July 1993, pp. 70–74.

156

ben-ami shillony

and the excessive media exposure would bring upon the imperial family of Japan the ignominious fate of the British royal family.64 The fact that Crown Princess Masako’s education had taken place mostly in European and American schools was deplored by the conservatives. Nishi Yoshiyuki, a professor of German literature at Tokyo University, commented that Masako was actually a kaigai kikoku shijo (returnee child from abroad), who needed a supplementary Japanese education.65 Masako’s difficulty in adjusting to palace life, her inability to bear a son, and her prolonged depression made her an object of criticism not only from conservative circles, but also from the palace. Tomonō Naoko, a journalist with connections to the imperial palace, quoted anonymous palace officials complaining that Masako was ignoring her official duties by professing a ‘selfishness sickness’ (wagamama-byō).66 In May 2004, at a press conference on the eve of his journey abroad without Masako, Crown Prince Naruhito lashed out against unnamed people in the palace, who were ‘negating the career and personality’ of his wife. This unprecedented open attack by the crown prince on the imperial palace created a sensation. Whom did he mean? Was he accusing conservative officials in the imperial household agency, or was he alluding to his parents who objected to Masako’s travels until she produced a son? Kudō Yukie, a female lecturer at Takushoku University, wrote in Shokun! that Naruhito’s accusations were aimed at the emperor and the empress, who wanted Masako to stay at home.67 Ishihara Hōki, the publisher of Jiyū, wrote: It is claimed that Princess Masako should be allowed to pursue her career. But what is her career? What is she supposed to do? She should not forget that she is first and foremost a member of the imperial family, which exists for the sake of the Japanese people.68

Other imperial family members responded to Naruhito’s accusations in their birthday greetings, one of the rare occasions on which they are allowed to express personal views. Empress Michiko, on her seventieth

64 Kase Toshikazu, “Eikoku no wadachi o fumu kiken wa nai ka.” Bungei shunjū, Jan. 1994, p. 131. 65 Nishi Yoshiyuki, “Kōtaishi-hi kettei ni omou,” Seiron, March 1993, pp. 64–65. 66 Tomonō Naoko, “Kōtaishi to masako-hi kunō no ketsudan,” Bungei shunjū, April 2006, p. 117. 67 Kudō Yukie, “Kōtaishi ‘gohatsugen’ yotsu no messeji”, Shokun! July 2004, pp. 36–42. 68 Ishihara Hōki, “Kōi keishō o meguru ronsō, kō”, Jiyu, May 2006, p. 57.

conservative dissatisfaction with the modern emperors 157 birthday in October 2004, recalled her own difficulties when she was a crown princess, adding: During all these years, I felt a sense of heavy responsibility, that I should not disgrace the imperial family, with its long history, the family which had accepted me, an ordinary citizen, as crown princess.69

This was an insinuation that Masako lacked such a sense of responsibility and was disgracing the imperial family. Two months later, the emperor, on his seventy-first birthday, revealed that when he heard his son’s accusations: I was very surprised, as it was the first time for me to hear that, and I asked him to explain the matter to the people. I listened to what he said, but there are still things which I do not understand.70

Naruhito’s younger brother Prince Akishino irritated the conservatives on several occasions. His decision to marry the commoner Kawashima Kiko in 1990, not waiting for the crown prince to marry first; his insistence on announcing the betrothal while the family was still in the year of mourning over Hirohito; and the scandalously casual way in which he had proposed to her—while they were waiting for a traffic light to change—seemed highly undignified. But on his fortieth birthday, in November 2005, Akishino joined the conservative critics and said that Naruhito should have discussed the matter with the emperor before making public accusations. He also admitted that he and his wife hardly spoke to the crown prince and princess.71 Nationalism without the Emperor The growing dissatisfaction with the imperial family created, for the first time in modern Japanese history, a right-wing disenchantment with the imperial institution itself. By the end of the twentieth century, the institution of the emperor, which for a long time had been the core of Japanese nationalism, started losing its relevance. Japanese nationalists showed interest in such ‘normal’ issues as defense, foreign policy, and

CNN, 21 October 2004. The Telegraph, 25 December 2004. 71 Watanabe Midori, “Michiko-sama no inori,” Bungei shunjū, December 1993, pp. 128–129; Miura Shumon, “Of Monarchy and Matrimony,” Japan Echo, vol. 16, No. 4 (Winter 1989), pp. 83–84. 69 70

158

ben-ami shillony

education, while the issue of the emperor became problematic and even counter-productive. In 1999, Fukuda Kazuya, a professor of literature at Keiō University and a nationalist intellectual, coined the phrase tennō nuki nashonarizumu (nationalism from which the emperor has been extricated). In an interview in Shokun!, he recommended that Japanese nationalism should not center anymore on the emperor. The identification of the emperor with Japan, he claimed, had played an important role in the past, when it helped to unify the people in the bakumatsu and Meiji periods, but later it prevented Japanese nationalism from taking its normal course. Fukuda advocated that the emperor should be detached from the state and moved back to Kyoto, to engage in poetry and arts, as his ancestors had done.72 In May 2006, Ishihara Hōki wrote in Jiyū that as most people did not understand what the ‘symbol-emperor’ meant, the emperor should return to Kyoto, to engage there in traditional arts and in prayers for the prosperity of the nation.73 The marginalization of the emperor in the ideology of the new nationalists was reflected in the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashii rekishi kyōkasho tsukurukai ). This society, which was established in 1996 to promote new history textbooks that would make Japanese schoolchildren proud of their country, in 2001 published the junior-high-school history textbook Atarashii rekishi kyōkasho (New History Textbook).74 The approval of this book by the ministry of education, although it was adopted by only a few schools, caused an international uproar. Historians from Japan and other countries denounced the textbook as a right-wing publication that distorted history.75 But on the topic of the emperor, this textbook was different from the previous nationalist textbooks. Whereas former nationalist historians, even in the postwar period, extolled the role of the emperors in Japanese history,76 the new nationalist historians quite ignored them. The book dismissed the

72 Ōtsuka Eiji and Fukuda Kazuya, “ ‘Tennō nuki’ no nashonarizumu o ronzu,” Shokun!, January 1999, pp. 140–153. 73 Ishihara, “Kōi keishō,” part II, pp. 57–58. 74 Nishio Kanji et alii, eds., Atarashii rekishi kyōkasho (Tokyo: Fusōsha, 2001). 75 International Scholars’ Appeal Concerning the New Japanese History Textbook (Inaugurated on July 10, 2001). 76 See for instance Hiraizumi Kiyoshi, Shōnen nihon-shi (Tokyo: Kōgakkan Daigaku Shuppan-bu, 1970).

conservative dissatisfaction with the modern emperors 159 divine origin of the dynasty as a myth (shinwa),77 attributed the reforms of the Meiji Restoration to the statesmen rather than to the emperor, and explained that although the Meiji Constitution made the emperor into a ruler, power remained in the hands of the oligarchs.78 The book credited Hirohito with the suppression of the 1936 rebellion and the ending the war in 1945,79 but said nothing about his postwar reign or about his successor. It praised the pacifistic and democratic qualities of Hirohito, describing him as a peace-loving emperor, who ‘walked with the people’ and was dedicated to his duties as a constitutional monarch.80 Another history book by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, Kokumin no rekishi (History of the People), written by its president Nishio Kanji, focused on the people rather than on the monarchs, and presented the emperors as passive figures, a far cry from the divine rulers who populated the pre-1945 textbooks.81 Conservatives Try to Change the Succession Rules The conservatives’ loss of awe for the imperial institution was also reflected in the readiness of part of them to change the succession rules. In December 2004, after no son had been born into the imperial family for almost forty years, Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō appointed a ten-member advisory council to suggest amendments to the Imperial Household Law which would enable the dynasty to continue. It was a conservative panel, composed of scholars, businessmen and former bureaucrats and it was headed by the former president of Tokyo University, Yoshikawa Hiroyuki. However, the advisory council’s report, submitted in November 2005, was revolutionary. It recommended not only the reinstitution of female emperors, something which had existed in the past, but went further and recommended that reigning empresses be allowed to marry commoners and have their first-born child from these marriages, regardless of sex, succeed the throne. This meant the end of the millennium-and-a half old exclusively patrilineal dynasty, and the start of a mixed patrilineal and matrilineal line which had never 77 78 79 80 81

Atarashii rekishi kyōkasho, pp. 60–63. Atarashii rekishi kyōkasho, pp. 190–209; 214. Atarashii rekishi kyōkasho, pp. 269, 287. Atarashii rekishi kyōkasho, pp. 306–307. Kokumin no rekishi, pp. 173–197, 384–401.

160

ben-ami shillony

existed before. Prime Minister Koizumi, a nationalist on such matters as defense and Yasukuni Shrine, endorsed the report and started preparations for changing the Imperial Household Law according to it. The fact that a conservative panel recommended such a reform and a conservative prime minister endorsed it, proved that for many conservatives the imperial dynasty had lost its sacred significance. Professor Iwao Sumiko of the Musashi Institute of Technology, who was a member of the panel, justified the report in the conservative English-language journal Japan Echo, of which she was the editor, on the grounds that it fitted the constitution and expressed the will of the people.82 While the conservative government supported the advisory council’s report and was ready to change the succession rules, more conservative Japanese viewed it as a death blow to the unbroken dynasty (bansei ikkei ), and strongly protested against it. They opposed the reinstitution of female emperors and the establishment of a female lineage, and recommended instead the revival of the collateral princely families (miyake) of imperial descent, which had been disbanded by the allied occupation and which in the past supplied imperial heirs when the main line could not do it. The campaign against the advisory council’s report was led by the Association of Shinto Shrines ( jinja honchō), headed by Kuni Kuniaki, the chief priest of Ise Shrine and a nephew of Hirohito’s wife Empress Nagako.83 Akihito’s cousin Prince Mikasa Tomohito joined the opposition and suggested the use of concubines to produce male offspring.84 The nationalist scholars who had previously distanced themselves from the emperor now rallied to the defense of the endangered male dynasty. Nishio Kanji accused the ‘spineless’ politicians and bureaucrats, who had neglected the imperial institution in the same way that they had neglected Japan’s interests in the territorial disputes with China.85 The participants in the symposium on ‘The Collapse of the Imperial System’ in the January 2006 issue of Shokun! warned that the imperial dynasty would collapse if the report’s recommendations were adopted.

82 Iwao Sumiko, “Heirs for the Japanese Throne,” Japan Echo, vol. 33, No. 1 (February 2006), pp. 25–32. 83 Jinja shimpō, 14 November 2005; 28 November 2005. 84 Asahi shimbun, 4 November 2005; The Japan Times, 9 January 2006. 85 Nishio Kanji, “Rekishi to minzoku e no sekinin: chūgoku ryōdo mondai to joteiron no miezaru teki,” Seiron, April 2005, pp. 125–137.

conservative dissatisfaction with the modern emperors 161 Yagi Hidetsugu, one of the participants, said that the left-wing rejoiced over the report, because it heralded the end of the dynasty86 Nakagawa Yatsuhiro of Tsukuba University, in Seiron of the same month, accused the panel members of being communist sympathizers. Their report, he claimed, resembled the beheading of King Louis XVI of France in 1793.87 Fukuda Kazuya, who in 1999 recommended Japanese nationalism without the emperor, in 2005 embarked on the mission to save the imperial institution. In a book with Nakanishi Terumasa of Kyoto University, he praised the role of the emperors in Japanese history and accused Prime Minister Koizumi and the imperial household agency of lacking concern for the emperor.88 At the same time, Fukuda and Nakanishi criticized the populist behavior of Akihito and Michiko, which was damaging the prestige of the throne.89 The succession problem was, at least temporarily, solved in September 2006, when the thirty-nine-year-old Princess Kiko, wife of Prince Akishino, gave birth to a baby boy, Prince Hisahito. Two weeks later, Abe Shinzō, who was more conservative than his predecessor, succeeded Koizumi as prime minister. With the succession of Naruhito apparently assured, Abe suspended the recommendations of the advisory council and set up a parliamentarians’ league to deliberate the preservation of the ‘traditional imperial succession rules.’90 The birth of Hisahito turned Prince Akishino and Princess Kiko into popular figures. They were praised for their loyalty to the imperial family, their self sacrifice in producing a third child after having already two teen-age daughters, their cordial relations with the emperor and empress, and the cheerful personality of Kiko who, unlike her sisterin-law, adjusted well to palace life. These praises implied a rebuke of the crown prince and princess who apparently lacked these features. Criticism of Princess Masako mounted in 2008, when the tabloids discovered that while she absented herself from her official duties,

86 Tokoro Isao, Hasegawa Michiko, Yagi Hidetsugu, “‘Tennō seido’ hōkai no toki,” Shokun!, January 2006, pp. 128–139. 87 Nakagawa Yatsuhiro, “Tennō, kōzoku o kōi keishō shingi kara haiseki shite yoika,” Seiron, January 2006, pp. 114–125. 88 Nakanishi Terumasa and Fukuda Kazuya, Kōshitsu no hongi (Tokyo: PHP, 2005), pp. 52–54, 61–62. 89 Ibid., p. 62. 90 The Japan Times, 1 October 2006.

162

ben-ami shillony

because of depression, she was enjoying herself with lavish dinners at restaurants, luxurious shopping, and expensive horse riding at public expense.91 By the summer of 2008, with the emperor and empress getting older and frailer, no one could predict how the conservative dissatisfaction would affect the imperial institution. .

91

The Japan Times, 7 February 2008.

EMPERORS AND CHRISTIANITY Ben-Ami Shillony Emperor Meiji and the Missionaries Although one would expect a wide gap to exist between the emperors of Japan—allegedly the descendants and high priests of the sun goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami—and Christianity, which regards polytheistic religions as pagan creeds, the modern emperors of Japan and their family members have shown an interest in the religion of the west.1 Christian officials and educators have occupied senior positions in the palace since the Taishō period, despite the nationalistic atmosphere of the 1930s and 1940s, and this phenomenon has widened after the Second World War. From the early seventeenth century until 1873, Christianity was banned in Japan as an ‘evil faith’ ( jakyō) and its believers faced the death penalty. However, the Meiji government was aware of the esteem with which the westerners treated their own religion and it often turned a blind eye to the missionaries’ illicit activities. In 1872, when Christianity was still prohibited, the twenty-year-old Meiji Emperor received in audience the American missionary James Hepburn and accepted from him a copy of the King James Bible.2 Later that year, the emperor, on a tour of Kyushu, visited the Kumamoto domain school for western studies ( yōgakkō), where several missionaries, working as English teachers, secretly spread the Christian gospel.3 Going out of his way, the young emperor paid a visit to the home of the chief missionary, Leroy Lancing Janes. Four years later, when the ban on Christianity was lifted, Janes converted thirty-five of his students to Christianity and they formed one

1 This chapter includes some material that has appeared in Ben-Ami Shillony, Enigma of the Emperors: Sacred Subservience in Japanese History (Kent: Global Oriental, 2005). 2 William E. Griffis, The Mikado (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1915), p. 228. The Protestant Japanese translation was presented to him in 1898. 3 F.G. Notehelfer, American Samurai: Captain L.L. Janes and Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 172–173.

164

ben-ami shillony

of the first Christian groups in Japan: the Kumamoto Band.4 A decade later, Christian Japanese teachers were invited to tutor the children of the imperial family and the high nobility. In 1883 Tsuda Umeko, a devout Christian female educator, who had studied in the United States for eleven years, was asked to tutor the wife and daughter of the senior statesman Itō Hirobumi. According to Tsuda’s account, Itō asked her to explain to him the tenets of Christianity. After listening to her for two hours, he admitted that ‘for Japan, Christianity would be a good thing.’ In 1886, Tsuda was appointed teacher of English at the Girls’ Peers School (kazoku jogakkō), where the daughters of the imperial family and the nobility studied.5 In September 1885, Emperor Meiji received in audience the Catholic vicar of northern Japan, Pierre Marie Osouf, who later became the archbishop of Tokyo. Osouf handed the emperor a letter from Pope Leo XIII, in which the pope thanked the emperor for the generous treatment accorded to the missionaries. The French ambassador, JosephAdam Sienkiewicz, who attended that audience, reported that after it was concluded, Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi and Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru confided to him that after adopting a constitution, Japan would also adopt Christianity.6 The prediction did not materialize, but the fact that leading Japanese statesmen said this to a foreign envoy shows that the Meiji oligarchs, despite their dedication to Shinto, considered the possibility of adopting Christianity as a national religion. From their point of view, there was no contradiction between the two religions. If parochial Shinto went well with cosmopolitan Buddhism in the past, why couldn’t it go well with cosmopolitan Christianity in the present?

4 Donald Keene, Emperor of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 215; Nihonshi kōjiten (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1997), p. 680. 5 Barbara Rose, Tsuda Umeko and Women’s Education in Japan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 63–67; Linda L. Johnson, “Tsuda Umeko and Meiji Cultural Nationalism Discourse,” in Roy Starrs, ed., Japanese Cultural Nationalism (Kent: Global Oriental, 2004), pp. 53, 57; Kirisutokyō jimmei jiten (Tokyo: Nihon Kirisuto Kyōdan Shuppan-kyoku, 1986), p. 891. 6 Joseph L. Van Hecken, The Catholic Church in Japan Since 1859 (Tokyo: Herder Agency, Enderle Bookstore, 1963), p. 269; Richard Sims, French Policy Towards the Bakufu and Meiji Japan, 1854–95 (Richmond: The Japan Library, 1998), p. 196; Keene, Emperor of Japan, p. 398. Takeuchi Hiroshi, Rainichi seiyō jimmei jiten (Tokyo: Nichigai Associates, 1995), p. 67. Pierre Marie Osouf (1829–1906) arrived in Japan in 1878. In 1891 he became the archbishop of Tokyo.

emperors and christianity

165

Strangely enough, exposure to Christianity bolstered the emperor’s divinity in Japan. In 1888, Itō told the Privy Council (sūmitsuin) that in Japan, reverence for the emperor would play the same role as reverence for God in the west.7 Yamaguchi Osamu, Murakami Shigeyoshi, and Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney have all pointed out that the transformation of the emperor into a manifest deity in the Meiji period was modeled on the Christian adoration of God.8 According to Yuki Hideo, the Meiji oligarchs elevated the emperor ‘to a plane, on which he vied for supremacy with the God of religions like Christianity and Islam.’9 Japanese Christians Embrace the Emperor The story of Uchimura Kanzō, the Christian teacher at the prestigious First Higher School in Tokyo, who in 1891 refused to bow to the Imperial Rescript on Education (kyōiku chokugo), and as a result had to resign from his post, is widely known. But, as Irokawa Daikichi has pointed out, most Japanese Christians accepted the rescript.10 Carol Gluck quotes the pastor Yokoi Tokiō, who wrote in the English-language journal The Far East a few years later: The document was noble in style, catholic in sentiment, candid in tone. On all sides it was hailed as a welcome shower in the sultry moral atmosphere of the time . . . the document remains to this day the earnest of the Emperor’s fatherly counsel to his loyal subjects in the essentials of sound morality.11

The authorities welcomed the patriotism of the Christians and opened to them senior positions in government and education. One of these patriotic Christians was the educator Nitobe Inazō, whose wife was an American Quaker from Philadelphia. Nitobe wrote the book Bushidō

David A. Titus, Palace & Politics in Prewar Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 36. 8 Yamaguchi Osamu, Tennō (Tokyo: PHP Kenkyūjo, 1994), pp. 210–212; Murakami Shigeyoshi, Kōshitsu jiten (Tokyo: Tōkyōdō Shuppan, 1980), p. IX; Emiko OhnukiTierney, “The Emperor of Japan as Deity (Kami),” Ethnology, vol. 30, No. 3 ( July 1991), p. 204. 9 Hideo Yuki, “The True Meaning of Tradition,” Echoes of Peace (Niwano Peace Foundation), No. 31 (October 1990), pp. 8–9. 10 Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period (tr. and ed. by Marius B. Jansen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 251. 11 Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 126. 7

166

ben-ami shillony

the Soul of Japan, in which he extolled the noble nature of the Japanese warrior tradition.12 In 1903 Nitobe was appointed professor of law at Kyoto University and in 1906 he was made principal of the First Higher School in Tokyo, from which Uchimura Kanzō had been forced to resign sixteen years earlier. Nitobe was a passionate Christian and propagated the religion among his students, many of whom—like Maeda Tamon, Tajima Michiji, Tsurumi Yūsuke, Yanaibara Tadao, and Nambara Shigeru—later became leading figures in the bureaucracy and the universities.13 Some prominent Christians accepted the theory of the divine origins of the emperor and of the Japanese nation. Ebina Danjō, one of the Kumamoto Band members, who became a minister at the Hongō church in Tokyo and was later president of Dōshisha University in Kyoto, recommended that the Imperial Rescript on Education be included in Christian sermons. In an article at the beginning of the twentieth century, he wrote: Christians . . . without doing violence to their creed may acknowledge that the Japanese nation has a divine origin. It is only when we realize that the Imperial Ancestors were in close communion with kami [God or gods], that we understand how sacred is the country in which we live.14

Another clergyman, Kozaki Hiromichi, wrote in his book Kokka to shūkyō (State and Religion) in 1913: “The fact that our nation is a divine nation, that the imperial institution is descended from the gods, and that our national essence is a unique national essence in no way clashes with my beliefs as a Christian.”15 When Emperor Meiji died in 1912, the pastor Uemura Masahisa, founder of the Tokyo Theological School, equated him with the Biblical King Uzziah. Uchimura Kanzō, who twenty-two years earlier had refused to bow to the emperor’s rescript, lamented the emperor’s death as an apocalyptical disaster. In his journal Seisho no kenkyū (Bible Research) he wrote:

Inazo Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan (Tokyo: Shokwado, 1901). Ushijima Hidehiko, Nonfuikushon kōtaishi akihito (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1987), pp. 140–142. 14 Basil H. Chamberlain, Things Japanese (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1971), p. 538. 15 Quoted in John Breen, “Shinto and Christianity,” in Mark R. Mullins, ed., Handbook of Christianity in Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 260. 12 13

emperors and christianity

167

The demise of Emperor Meiji is an unprecedented tragedy. We feel as if the world is about to turn upside down. It is like the situation referred to by the prophet Joel, who said: ‘The sun and the moon shall be dark and the stars shall withdraw their shining’. We feel the impermanence of the world.16

Christian churches and schools hailed the enthronement of Emperor Taishō and welcomed the Shinto ceremonies which accompanied it. Uemura Masahisa wrote that although the daijōsai enthronement ceremony contains Shinto elements, it is essentially a civic ceremony, in which a new emperor thanks God for His blessing and receives from Him the mission to reign.17 As the Japanese language does not distinguish between singular and plural, Uemura could interpret the term kami as God, and incorporate that ancient Shinto ritual into his Christian faith. After the First World War, Nitobe became Japan’s envoy to the League of Nations and served as its under-secretary general from 1920 to 1926. In one of his speeches in Europe, Nitobe explained that the exceptionally long survival of the imperial dynasty of Japan was due to the fact that it obeyed God’s fifth commandment, which said: “Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.”18 Thus, the longevity of the imperial dynasty received a Biblical justification. Christians around the Throne Although Christians constituted less than half a percent of Japan’s population, after the First World War they assumed senior positions not only in government and education, but also in the imperial palace which was presumably a Shinto sanctuary. At the palace they enjoyed the patronage of Empress Sadako, the wife of the Taishō Emperor. Sadako was a devout Shinto believer, but was also very sympathetic towards Christianity. She was raised until the age of four by a Quaker farmer couple, Okawara, and at the Girls’ Peers School she had Christian

16 Dohi Akio & Tomura Masahiro, eds., Tennō no daigawari to watashitachi (Tokyo: Nihon Kirisuto Kyōdan Shuppan-kyoku, 1988), pp. 138–140. I am indebted to Professor Colin Noble for bringing this quotation to my attention. 17 Dohi & Tomura, Daigawari, p. 143. 18 Inazo Nitobe, “The Moral Basis of the Japanese Monarchy,” The Works of Inazo Nitobe (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1972), vol. 3, p. 501.

168

ben-ami shillony

teachers. In her view, Christianity and Shinto complemented each other. Hara Takeshi, in his essay on the Taishō Emperor in this volume, writes that Sadako thought that Christianity could become the protecting religion of Japan, in the same way as Buddhism had been in the past. Sterling Seagrave, in his book The Yamato Dynasty, claims that Sadako read the Bible every day and “there are strong indications that she was a practicing Christian, although the imperial household kept this carefully obscure.” 19 He points out that when Sadako became empress in 1912, she surrounded herself with Christians, mostly Quakers, “adding them to her retinue and discretely arranging for them to be appointed to senior posts in the Imperial Household and in the government bureaucracy.”20 Sadako patronized Christian charities. In 1916 she donated 6,000 yen to the Kaishun Hospital for lepers near Kumamoto, which had been established by the English missionary Hannah Riddell, and she continued to support that hospital through yearly donations.21 When the Taishō emperor became ill, Sadako became the leading figure in the palace. Prime Minister Hara is quoted as saying: “Recently it has gotten to the point where one must do everything through the empress.”22 In 1921, Sekiya Teizaburō, the governor of Shizuoka Prefecture, was appointed vice minister of the imperial household ministry (kunaishō), a senior palace position which he held until 1933. Sekiya was a Christian and a disciple of Uchimura Kanzō. His wife Iko, a leading member of the Fujimi-chō Church in Tokyo, was a former classmate of the empress.23 When Sekiya became vice minister, Yamamoto (Stephen) Shinjirō, a Christian naval captain who had served as a naval attaché in Rome from 1914 to 1917, was appointed Crown Prince Hirohito’s aide on naval affairs. Although he was an active-duty officer, Yamamoto was the president of Japan’s Catholic Youth Association (kōkyō seinenkai ).24 Shortly after his appointment, Yamamoto accompanied the crown prince on his European tour. In Rome, they were received by Pope Sterling Seagrave, The Yamato Dynasty (London: Bantam Press, 1999), p. 12. Seagrave, The Yamato Dynasty, p. 12. 21 Julia Boyd, Hannah Riddell, an Englishwoman in Japan (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1996), pp. 159–165. 22 Toshiaki Kawahara, Hirohito and His Times (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1990), pp. 35–36. 23 Ushijima, Nonfuikushon, pp. 154–155; Hata Ikuhiko, Senzen-ki nihon kanryō-sei no seido, sōshiki, jinji (Tokyo: Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppansha, 1981), pp. 133–134; Asahi jimbutsu jiten (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1990), pp. 896–897. Titus, Palace & Politics, pp. 92–94. 24 Nihon kirisutokyō rekishi daijiten (Tokyo: Kyōbunkan, 1988), p. 1446; Nihon kingendai jimmei jiten (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2001), p. 1116. 19 20

emperors and christianity

169

Benedict XV and after that met with a group of Japanese students of theology.25 This exposure to Christianity might have motivated Hirohito to confide to General Nara Takeji, during that tour, that he did not believe in the divinity of the Japanese emperors.26 When Hirohito ascended the throne in 1926, Christian churches and schools all over Japan celebrated the enthronement ceremonies.27 In the following year, a Christian diplomat, Chinda Sutemi, was appointed as Hirohito’s grand chamberlain ( jijūchō), and he held that position until his death two years later. Hirohito’s younger brother, Prince Chichibu, studied at Oxford from 1925 to 1926, becoming the first imperial prince to attend a Christian university. In 1928 Chichibu married Matsudaira Setsuko, who was a graduate of the Quakers’ Friends University in Washington, where her father Matsudaira Tsuneo had served as ambassador. Setsuko’s mother, Nobuko, was Sadako’s friend from school. Another childhood friend of Sadako was Alice Perry, the great grandniece of Commodore Perry. Alice Perry was the daughter of an English teacher at Keiō University and she married Joseph Grew, the U.S. ambassador to Japan from 1932 to 1941.28 Christians Worship the Kami In 1928, delegates from the Japan Christian Federation (Nihon kirisuto remmei), who attended the International Missionary Conference in Jerusalem, proposed that Shinto, like Judaism, be recognized as a proto-Christian faith.29 The proposal was rejected, but it revealed the favorable attitude of Japanese Christians toward Shinto. In 1936, following a further visit of Yamamoto Shinjirō to Rome, the Vatican proclaimed that Japanese Catholics could worship at Shinto shrines, as an act of “filial reverence toward the Imperial Family and the heroes

25 Nihon kirisutokyō rekishi daijiten, p. 1446; Yoshinori Futara and Setsuzo Sawada, The Crown Prince’s European Tour (Osaka: The Osaka Mainichi Publishing Co., 1926), p. 156. 26 Nara wrote in his diary: “The very rational-minded prince does not believe that the ancestors of the imperial house are truly gods nor that the present emperor is a living deity (arahitogami ).” Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), p. 119. 27 Dohi & Tomura, Daigawari, pp. 147–152. 28 Seagrave, The Yamato Dynasty, pp. 83, 123, 139. 29 Kun Sam Lee, The Christian Confrontation with Shinto Nationalism (Philadelphia: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1966), pp. 131–132, 140.

170

ben-ami shillony

of the country.”30 In 1937, a group of Japanese Protestants worshipped Amaterasu Ōmikami at Ise Shrine, begging her that ‘the august person of the Emperor be kept in ever increasing health and grace,’ that his glory grow ‘into an eternity as enduring as heaven and earth,’ and that the ‘sacred power of the Emperor shine ever higher, ever brighter, and for eternity.’31 In October 1940, 25,000 Japanese Christians of all denominations attended the Tokyo mass rally in celebration of the 2,600th anniversary of the founding of the empire (kigen) by Emperor Jimmu.32 The wartime regime suppressed Christian groups suspected of maintaining contacts with their parent organizations in enemy countries, but other groups were not affected. The Catholic Church, associated with Italy and France, enjoyed a respectable position in wartime Japan. Many Christians supported the war and held senior positions throughout it. The dean of the Law Faculty of Tokyo Imperial University from 1937 to 1939, Tanaka Kōtarō, was a Catholic. In 1940, a Christian educator, Abe Yoshishige, was appointed principal of the First Higher School in Tokyo, and held that position throughout the war. In June 1941, most Protestant denominations merged into the United Church of Christ (Nihon kirisuto kyōdan), which supported the war. In January 1942, the president of this organization, the Presbyterian minister Tomita Mitsuru, went on a pilgrimage to Ise Shrine to pray for Japan’s victory.33 In August 1943, the treasurer of the organization, Matsuyama Tsunejirō, declared: “For the Judaized Christianity of the United States and Britain, democracy may be appropriate, but Christianity in Japan must center on our Imperial Family, revere our ancestors, and worship our gods.”34 Christian officers and men served in all branches of the imperial army and navy, including the kamikaze units. Prominent Christian

Kirisutokyō to tennō-sei (Tokyo: Yorudansha, 1991), pp. 192–193; D.C. Holtom, The National Faith of Japan (London: Kegan Paul, 1995), p. 99. 31 Holtom, National Faith, pp. 100–101; William M. Steele, “Christianity and Politics in Japan,” in Mark R. Mullins, ed., Handbook of Christianity in Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 361. 32 A. Hamish Ion, The Cross and the Rising Sun (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990–1993), vol. 2, p. 216; C.H. Germany, Protestant Theologies in Modern Japan (Tokyo: IISR Press, 1965), p. 163. 33 Hamish Ion, The Cross in the Dark Valley (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1999), p. 305. 34 David G. Goodman and Masanori Miyazawa, Jews in the Japanese Mind (New York: The Free Press, 1995), pp. 117–118. 30

emperors and christianity

171

figures, such as Kagawa Toyohiko and Tomita Mitsuru, attacked the United States and Great Britain in radio broadcasts transmitted abroad. When American airplanes bombed the Outer Shrine of Ise in June 1945, Tomita, in a broadcast titled ‘The Americans who Lost God,’ declared: “Our enemy the U.S., which desecrates God, will surely be annihilated in the fearful flame of sin.”35 It was an ironic coincidence that a Catholic American pilot, Major Charles (‘Chunk’) Sweeney, dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, which destroyed the Urakami Tenshudō, the largest Catholic cathedral in East Asia. A Christian Emperor? General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) for most of the occupation period, was a devout Episcopalian. He was convinced that only Christianity could secure democracy and block communism in Japan.36 John Gunther wrote in 1951: MacArthur, a profoundly religious man, really believes in Christianity . . . He even goes so far as to think of himself and the Pope as the two leading representatives of Christianity in the world to-day. The Pope fights on the spiritual front, so to speak, while he tackles communism on the ground.37

In October 1945, MacArthur told a visiting group of American Protestant leaders: “Japan is a spiritual vacuum. If you do not fill it with Christianity, it will be filled with Communism. Send me 1,000 missionaries.”38 The group then met with the emperor. In the following months, many missionaries arrived in Japan, and although they were civilians, they were quartered in army facilities. By 1950, the number of missionaries rose to more than 2,500.39 On MacArthur’s orders,

Ion, The Cross in the Dark Valley, pp. 320–321; Kawashima Sachio, Kagawa Toyohiko no shōgai to shisō (Tokyo: Nakagawa Shoten, 1988), pp. 35–41; George Bikle. The New Jerusalem: Aspects of Utopianism in the Thought of Kagawa Toyohiko (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1976), pp. 236– 248; Yuzo Ota, “Kagawa Toyohiko: A Pacifist?” in Nobuya Bamba and John F. Howes, eds., Pacifism in Japan (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1978), pp. 169–197. 36 Lawrence S. Wittner, “MacArthur and the Missionaries: God and Man in Occupied Japan,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 40. no. 1 (February 1971), pp. 77–98. 37 John Gunther, The Riddle of MacArthur (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951), p. 68. 38 Woodard, The Allied Occupation, p. 243. 39 Woodard, The Allied Occupation, pp. 219, 243; Wittner, “MacArthur and the Missionaries,” pp. 83–85, 95. 35

172

ben-ami shillony

ten million Japanese-language Bibles were shipped from the U.S.A. to Japan on Navy vessels, and distributed there by the Pocket Testament League.40 The education minister in both the Higashikuni and Shidehara cabinets, Maeda Tamon, was a Christian and a disciple of Nitobe Inazō. When asked in the Diet in December 1945 whether the government considered the emperor to be god (kami), Maeda replied that the emperor was indeed a kami, not in the western sense of God, but “in the sense of his being a person of the highest rank in this world, in the traditional Japanese concept.”41 In March 1947, the socialist Katayama Tetsu was elected by the Diet as prime minister. Katayama was the first Christian prime minister of Japan and he appointed four other Christians to his cabinet. The Japanese public was hardly aware of, and hardly cared about, the religion of the prime minister and the other ministers, but MacArthur regarded it as a historical breakthrough. In a statement to the press he declared: “For the first time in history, Japan is led by a Christian leader—one who throughout his life has been a member of the Presbyterian Church.”42 Yoshida Shigeru, who preceded and succeeded Katayama, was not a Christian, but his wife and children were Catholics. The quickest way to convert the Japanese nation was to first convert the imperial family. An imperial conversion could also improve Hirohito’s image abroad, remove the danger of his dismissal, and ensure the continuity of the dynasty. When State Shinto was disbanded in December 1945, the emperor’s religion became his private affair. As a result, State Shinto, which had formerly been a state-sponsored system of rites centered on the emperor, became the private religion of the imperial family. That seemed to mean that the emperor, as a private citizen, was free to adopt any religion, including Christianity. Some occupation officers and Japanese Christians believed that, with proper guidance, the scion of the gods would embrace the Son of God. In July 1946, MacArthur confided to Secretary of the Navy James For-

40 Douglas MacArthur, Reminiscences (London: Heinemann, 1964), pp. 309–311; Seagrave, Yamato Dynasty, p. 244. 41 Wilhelmus Creemers, Shrine Shinto after World War II (Leiden: Brill, 1968), pp. 124–132; Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1983), vol. 5, p. 80. 42 Woodard, The Allied Occupation, p. 356; Wittner, “MacArthur and the Missionaries,” p. 94.

emperors and christianity

173

restal that he was considering asking the emperor to convert.43 William Woodard, head of the Religious Research Unit of SCAP, admits: That the General pondered the possibility of His Majesty’s conversion, there can be little doubt. He referred to it on too many occasions for this to have been a mere figment of someone’s imagination. There is good reason to believe that Christianity was mentioned on the occasion of at least one of the Emperor’s visits with MacArthur.44

MacArthur believed that converting the emperor and the rest of the people would not be difficult, as he told a missionary: “I could make the Emperor and seventy million people Christians overnight, if I wanted to use the power I have.”45 He later told the evangelist preacher Billy Graham, who visited Japan, that Hirohito had revealed to him ‘his willingness to make Christianity the national religion of Japan.’ MacArthur added that he had rejected the offer, because it was wrong ‘to impose any religion on a people.’46 Interestingly enough, the imperial family seemed quite favorable to the idea of conversion. Following Japan’s defeat, Hirohito’s mother, Empress Dowager Sadako, was quoted saying: “What this country now needs is Christianity.”47 Japan’s first postwar prime minister, the emperor’s uncle Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko, on 20 September 1945 invited to his residence a group of Christian leaders, including Kagawa Toyohiko and foreign missionaries who had stayed in Japan during the war. He apologized to them for the wartime maltreatment of some Christians and presented his vision about the role of Christianity in postwar Japan. “The teachings of Jesus Christ,” he said, “should be the new ethics of our country. Neither Buddhism nor Shinto teaches us to forgive the enemy . . . The way to revive Japan is to make Jesus Christ the foundation of the people’s life.”48 In 1952 Prince Higashikuni became a Freemason and joined the Tokyo Masonic Lodge. Although Freemasons are not necessarily Christians, they take an oath on the Bible.49

43 Eiji Takemae, Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy (New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 379. 44 Woodard, The Allied Occupation, p. 272. 45 Woodard, The Allied Occupation, p. 245. 46 Woodard, The Allied Occupation, p. 245. 47 Woodard, The Allied Occupation, p. 273. 48 Ray A. Moore, Tennō ga baiburu o yonda hi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1982), p. 35. 49 T.W. Fripp, Japan: A History of Freemasonry (Hong Kong: District Grand Lodge of the Far East, 1961). I am indebted to Pauline Chakmakjian for pointing out this matter to me.

174

ben-ami shillony

In December 1951, another uncle of Hirohito, the sixty-four-year-old Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, who had studied in France before the war and commanded the Japanese army in China during the war, was baptized to Catholicism in Rome together with his wife and children.50 In January 1948, Prince Takamatsu, at a session of the preparatory committee of the International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo, declared: “I think Christians possess a sincere character . . . When, regretfully, people and morals in our country become corrupted, I sincerely wish that a Christian person should become our light.”51 When the university was established in 1952, the emperor sent a personal donation, and his brother Prince Chichibu became an honorary councilor of the university.52 Embracing Christianity did not imply the discarding of Shinto. If the Christians before 1945 could accept the emperor’s divinity, could not a Christian emperor perform Shinto rituals? MacArthur did not regard Shinto as heresy. In his Reminiscences he wrote: Although I was brought up as a Christian and adhere entirely to its teachings, I have always had a sincere admiration for many of the basic principles underlying the Oriental faiths. Christianity does not differ from them as much as one would think. There is little conflict between the two, and each might well be strengthened by a better understanding of the other.53

Hirohito did not regard Shinto as a religion. According to a palace official, the emperor saw Shinto as a system of rites, which ‘had been greatly over-rated in the United States.’54 His brother, Prince Takamatsu, in 1947 told the shrine journal Jinja shimpō, that Shinto lacked religious tenets and therefore had to receive them from other religions. In the past, he explained, Shinto borrowed these from Buddhism, but now it should get them from Christianity.55 Hirohito responded favorably to MacArthur’s overtures. According to the chamberlain Tokugawa Yoshihiro, shortly after the war the 50 Karei naru kōshitsu (Tokyo: Gakken, 1994), p. 169; Seagrave, The Yamato Dynasty, p. 245. 51 Moore, Tennō ga baiburu o yonda hi, pp. 41–42. 52 Vining, Return, pp. 124–125. 53 MacArthur, Reminiscences, pp. 309–311. 54 John W. Dower, “The Shōwa Emperor and Japan’s Postwar Imperial Democracy,” JPRI ( Japan Policy Research Institute) Working Paper No. 61 (October 1999), pp. 3–4. 55 Takahashi Hiroshi & Suzuki Kunihiko, Tennō-ke no misshitachi (Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, 1981), pp. 122–123.

emperors and christianity

175

emperor started inviting Christian lecturers to the palace.56 In January 1946, Kagawa Toyohiko was invited to explain to the imperial family the principles of Christianity. The lecture lasted for two hours, and after it was over Hirohito asked many questions. 57 In May, Saitō Takeshi, a Christian professor at Tokyo University, lectured to the imperial family on “Sin, Suffering and Pardon, the Cross and the Hope.” When the lecture was over, Hirohito asked Saitō to recite a Christian prayer.58 In May 1946, Uemura Tamaki, the president of the Young Women Christian Association of Japan and the daughter of the clergyman Uemura Masahisa, traveled to the United States to promote the Christian mission to Japan. She was the first Japanese allowed to go abroad after the war. Upon her return in 1947, she was received in audience by the emperor and empress, and handed them a gift from the American Presbyterian Church Women, a beautifully bound Bible.59 Following the audience, Uemura was asked by the empress dowager to provide weekly Bible lessons to the empress and her three daughters. During these lessons, that lasted for four years, Uemura, the empress and the princesses sang Christian hymns. The emperor would sometimes join them and listen.60 Like Emperor Meiji, Hirohito showed a special interest in Catholicism. In August 1947, he paid a visit to a Catholic church in Akita city, where the nuns welcomed him with Christian hymns.61 That summer, when vacationing in Nasu, the imperial couple visited the orphanage of the French missionary Joseph Flaujac. In January 1948, Hirohito asked Flaujac, who was on his way to Rome, to deliver an autographed photograph to Pope Pius XII. Flaujac presented the photograph to the pope, who in return sent Hirohito a golden medal with his own autographed photograph.62 In 1949 Hirohito toured the devastated city of Nagasaki, where he visited the Catholic writer Nagai Takashi, who was in hospital suffering from radiation sickness (he died two years later). Nagai regarded the dropping of the atomic bomb on his city as a divine blessing. In his book Nagasaki no kane (The Bells of Nagasaki), 56 Tokugawa Yoshihiro, Jijūchō no yuigon (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1997), pp. 115–116. 57 Ushijima, Nonfuikshon, p. 129. 58 Takahashi & Suzuki, Tennō-ke, pp. 120–122. 59 Takahashi & Suzuki, Tennō-ke, pp. 106–115. 60 Seagrave, Yamato Dynasty, p. 243; Moore, Tennō ga baiburu o yonda hi, p. 41. 61 Takahashi & Suzuki, Tennō-ke, pp. 131–133. 62 Takahashi & Suzuki, Tennō-ke, pp. 134–136.

176

ben-ami shillony

he claimed that God had chosen His beloved Nagasaki as a sacrificial lamb to end the war and to expiate the sins of humanity. He wrote: How noble, how splendid was that holocaust of August 9, when flames soared up from the cathedral, dispelling the darkness of war and bringing the light of peace! . . . Eight thousand people, together with their priests, burning with pure smoke, entered into eternal life . . . let us give thanks that Nagasaki was chosen for the sacrifice. Let us give thanks that through this sacrifice peace was given to the world and freedom of religion to Japan.63

During the first five years of the allied occupation it often seemed that the imperial family was about to convert. In December 1946, Nambara Shigeru, the Christian president of Tokyo University, announced that the emperor would soon convert to Christianity. In May 1947, the Miyako shimbun of Kyoto reported that the emperor was ‘on the way to conversion.’64 In 1948, Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York met Hirohito and after their meeting declared that the emperor and the people of Japan would convert to Catholicism. In December 1948, the Associated Press reported from the Vatican that the emperor of Japan would soon become a Catholic.65 In April 1950, Kagawa Toyohiko told British reporters that the empress was being instructed in Christianity, and ‘she in turn was teaching the emperor.’66 The Attempt to Convert the Crown Prince Converting the imperial family required that its young members be given a Christian education. There had been Christian teachers at the Gakushūin (Peers’ School) before the war, but during the occupation, when Hirohito’s two sons, Crown Prince Akihito and Prince Hitachi (Masahito), attended that school, their numbers increased. In 1947, the Christian educator Abe Yoshishige, principal of the First Higher School in Tokyo during the war, was appointed president of Gakushūin. Mitani

63 Takashi Nagai, The Bells of Nagasaki (tr. William Johnston. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1984), pp. 108–109; See also: John W. Treat, Writing Ground Zero (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 310–315; Kenneth J. Ruoff, The People’s Emperor (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), p. 133; John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat (New York: Norton, 1999), pp. 196–198. 64 Woodard, The Allied Occupation, p. 273. 65 Woodard, The Allied Occupation, pp. 273–274. 66 Woodard, The Allied Occupation, p. 274.

emperors and christianity

177

Takanobu, a Christian diplomat and brother of the theologian Mitani Takamasa, was appointed the school’s vice president. Abe stayed in that post until his death in 1966. Mitani became, after a year, the emperor’s grand chamberlain and remained in that position until his retirement in 1965.67 According to Watanabe Midori, when Prince Hitachi was a student at Gakushūin High School, he secretly embraced Christianity and prayed to God every evening before going to bed.68 Kawahara Toshiaki claims that although Prince Hitachi is attending Shinto rites, ‘deep in his heart’ he is a Christian.69 In June 1948, Tajima Michiji, a Quaker businessman and a former student of Nitobe, was appointed director of the imperial household agency (formerly the imperial household ministry), and he stayed in that office until 1953. One of Tajima’s first acts was to appoint Koizumi Shinzō, the wartime president of Keiō University, who converted to Christianity after the war, as the chamberlain in charge of Akihito’s education. Koizumi became Akihito’s closest adviser and for many years wielded great influence over him.70 In 1950, a Catholic jurist, Tanaka Kōtarō, the dean of the faculty of law of Tokyo Imperial University before the war and chief justice of the supreme court after the war, was appointed Akihito’s tutor on constitutional affairs. In 1951, a Catholic educator, Hamao Minoru, the elder brother of the future bishop of Yokohama, Hamao (Stephan) Fumio, was appointed a personal tutor of Akihito, and he too had a great influence over him.71 Akihito’s most influential Christian teacher was Elizabeth Gray Vining, who was appointed in 1946 to be his English tutor. Although there were many linguists among the occupation personnel who were qualified to fill this position, MacArthur brought Mrs. Vining all the way from Philadelphia because she was meant to be more than a

67 Tokugawa, Jijūchō no yuigon, p. 161; Nagafuji Takeshi, “Kōshitsu ni shinobiyotta kirisutokyō no kage,” Bungei shunjū, March 1989 (Special Issue), pp. 88–89. 68 Watanabe Midori, Michiko kōgō no “inochi no tabi,” (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 1991), pp. 173–175. 69 Kawahara Toshiaki, Michiko-sama to kōzoku-tachi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1992), p. 259. 70 Nihon kirisutokyō rekishi daijiten, p. 498; Elizabeth G. Vining, Quiet Pilgrimage (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970), pp. 220, 223; Elizabeth G. Vining, Return to Japan (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960), pp. 114, 116; Watanabe Midori, Talking about the Imperial Family (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2000), pp. 69–77. 71 Jinji kōshin-roku (Tokyo: Jinji Kōshin-sho, 1995), vol. 2, p. 107; Vining, Return, p. 277.

178

ben-ami shillony

language teacher.72 Vining was a devout Quaker, and Philadelphia was the center of the Quaker movement from where missionaries had been coming to Japan since 1885.73 The expectations from her were great, as Woodard writes: After the arrival of Mrs. Elizabeth Vining as tutor to the Crown Prince, there were those who assumed that the Crown Prince might be converted . . . Brigadier General Bonner Fellers reportedly predicted that Japan’s next Emperor would ‘undoubtedly’ be a Christian.74

In her book Windows for the Crown Prince, Vining admits that there was “an expression of the hope which many Christians felt and which others put to me in far more blunt terms, that I should convert the Crown Prince to Christianity.”75 Vining could not preach Christianity openly, but she introduced Christian ideas to Akihito through her English conversation classes, in which she discussed with him such topics as ‘What is God?’ and ‘Why do Christians pray?’ She gave the crown prince a copy of the English Bible and asked a Christian boy, Robert Tōgasaki, the son of the president of The Japan Times, to join the group of children who studied with the crown prince. She also invited Christian scholars to lecture to the crown prince on religious themes.76 Shimizu Jirō, one of Akihito’s Christian chamberlains, commented: “Mrs. Vining did not propagate Christianity, but she touched the prince with her warm heart, praying that the prince would himself discover the unseen true God.”77 When Mrs. Vining returned to the United States in 1950, she was succeeded by another Quaker teacher from Philadelphia, Esther Rhodes, the headmistress of the Friends School ( furendo gakuen) in

72 Ushijima, Nonfuikushon, pp. 132–133; Herbert P. Bix, “Inventing the Symbol Monarchy in Japan, 1945–52,” Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 21, No. 2 (Summer 1995), pp. 319–320; Gwen Terasaki, Bridge to the Sun (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1973), pp. 205–207; Seagrave, The Yamato Dynasty, pp. 238–239. 73 Nihon kirisutokyō rekishi daijiten, pp. 438, 1030; Itoko Koyama, Nagako, Empress of Japan (New York: John Day, 1958), pp. 171–172. 74 Woodard, The Allied Occupation, p. 273. 75 Elizabeth G. Vining, Windows for the Crown Prince (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1952), pp. 73–74. 76 Vining, Windows, pp. 186–187; Elizabeth G. Vining, Return, pp. 226–227, 272–273. 77 Yoshida Shin’ya, Tennō e no michi (Tokyo: Yomiuri Shimbunsha, 1991), p. 191; Ushijima, Nonfuikushon, p. 157.

emperors and christianity

179

Tokyo. Mrs. Rhodes gave English lessons to the crown prince and to the empress for seven years until 1957.78 Hirohito’s youngest brother, Prince Mikasa, who graduated from Tokyo University after the war, in 1955 began teaching about the ancient Middle East at a Christian college, the Tokyo Women’s University, which had been founded in 1917 by the American missionary Karl Reischauer (father of the historian Edwin O. Reischauer). Specializing in Judaism and Christianity, Prince Mikasa was critical of the Shinto myths and opposed the revival of kigensetsu—the prewar holiday celebrating the founding of Japan by the mythical first emperor Jimmu.79 Mikasa’s eldest son, Tomohito, married a Catholic, Aso Nobuko, the granddaughter of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru. Another son, Prince Takamado, married Tottori Hisako, a graduate of the Catholic junior high school of the University of the Sacred Heart (Seishin joshi daigaku). Prince Takamado died in 2002 of a heart attack. A Catholic-Educated Crown Princess After the end of the allied occupation in 1952, the interest of the imperial couple in Christianity waned, but the Christian network around Akihito remained strong. In 1956, when the crown prince reached the age of twenty-three, his Christian mentor Koizumi embarked on the task of finding him a bride. After a long search, his choice fell on Shōda Michiko, the eldest daughter of Shōda Hidesaburō, president of the Nisshin Seifun flour-milling company. The match was hailed as a love affair between the young crown prince and a commoner girl whom he met on the tennis ground of Karuizawa. But this tennis game, in which the couple first met in August 1957, had been pre-arranged by Koizumi, and it was watched from the benches by Koizumi, Hamao, and Michiko’s mother Shōda Fumiko.80 Three months later, Koizumi wrote to Mrs. Vining in the

Vining, Return, p. 26; Nihon kiririsutokyō rekishi daijiten, p. 1526. Mikasa no Miya Takahito, Kodai oriento-shi to watakushi (Tokyo: Gakuseisha, 1984), p. 281; Kawahara Toshiaki, Michiko-sama to kōzoku-tachi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1992), pp. 246–247; Éric Seizelet, Monarchie et Démocratie dans le Japon d’Après-Guerre (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1990), p. 298. 80 Yoshida Shinya, Tennō e no michi (Tokyo: Yomiuri Shimbunsha, 1991), pp. 234–236; Vining, Return, pp. 363–364. 78 79

180

ben-ami shillony

United States about his choice of bride: “It is not only His Highness’s but our choice too. We rather chose first.”81 Michiko’s family was Catholic and her entire education, from the Futaba elementary school to the University of the Sacred Heart, had been Catholic. She was the valedictorian of her 1957 graduating class, and in 1958 she was sent to Brussels to represent her Catholic university at an international conference of Catholic schools.82 Was she herself a Catholic? The official version was that she had not been baptized, and therefore was not a Christian. This would mean that her parents ignored the binding Code of Canon Law, which obliges Catholic parents to baptize their children.83 In November 1958, the imperial house council, chaired by Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, met to confirm the engagement. At that meeting, the prime minister asked: “What is the religion of Michiko? I hear that the Shōda family is Catholic, and that Michiko has graduated from the University of the Sacred Heart. As the religion of the imperial family is Shinto, wouldn’t that pose a problem?” The director of the imperial household agency, Usami Takeshi, replied: “It is true that Michiko graduated from the university that you have mentioned, but she was not baptized. Therefore there is absolutely no problem.” On the basis of this explanation, the council unanimously approved the marriage.84 The wedding was welcomed by Christians. On 6 December 1958, the Protestant paper Kirisutokyō shimbun (Christianity Newspaper) wrote: By this deed the imperial family has destroyed the feudal wall which has historically surrounded it. The next step should be to tear down the wall of Shinto which hinders religious freedom. Only when that wall too is torn down will Japan become a civilized nation.85

These words irritated the Shinto establishment. On 20 December, the Jinja shimpō (Shrine Newspaper) reacted vehemently:

Vining, Return, pp. 214–215. Kawahara Toshiaki, Michiko kōgō (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1990), pp. 51–52; Nihon kirisutokyō rekishi daijiten, pp. 757, 1242, 1305. 83 Code of Canon Law (Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1983), Book IV, Part I, Title 1, Chapter III, Can. 867. 84 Hattori Minoru, “Kōshitsu to kirisutokyō,” Bungei shunjū, November 1989, pp. 238–239. 85 Ashizu Uzuhiko, Miyabi to haken (Tokyo: Nihon Kyōbunsha, 1980), p. 173. 81

82

emperors and christianity

181

Gentlemen of the Protestant Church, before you tear down the Shinto wall of the imperial family, first tear down the walls of the Protestant monarchies which share your religion. Respecting the iron Protestant walls of other monarchies while demanding only the demolition of the walls of the Japanese imperial family will not bring you new adherents. On the contrary, such self-righteous attitude will gain you the hostility of most Japanese, who will be greatly annoyed by this insult.86

Hirohito and his wife were not pleased with the plebeian crown princess. They accepted the decision of their son and the imperial household agency, but they did not hide their displeasure.87 As a result, Michiko suffered from depression and refused to talk to anyone except her husband and little son Naruhito (Prince Hiro), who was born in 1960. In 1964 a woman psychiatrist, Kamiya Mieko, the daughter of the Christian education minister Maeda Tamon, was summoned to treat her. Kamiya stayed with Michiko for more than six years and became her closest friend and adviser.88 The crown prince and princess showed a favorable attitude to Catholicism. After Akihito’s Catholic tutor Hamao Minoru left his position in 1971, to teach at the University of the Sacred Heart, he continued to visit their Tōgū palace.89 When the crown prince and princess vacationed in Karuizawa, they sent their daughter Sayako to a Catholic nursery school, rather than to one of the ordinary schools there.90 In 1989, Peter Hebblethwaite wrote of Michiko in the National Catholic Reporter: A Jesuit who knows her well says prayer plays an important part in her life. Although she has not become a Christian, she will call the sisters who taught her and say: ‘We have a problem. Would you please put the matter in your prayers? Thank you, sister.’91

When a reporter asked Michiko, on her forty-seventh birthday in October 1981, what was the most important event in the previous year for her, she replied that it was the pope’s visit to Japan and his prayer in

Ashizu, Miyabi, pp. 174–175. Hamao Minoru, Kōtaishi-sama, masako-sama e no messeiji (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1993), p. 124. 88 Miyabara, “Michiko kōgō,” pp. 267–269; Seizelet, Monarchie et démocratie, pp. 305–306; Asahi shimbun, 23 March 1963. 89 Hamao Minoru, Kōgō michiko-sama (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1996), pp. 222–223. 90 Miyabara, “Michiko kōgō,” p. 271. 91 Peter Hebblethwaite, “Japan’s Imperial Family has Catholic Ties,” National Catholic Reporter, March 12, 1989, p. 9. 86 87

182

ben-ami shillony

Hiroshima.92 In 1993, during a tour of Europe, Akihito and Michiko met with Pope John Paul II at his villa near Rome.93 In the 1970s and 1980s, two Christian politicians became prominent in Japan, but their religion was hardly noticed by the public and it had no effect on their behavior. One of them was Ōhira Masayoshi, prime minister from December 1978 to June 1980. Although he was a Christian, it was during his tenure in 1979 that the emperor-based counting of years by reign-periods ( gengō ) was reinstituted. The other Christian was Doi Takako, the woman president of the opposition Japan Socialist Party from 1986 to 1991. When Akihito ascended the throne in 1989, the Christian churches, in contrast to their support of the enthronement ceremonies of the Taishō and Shōwa emperors, objected to the daijōsai ceremony, claiming that it was unconstitutional. Nishikawa Shigenori, a Christian journalist, claimed that the ceremony was imposed on Akihito, who did not believe in the Shinto gods. He wrote: “We can hardly avoid the conclusion that the emperor is, in effect, being deprived of his own religious freedom.”94 Akihito and Michiko’s positive feelings toward Christianity continued after they became emperor and empress, and many of their chamberlains and ladies in waiting continued to be Christians.95 The bishop of Yokohama, Hamao (Stephan) Fumio, the younger brother of the chamberlain Hamao Minoru, was a frequent visitor at the palace in the 1990s.96 In 1991, two Catholic women, Marie Philomène de los Reyes of the convent of the Sisters of St. Paul, and Saitō Masako, professor of English literature at the University of the Sacred Heart, edited the English translation of the imperial couple’s waka poetry collection Tomoshibi.97 In 1994, Eileen Katō, the Irish Catholic widow of the former Japanese ambassador to Belgium and an expert on the nō drama,

Takahashi Hiroshi, Tennō-ke no shigoto (Tokyo: Kyōdō Tsūshin-sha, 1993), p. 29. The Japan Times, 5 September 1993, p. 2. 94 Shigenori Nishikawa, “The Daijōsai, the Constitution, and the Christian Faith,” The Japan Christian Quarterly, vol. 56, No. 3 (Summer 1990), pp. 144–145. 95 Nagafuji, “Kōshitsu ni,” pp. 688–689. 96 Hebblethwaite, “Japan’s Imperial Family,” p. 9; Hattori, “Kōshitsu to kirisutokyō,” p. 39. Stephen (Fumio) Hamao was made bishop of Yokohama in 1979. In 1998 he was called to Rome, and in 2003 he was made a cardinal. He died in 2007 at the age of 77. 97 Philomène, Marie and Masako Saito, eds., Tomoshibi-Light, Collected Poetry by Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko (Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1991). 92 93

emperors and christianity

183

was appointed translator of the imperial couple’s correspondence with foreign countries.98 In 1989, Yamashita Kazuo, a Catholic diplomat and former ambassador to Morocco, was appointed chief chamberlain of Crown Prince Naruhito. Yamashita held that position until 1995 and was in charge of Naruhito’s marriage with Masako. Both Naruhito and Masako were exposed to Christianity in their youth. Naruhito attended Merton College in Oxford for two years, and Masako attended the Futaba Catholic elementary and middle schools in Tokyo, and later studied at Harvard and at Balliol College in Oxford. Despite this long-lasting interest in Christianity, the imperial family of Japan did not convert. Japan adopted democracy and pacifism without basing them on a Christian belief. Its return to the family of nations, as a respected industrial democracy, removed the fear that without Christianity it would not be respected by the western world. The Japanese public, of which only one percent is Christian, might not mind a Christian prime minister, but would not accept a Christian emperor who is the symbol of the people. An imperial conversion during the allied occupation could have improved the emperor’s image abroad, but would have damaged his prestige at home and undermined public support for the imperial institution. Retaining the dynasty seemed to require that it remain Shinto.

98

The Japan Times, 4 April 1994, p. 2.

THE UNRECIPROCATED GAZE: EMPERORS AND PHOTOGRAPHY Julia Adeney Thomas The Strange Story of the Crown Prince and the Photographers Deep in the archives of the Prange Institute at the University of Maryland, where censorship materials from the allied occupation of Japan are housed, I stumbled upon a small magazine called Shashin tembō (Photography’s Prospects). Its inaugural issue in January of 1947, sixteen months after the defeat, carried an article titled “Tennō to shashin” (The Emperor and Photography).1 In this essay, an obscure photojournalist named Ikegami Shirō reminisces about his days of covering the news at the imperial house. The essay recounts a startling story. In Ikegami’s recollection, the newly married prince regent, the man who would become the Shōwa Emperor, galloped up to the Meiji Shrine on his horse and gracefully dismounted. Casual and debonair in his riding outfit, Hirohito waltzed straight up to the waiting photographers of the press, blatantly disregarding the imperial household ministry decree that there always be twenty meters between himself and any camera lens. When one of the photographers, Miura Hirokichi, audaciously turned his camera on the prince regent, he ‘stood still and posed with his riding crop by his side,’ radiating control of the situation and of himself. When the photojournalist pleaded for yet another shot, Hirohito posed again, smiling broadly and even asking ‘How’s this?’ before striding off, up the path to his revered grandfather’s memorial. When I came across this story, I felt as though I was reading a fairy tale. Here was a Hirohito whom I had rarely encountered. Here was a virile and capable man, a newlywed husband and a sportsman, in tune with his own body and with the concerns of the anxiously waiting * Along with Ben-Ami Shillony and other colleagues in attendance at the International Conference on Japan at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2007, I would like to thank J. Lee Spurgeon for her excellent research assistance and Alan G. Thomas for his unsparing critique. 1 Ikegami Shirō, “Tennō to shashin,” Shashin tembō, vol. 1, No. 1 ( January 1947), pp. 30–34.

186

julia adeney thomas

cameramen. He had arrived late, and, as Ikegami remembers it, the photographers were nervous, thinking that if the prince regent walked by too quickly in the increasing darkness, their shutter speeds would be too slow to capture his progress. Hirohito eliminates their concerns by making himself comfortably available to the cameras. In short, a selfpossessed prince regent initiates a reciprocal interaction that is neither the mark of a remote icon nor that of a passive object. In defiance of the chief inspector of Saitama (who happened to be there) and the chief of police of the Meiji Shrine who stand aghast at these proceedings, the prince regent looks at the cameramen, recognizing them and their needs, and they in turn look at him, communicate their respect and proceed to practice their craft. At least in this telling, Hirohito is not the “slight, twitchy, shrill-voiced, near-sighted, physically awkward, reticent and tense” person described by historian Gavan McCormack, but rather a vigorous, graceful participant in the world around him and in the creation of his own photographic image.2 However, the image itself, reproduced in the 1947 magazine article (see figure 1), still conveys the physical tentativeness of the man. This tentativeness may be the result of the framing of the figure. Instead of dominating the space around him or interacting with it, the prince regent is encased by his environment, visually placed at an equal distance—and rather too much of a distance—from the borders of the frame. Rather like the very first photograph, taken in 1871, of the Meiji Emperor (see figure 2), where he is seated awkwardly in his formal court robes, Miura’s photograph likewise suspends the monarch in space, a formal compositional technique that attenuates the subject and undermines his projection of self-command. Furthermore, unlike the young Meiji who has only a blank formal backdrop to compete with, the prince regent in Miura’s figure is encased in a natural environment of visual complexity that slightly overwhelms him. Later, Edoardo Chiossone’s 1888 portrait (see figure 3) solves the problem of the relationship between imperial presence and pictorial space by cropping the imperial body and framing Meiji’s torso. There can be little doubt that because this framing supplies the sitting subject with dignity and force by displaying him as dominating the space around

2 Gavan McCormack, “Japan’s Houdini” [Review of Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan], (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), New Left Review, 7 ( Jan/Feb 2001), p. 139.

the unreciprocated gaze: emperors and photography

187

Fig. 1. Image of Prince Regent Hirohito at Ōmiya-Hikawa Shrine, used to illustrate “Tennō to shashin,” in Shashin tembō, January 1947.

188

julia adeney thomas

Fig. 2. Earliest photographic portrait of the Meiji Emperor, December 1871.

the unreciprocated gaze: emperors and photography

Fig. 3. Portrait of the Meiji Emperor by Edoardo Chiossone, 1888.

189

190

julia adeney thomas

him, it was Chiossone’s painting that was photographed by Maruki Toshiaki and placed in schools, post offices, and other official buildings throughout Japan in the late Meiji period.3 By the 1930s, it was often the practice to display only the upper torso of the Shōwa Emperor, and always from a frontal view so as not to reveal his slightly stooped posture.4 In any case, the photograph of the prince regent standing on the path to the Meiji Shrine does not convey the certitude and presence suggested by Ikegami’s approbation. The tension between the restrained image from the early 1920s and the ebullient text of 1947 suggests that Ikegami’s enthusiasm may say more about his present-day hopes than about his past recollections, more about the possibilities of the postwar emperorship than of the prewar regency. Ikegami’s gloss on the recently dismounted prince may be his way of suggesting that there might have been and, more importantly, might still be a different way for the ruler to interact with his people through photography. Indeed, Ikegami declares that by means of the new kind of photographs appearing after the war such as the image of the emperor standing on the shore with the waves flooding his shoes, ‘we have, we might say, an exquisite intimacy with the emperor.’5 Blaming the wartime separation between the emperor and the general populace on various officials, Ikegami describes the emperor in 1947 as standing ‘directly in front of the people’ and ‘seeing their way of life.’6 He was, we now know, sadly mistaken. In the early months of the occupation, the postwar imperial role had already been set on a less desirable course, one that was neither frank nor transparent. Nevertheless, it is worth paying attention to Ikegami’s vision for what it tells us about photography’s potential to serve as a positive form of political communication. Ikegami’s 1947 reverie about the early 1920s represents a hopeful alternative, distinct from both wartime and postwar imperial images. Ikegami’s vision of a virile, interactive monarch reached only the 10,000 or so readers of Shashin tembō, a shortlived periodical that was 3 For discussions of images of Meiji, see Sudō Mitsuaki, Meiji tennō gyoden (Tokyo: Kaneo Bun’endō, 1912); Watanabe Gintarō, Gotaisō go-shashin chō (Tokyo: Shimbashi Shoten, 1912); T. Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 4 Kyoko Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo under the American Occupation, 1945–1952 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), p. 141. 5 Ikegami Shirō, “Tennō to shashin,” p. 30. 6 Ikegami, ibid.

the unreciprocated gaze: emperors and photography

191

only one among seventeen or more magazines dedicated to amateur photographers during the early years of the occupation. And yet it throws wartime and postwar imperial images into relief by presenting the notion of the emperor as an active, but not over-powering, agent in the world, and as a ‘normal’ husband rather than the reified Father or Mother figure of the prewar years, let alone what commentators would describe as the myopic bride or female impersonator who emerged after the defeat. Although Ikegami’s alternative ideal was never achieved, never even fully envisioned, the fact of its being recollected, or projected, at this important juncture reveals the possibility of another mode of monarchy, emerging briefly in the postwar turmoil only to be discarded. Photography helps us explore the nature of these different imperial modes, both actual and imagined. My theme, therefore, is the gaze and its corollaries of political agency, gender, and sexuality as they pertain to photography and the Shōwa Emperor.7 While both before and after the war, as I shall demonstrate, the gaze was unidirectional, marred by opacity, and betokening the violence of unequal relationships, Ikegami’s essay envisions what might be called a ‘reciprocal gaze’ between a modest monarch and the people around him. In so doing, it suggests an accessible, non-violent public figure. The shared prerogative of seeing and the level exchange of the gaze promise political and gender equity and a benign sexuality devoid of danger. These qualities—inherent in the reciprocal gaze—are missing from the photographs of the emperor both before and after the war. I will return to this argument, but first let me present the contrast between the wartime and postwar imperial image. The Disciplinary Gaze of the Wartime Emperor As is well-known, before Japan’s defeat in 1945, photographs of the emperor were heavily regulated by his advisors, particularly the imperial household ministry, as well as by the police and the military. Rules about who was allowed to take photographs, the distance between 7 Much work in film studies centers on the idea of ‘the gaze,’ including Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996); Tania Modelski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Film Theory (New York: Methuen, 1988). The concept finds older iterations in Hegel and Freud.

192

julia adeney thomas

the photographers and their sacred subject, and which of these very uncandid shots were appropriate for publication all pertained. As Ikegami’s article goes on to reveal, farcical situations arose from efforts to monitor news photographs in the 1930s. For instance, in the Shizuoka Prefecture, at an agricultural school in Nakaizumi, a group of newspaper photographers became disgruntled when they realized that the place designated for them, unlike that of the official provincial photographer, prevented them from framing both the emperor and the school activities in the same shot. They therefore left their designated position and arrayed themselves closer to the emperor. After bowing deeply, they pulled out their cameras and started shooting photos. As soon as the emperor departed, furious policemen rushed at the photographers, ripped the film out of their cameras and, trampling it vigorously underfoot, declared that they were bringing charges. “Quite right,” was the response of the canny reporters, “but if we have committed lèse majesté by going to a particular spot without permission, you have flung this film [containing the ‘sacred image’] on the bare ground close to the toilet and . . . ground it into the dirt with your feet . . . If we committed lèse majesté, haven’t you committed even worse lèse majesté ?” The faces of the Shizuoka chief of police and his surrounding officers were “drained of color in a flash.”8 Without doing anything further, they retreated. Eventually, after much bluster, the chief of police “came, and crying manly tears, asked the photographers to forget all about what happened.”9 This and other instances related by Ikegami reveal the strict regulations and bureaucratic stridency of those charged with guarding the Shōwa Emperor from intrusive cameras and, of course, the resulting absurdities of this policy. The effect of all this regulation, beginning in the Meiji period, was the projection of what Takashi Fujitani has called ‘the disciplinary gaze’ of an all-seeing monarch throughout the nation.10 I have some qualms about how precisely Foucauldian terms apply to a figure like Hirohito who was seemingly oblivious to so much and imbued with a sacral aura linked to ancestral divinities beyond the panopticon of the modern administrative state. Nevertheless, the purvey of the Shōwa Emperor’s gaze was at least imagined to encompass all his subjects’ activities. The

8 9 10

Ikegami, “Tennō to shashin”, p. 33. Ibid., p. 34. Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, pp. 24–26.

the unreciprocated gaze: emperors and photography

193

emperor in military garb paraded above the obeisant crowd and peered down at them from the photographic images hanging in public places, injecting moral discipline and national focus into ordinary life. Even when depicted in civilian clothes, the emperor regarded his people by looking directly into the camera. Historian Stephen Large writes that especially after the ‘Toranomon Incident’ of 23 December, 1923 when communist Nanba Daisuke attempted to shoot Hirohito, “the newspapers and magazines took to publishing photographs of the bespectacled regent seated at his desk, looking intently at the reader over an open book.”11 The emperor was certainly the one with the privilege to see, and it was meant as a commanding gaze, although exactly how clearly he saw or was meant to see is another matter. The prewar emperor’s gaze was also parental and, I believe, primarily paternal, as historians Ben-Ami Shillony and Fujitani suggest,12 rather than a loving mother’s look. Although Kanō Mikiyo and Robert Bellah have made interesting arguments about the modern emperors as embracing, comforting mother figures, compelling self-sacrifice for the nation, in terms of photography, the image of the wartime emperor was not feminized because of the need to project strength—military and otherwise—domestically and internationally.13 Indeed, even the intimacy and softer sides of fatherhood were downplayed. As historian Stephen Large says, in the early years of the war: Images of Shōwa as a family man never reached the public. In 1936, for example, the imperial household ministry censored a photograph showing him dressed in a suit as he relaxed with the members of his family. Only photographs depicting him unsmiling and in military uniform were judged suitable for a ‘manifest deity’ and leader of the armed forces.14

These photographs were in fact carried onto the battlefields. As the fighting drew to a close, special orders to burn the emperor’s photograph were sent to battalions in retreat. At first these messages flummoxed

11 Stephen S. Large, Emperors of the Rising Sun: Three Biographies (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1997), pp. 108–9. 12 Ben-Ami Shillony, Enigma of the Emperors: Sacred Subservience in Japanese History (Folkestone, Kent, UK: Global Oriental, 2005), esp. pp. 131–136. 13 Robert Bellah, Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and its Modern Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), especially Chapter 6 “The Japanese Emperor as a Mother Figure: Some Preliminary Notes”. See also Ueno Chizuko, “In the Feminine Guise: A Trap of Reverse Orientalism” in Richard F. Calichman, ed., Contemporary Japanese Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 225–245. 14 Large, Emperors of the Rising Sun, pp. 154–5.

194

julia adeney thomas

British decoders who had otherwise broken Japanese encryption, but who could not make out the obscure nature of the command regarding immolation of the imperial picture.15 Through the photography of the period, the wartime emperor was not only imbued with the power of the gaze, but the power of a gaze that was masculine, martial, and austere. In its unidirectionality and inequality, it catalyzed violence. In contrast to their emperor, the Japanese people were both unseen and unseeing. The Shōwa Emperor gazed down on his people and held them in his thrall, but he appears not to have apprehended them nor, as the war moved closer to the Japanese islands, their increasing misery. Indeed, historian Herbert Bix describes the emperor in his 1946 “Monologue” (dokuhaku-roku) as displaying “coldness to the point of sarcasm in discussing the battle of Okinawa” and appearing “morally and emotionally distant from the pain and devastation that his government’s policies had produced.”16 Published photographs of the emperor at the time (see figure 4) suggest that displaying compassion—or even particular interest in the destruction caused by the war—was irrelevant to his image. Indeed, he appears to stride through Tokyo’s devastated landscape after the firebombing of March, 1945 with scarcely concealed impatience. While officially the emperor’s ‘disciplinary gaze’ may have penetrated everywhere, it must be said that Hirohito as an individual saw through cataract-encrusted lenses, his sight barely encompassing the reality of the battlefields of Asia and the Pacific or the domestic predicament. As for the people themselves, their view of their putative leader was also obscured by rules and customs established even before Hirohito took the throne. Sawamura Sadako, in her memoir of prewar Tokyo, recalls an incident she witnessed as a child. A second-hand dealer of scrolls and pictures was lying prostrate in front of his stall, while a soldier shouted: “How can you call yourself a Japanese subject? Bite your tongue and kill yourself, you unpatriotic scoundrel.” The reason for the soldier’s outrage, Sawamura recalls: . . . was a photograph of the emperor and the empress that stood beside the dealer. In those days Their Majesties’ portrait in a frame was a popular souvenir for country people. One was always displayed at this stall, but customarily, pieces of white paper covered each of the faces of the royal

Julian Ryall, “A British Veteran Remembers the Code War Against Japan,” The Japan Times (Wednesday, April 28, 1999), p. 19. 16 Herbert P. Bix, “The Showa Emperor’s ‘Monologue’ and the Problem of War Responsibility,” Journal of Japanese Studies vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer 1992), p. 352. 15

the unreciprocated gaze: emperors and photography

195

Fig. 4. Hirohito touring Tokyo after the fire-bombings, March 1945.

196

julia adeney thomas couple. Everyone understood that although such sales were permitted on the street, Their Majesties’ faces must be covered.

On that windy day the little customary pieces of white paper had blown away, leaving the stall-keeper to face uniformed wrath.17 As this incident shows, before the defeat in 1945, only carefully selected, carefully handled photographs of the emperor made their way to the public who were allowed to see very little as they worked and fought under the dispassionate eye of their imperial leader.18 Even staring at a photograph of the emperor was a punishable offense until the end of the Second World War.19 The lines of sight were clearly drawn. The Postwar Emperor as a Myopic Bride Japan’s defeat marked a sharp turn. As Fujitani deftly characterizes it, the gaze underwent “a nearly complete reversal in the vector of vision . . .”20 The emperor was transformed from a putatively all-seeing monarch into an object of public scrutiny. Stripped of the prerogative of the masculine, military gaze, he is described as taking on the attributes of a stereotypically feminized object, a passive entity of indeterminate gender without the agency of vision.21 It goes without saying that turning

17 Sadako Sawamura, My Asakusa: Coming of Age in Pre-War Tokyo (tr. Norman E. Stafford and Yasuhiro Kawamura. Boston: Tuttle Publishing Company, 2000), pp. 206–207. 18 Ikegami comments that he probably wasn’t alone during the war in not wanting to look further when he saw the ‘headline of an article on the imperial family.’ Ikegami, “Tennō to shashin,” p. 30. 19 John Whittier Treat, “Beheaded Emperors and the Absent Figure in Contemporary Japanese Literature,” PMLA, vol. 109, No. 1 ( January 1994), p. 109. 20 Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, p. 243. 21 Most theories of the gaze hold that it is a male prerogative. In her seminal essay on the subject, Laura Mulvey writes, “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” Laura Mulvay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” reprinted in Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Palgrave, 1989), p. 19. On the other hand, as Edward Snow argues, to adopt the view that the gaze is always male is to enact in analysis the patriarchy that is supposedly being critiqued. See Edward Snow, “Theorizing the Male Gaze: Some Problems,” Representations, No. 25 (Winter, 1989), pp. 30–41. Stephen Kern disputes the hegemony of the male gaze by focusing on what he calls the ‘proposal composition’ in English and French nineteenth-century painting. Here, as the woman contemplates her answer to a marriage

the unreciprocated gaze: emperors and photography

197

the emperor into a benign, downcast, rather bumbling figure, helped limit questions as to his war responsibility. In contrast to the war, when the people’s view of his daily life was all but obscured, after the war his own view of the people’s condition and most especially of his own past was deliberately blocked. This transformation began almost immediately after Japan’s defeat with the famous photograph of Hirohito’s September 1945 visit to MacArthur’s headquarters in the Daiichi building (see figure 5). Historian Harry Harootunian describes this as a “bourgeois wedding” picture with “big Mac” dwarfing “a small, almost shrinking emperor.”22 The Japanese government under Prime Minister Prince Higashikuni also found Hirohito’s subordination of MacArthur readily apparent in this image, and immediately banned it. Herbert Bix tells us: When the photograph did not accompany news articles . . . GHQ protested to the Foreign Ministry. The next day, 29 September, the Asahi, Mainichi, and Yomiuri-Hōchi newspapers did publish the censored picture . . . [but] Home Minister Yamazaki Iwao immediately intervened. All copies of those papers were seized on the ground that . . . the picture was sacrilegious to the imperial house and would thus have a detrimental effect on the nation.

In response, SCAP ordered the photograph to appear in papers and also repealed all Japanese restrictions on publishing. By 4 October, SCAP’s Civil Liberties directive abolished imperial thought control and “the whole apparatus of laws and ordinances retained in order to ‘protect the kokutai’ came crashing down.”23 The photographic union of the American general and the Shōwa Emperor catalyzed the formation of a new civic sphere, symbolically presided over by a retiring and myopic bride. Under occupation control, in this new passive form, the emperor was returned to the intimacy of family life in Japanese and American publications.24 On 4 February, 1946, Life magazine ran a scornful story

proposal, the moment of her supreme power, it is her gaze that is highlighted. Stephen Kern, Eyes of Love: The Gaze in English and French Culture 1840 –1900 (New York: New York University Press, 1996). 22 Harry D. Harootunian, “Review Article: Hirohito Redux,” Critical Asian Studies, vol. 33, No. 4 (2001), p. 621. 23 Herbert P. Bix, “Inventing the ‘Symbol Monarchy’ in Japan, 1945–52” Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 21, No. 2 (Summer 1995), pp. 324–25. 24 For instance, for the Japanese public, Asahi Camera ran a story in June, 1950 titled “Ningen tennō” (The Human Emperor).

198

julia adeney thomas

Fig. 5. General Douglas MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito, September 1945.

the unreciprocated gaze: emperors and photography

199

titled “Sunday at Hirohito’s” with the sarcastic text undermining the banal images of the imperial family commissioned by the imperial household ministry. The ministry (which in 1947 changed into an agency) had arranged for four Japanese photographers to take these first informal pictures. Ironically, one of them was Yamahata Yōsuke who had captured the horror at Nagasaki immediately after the atomic bomb. In homey domestic scenes, the crown prince chases the empress’s leghorns and an imperial grandson comes to visit in a shabby baby carriage. The lunch scene is dramatically captioned: “This is the first picture ever released of the emperor smiling.” With a nod to the emperor’s scientific pursuits, the story closes with an imperial tableau of Hirohito casually reading the Times and The Stars and Stripes near his ‘cherished’ busts of Lincoln and Darwin (see figure 6). In this image, the emperor is no longer looking over his paper at the people as he did before the war. Instead, he is photographed from above at an angle that would have been unthinkable before the defeat. Life magazine treats the story cynically, commenting that “the not very subtle purpose of the Jap imperial household is to present Hirohito as a democrat, father, grandfather, citizen, and botanist.”25 Here is less a bride than a slightly emasculated suburban husband. Life does not mention that such an image also served the purposes of MacArthur who wished to retain not only the imperial house, but Hirohito himself, pushing the blame for the war on a vague group of ‘militarists’ who purportedly deceived both emperor and people. In order to retain his position on the throne, the postwar emperor became the object of the gaze, not its progenitor. People now looked at him in relatively casual photographs in magazines, newspapers, and on television, and no longer averted their eyes. Nor, as part of the occupation bargain, was the emperor allowed to deploy his vision at will. In a famous incident, when he, and later his second son Prince Yoshi, (Hitachi) visited Edward Steichen’s touring photography exhibit, the ‘Family of Man,’ at the Takashimaya department store in April 1956, a specially constructed curtain barred his view of Yamahata’s 25 The text continues: “It [the imperial household ministry] censored some photographs of him in uniform, happily revealed a little shabbiness, such as the baby carriage above, had him read a copy of the New York Times and got Abraham Lincoln into the picture (Opposite page). The emperor is in fact a qualified working biologist. He himself discovered the two pickled marine fauna shown below and named by him Symposiphoea Imperialis Terao (the shrimp) and Lyrocteis Imperatoris Komai (the jellyfish).” Life (February 4, 1946), p. 78.

200

julia adeney thomas

Fig. 6. “Sunday at Hirohito’s,” Life, February 4, 1946.

the unreciprocated gaze: emperors and photography

201

photographs of Nagasaki’s ghastly victims, including relatively mild pictures (see figure 7). This arrangement of an emperor who was seen but unseeing did not please everyone. The Asahi Graph magazine responded with outrage to the censoring of the emperor’s sight, printing the photographs of Nagasaki’s wasted landscape and smoldering bodies next to a headline reading “Your Highnesses the Emperor and Prince Yoshi, Please Look at These.”26 But to no avail. The emperor’s capacity to look at the world around him and at his own past was redirected through his microscope or off to the side, as though alert for non-human biological specimens (see figure 8). The Lack of Reciprocal Gaze What is lacking from both wartime and postwar imperial photographs is the reciprocal gaze, a direct glance exchanged between the emperor and the people. The unreciprocated gaze creates, as I have intimated, hierarchies of power and the potential for violence. Reciprocity, on the other hand, because it represents a two-way exchange, constitutes agency on the part of both parties since they both direct their eyes at one another. In political terms, this quality of mutual recognition is fundamental to participation in and responsibility for public actions.27 In gender terms, it represents equalitarianism unavailable when one pair of eyes is literally or metaphorically veiled. And sexually, the reciprocal gaze denotes mutual longing without the proprietary dominance of the unidirectional ‘male’ gaze. As such, when enacted in the public sphere, the reciprocal gaze has decisive consequences for the development of responsible political agency, gender equality, and non-violent sensuality. In photographic images of the Shōwa Emperor before and after the war, there is little reciprocity. Whereas during the war, the vector of vision extended from the emperor to a populace unable to look him

26 See Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s description of this incident in The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History (New York: Verso, 2005), pp. 114–116. 27 Peter Wollen provides a concise history of ‘gaze theory’ in its political aspects, tracing it back, through Alexandre Kojève, to Hegel’s notion that the disparities of power and vision between master and slave were overturned with the end of history so that there was mutual ‘recognition of the desire of the other.’ Unlike Hegel, Kojève argues that the struggle between master and slave continues. See Peter Wollen, “On Gaze Theory,” New Left Review 44 (March–April 2007), esp. pp. 92–93.

202

julia adeney thomas

Fig. 7. Yamahata Yōsuke’s photograph taken in Nagasaki on 10 August 1945.

the unreciprocated gaze: emperors and photography

Fig. 8. Emperor Hirohito and Empress Nagako, 1982.

203

204

julia adeney thomas

in the face, after the war it was reversed, extending from the people to an emperor diminished by being on view, without returning the regard of the citizens. Whereas the wartime emperor was the putative agent of the nation and progenitor of his people engendered as male, after the war he became a mere symbol and the object of American foreign policy, conservative party designs, and right-wing fantasies. As symbol and object, the Shōwa Emperor was engendered as a perverse or perverted sexual object, a violated female in relation to foreign powers, the inviolable but impotent figurehead used by powerful elites, and even the homosexual desideratum of impassioned right-wingers as celebrated in the fiction of Mishima Yukio and critiqued in the work of Ōe Kenzaburō.28 Given that the gender and sexual confusion conveyed in the emperor’s image still managed to disallow women’s equality, feminist analyst Ueno Chizuko has rightly termed the postwar imperial establishment a “transvestite patriarchy.”29 But the confusion over gender in representations of the emperor also provided leverage for critique. Even as the ‘Chrysanthemum taboo’ on discussing the emperor descended with increasing force after the occupation and the opportunity for serious discussion of his wartime role vanished, photographs juxtaposing the sexual and the imperial created an electric charge, a frisson that had political overtones.30 Indeed, the first postwar photograph ever to be censored (see figure 9) shows two naked women by the Sakurada Gate of the imperial palace. With almost childlike playfulness, the women create a bridge with their outstretched arms, echoing the structure under which they stand. Although nude photography was hardly rare during the occupation or

28 Ben-Ami Shillony discusses Ōe’s sarcastic short story “Sebunchiin” (Seventeen) about a pathetic right-wing teenager envisioning the emperor at the moment of orgasm, Mishima Yukio’s story “Yūkoku” where a patriotic couple make love before a photograph of the emperor prior to their double suicide, as well as Mishima’s own, possibly, homo-erotic suicide. Shillony, Enigma of the Emperors, Chapter 25: “Sex, Death, and the Emperor,” pp. 242–248. 29 See Ueno Chizuko, “In the Feminine Guise: A Trap of Reverse Orientalism” in Richard F. Calichman, ed., Contemporary Japanese Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 241. 30 Literary scholar, John Treat writes that “Many observers date the start of the socalled chrysanthemum taboo—a reference to the design of the imperial seal—against public debate over the post-World War II emperor from the Shimanaka incident” of February 1961, when a publisher’s wife was attacked and his maid killed by a rightwinger in response to a short story (“Furyū mutan” [The Story of a Dream of Courtly Elegance] by Fukazawa Shichirō) mocking the imperial house. Treat, “Beheaded Emperors,” p. 101.

the unreciprocated gaze: emperors and photography

Fig. 9. Kijima Takashi, Two nudes near Sakurada Gate 1958.

205

206

julia adeney thomas

after—indeed, the era is known for its decadent eroticism—this quirky, slightly off kilter image caused official outrage, a police raid on the gallery, and charges as a violation of Penal Code 175.31 Not the nudity itself, but the combination of mild eroticism with imperial architecture undermined the pretense that this emperor could easily fulfill the desires of the right, the left, or even the vast middle in postwar Japan. Pointing out his equivocal position in relation to sexuality emphasized his equivocal position in relation to wartime history and the postwar political system. Even after the death of the Shōwa Emperor, photography underscoring his confused gender and sexual roles continued to be transgressive for the same reasons. The photographic collage ‘Made in Occupied Japan’ (see figure 10), in which gender-bending artists BuBu and Shimada Yoshiko re-enact the meeting between MacArthur and Hirohito, underscores Hirohito’s dishonesty and prevarication through their own frank embrace of alternative genders and sexualities. Conclusion In hindsight, then, it is evident that Ikegami’s 1947 reminiscence (or, perhaps, re-imagining) in Shashin tembō of the newly married, selfpossessed prince regent’s interaction with waiting photographers was an aberration, a dream possible only in the first year or so of the occupation. By 1951, toward the end of the occupation, it was clear that the emperor would not participate in the cycle of mutual recognition inherent in the reciprocal gaze. That year, another essay by another court photographer, this time for the amateur photo magazine called Camera, portrayed the emperor (though not the crown prince) as inert before the lens. In this essay, “Tennō go-ikka to shashin” (The Imperial Family and Photography), Kumagaya Tatsuo (1904–66) describes his work with the imperial family. He chortles his delight at the sheer number of honorable photographs (o-shashin and go-shashin) made available “as a result of Japan’s birth as a democratic country.”32 Kumagaya is nearly ecstatic in his claims that the imperial family’s daily life ( go-nichijō) is

Nakamura Masaya, Nihon no razō (Nude Photographs of Japan) (Tokyo: Asahi Sonorama, 1981), pp. 46 and 124. 32 Kumagaya Tatsuo, “Tennō go-ikka to shashin,” Camera, vol. 41, No. 1 ( January 1951), p. 82. 31

the unreciprocated gaze: emperors and photography

207

Fig. 10. Bubu + Shimada Yoshiko, ‘Made in Occupied Japan,’ collage, 1998. Photograph courtesy of the Ota Fine Arts Gallery, Tokyo.

208

julia adeney thomas

“not all that different from our own,” but he worries, quite rightly in my opinion, that he has failed to convey the easy-going intimacy in his photographs that he claims as the hallmark of imperial family life. Certainly the one picture illustrating his essay suggests a family of stiff haute bourgeois propriety rather than relaxed affection (see figure 11). The scalene triangle formed by the bodies of the imperial couple, their grandchildren, and the daffodils achieves equipoise because the glances of the figures with bowed heads looking from the left are counterbalanced by the princess’s gesture on the far right pushing attention back to the center of the composition. This thoroughly conventional composition closes the family off from the viewer with whom there is no visual exchange. Indeed, in keeping with this image, Kumagaya’s stories reveal no direct interaction between himself and the imperial couple. Unlike Ikegami’s depiction of the young Hirohito inquiring graciously whether or not the photographers have gotten their shots, Kumagaya remains outside the family group, the voyeur of this supposed postwar imperial normality, watchful as the imperial couple play, rather unplayfully, with the imperial grandchildren. Whatever possibilities may have emerged for a new visual engagement between the emperor and Japanese citizens after the war had, by 1951, vanished. But Kumagaya’s story is not entirely without moments of reciprocal acknowledgment. While the Shōwa Emperor’s bargain to retain his throne at the cost of becoming the unseeing object of his people’s gaze, a prostrate feminized form without sexual initiative, precludes him from direct visual exchange, Crown Prince Akihito, the boy who would grow up to become the current Heisei Emperor, had, what might be termed, the liberty of sight. He is described as deliberately posing before Kumagaya’s lens and asking things like, “I wonder if the position of my hand isn’t a bit odd?” Just as the young Hirohito as prince regent had interacted with photographers at the Meiji Shrine, so, too, Akihito as crown prince participates in the creation of his own image. Indeed, later that same year, Akihito would appear on the cover of the magazine, looking unhesitatingly into the camera.33 Moreover, Akihito goes even one step further, and commandeers the position of a photographer himself. During an outing to the seaside near Hayama, Kumagaya tells us that he witnessed the crown prince stealthily

33

Camera, vol. 42, No. 5 (November 1951), Cover.

the unreciprocated gaze: emperors and photography

209

Fig. 11. Image of the imperial family in the garden, used to illustrate “Tennō go-ikka to shashin,” in Camera, January 1951.

210

julia adeney thomas

adjusting the range finder on his beloved Super Six camera to take pictures of the seemingly oblivious emperor and empress strolling among the boulders.34 Even more enterprisingly, the crown prince suddenly turns his camera back on the large crowd of news photographers following him, and adjusts his range finder to snap the reporters startled countenances. “The crown prince,” confides Kumagaya, “is truly a master of the candid photo (kyandido fuoto).”35 And truly the master, in his relationship with the news photographers, of reciprocity. As portrayed in Kumagaya’s essay, the imperial children, particularly Akihito, intercede between their parents and photographers, looking both ways. It is they who engage in the reciprocal gaze. Indeed, Kumagaya confesses that it is only because the imperial children (ōji-samagata) understand photography that he is able to present the imperial couple as they really are in person in a way that is “natural (shizen) and without any kind of deceit (itsuwari no nai).”36 The need for mediators between the cameramen and the emperor, the failure of the emperor’s so-called naturalness and honesty to manifest themselves of their own accord, says it all. Kumagaya’s story unwittingly reveals that whatever hope there might have been for an open reciprocal gaze between the Shōwa Emperor and his people through photography has been deferred until the next generation. And that kind of reciprocal seeing with its positive political, gender and sexual connotations has been put off, as it so often seems to be, to a future Japan of greater governmental transparency and greater gender equality.

34 35 36

Kumagaya, “Tennō go-ikka to shashin,” p. 82. Ibid. Ibid.

PART TWO

INDIVIDUAL EMPERORS AND EMPRESSES

THE ‘GREAT EMPEROR’ MEIJI Hara Takeshi Introduction The Meiji Emperor lived from 1852 to 1912, and reigned from 1867 to 1912. His given name was Mutsuhito, and his childhood name was Sachi no miya (Prince Sachi). He was the 122nd emperor according to the traditional order of succession. He was the second son of Emperor Kōmei, who reigned from 1846 to 1867, and his mother was the imperial concubine Nakayama Yasuko (1834–1907). He married Ichijō Masako, who was later renamed Haruko and after her death became known as the Empress Dowager Shōken. All of his children, both sons and daughters, were born of imperial concubines. His third and only surviving son became the Taishō Emperor. Upon his death, the Meiji Emperor’s body was interred in the Fushimi Momoyama Mausoleum in Kyoto. In 1920, the Meiji Shrine (Meiji Jingū) was built in Tokyo to enshrine his soul. Up until the end of the Pacific War, the Meiji Emperor was referred to as Meiji Taitei, or ‘Meiji the Great’, and revered as the driving force behind Japan’s spectacular emergence as an industrialized great power in the course of a single generation. Paternal Instruction in Waka Poetry The Meiji Emperor was born at the house of the courtier Nakayama Tadayasu, his maternal grandfather, in Kyoto on 3 November 1852 (by the traditional calendar, the 22nd day of the ninth month, in the 5th year of Kaei). He received the childhood name of Sachi no Miya, or Prince Sachi. In accordance with the custom of having imperial offspring brought up by prominent court members, he was raised in the household of his maternal grandfather until he was four years old. In 1856 he was moved into the inner apartments of the imperial palace in Kyoto, where he received direct instruction from his father in reading and composing waka, the 31–syllable Japanese poems. In 1860, at the age of eight, he was formally adopted by the principal consort of Emperor Kōmei, Asako (later known as Empress Dowager Eishō).

214

hara takeshi

He then received the rank of shinnō (imperial prince) and the name of Mutsuhito, and was formally designated crown prince delegate. The number of gyosei, or imperial poems in the waka style, that the Meiji Emperor composed during his lifetime is said to be 93,032, a figure that far outstrips any other emperor or poet either before or after him. The person who laid the foundation for this creativity was his father, Emperor Kōmei, who personally set the topics for his son’s poems, and corrected his son’s brushwork and compositions. Although the Meiji Emperor had a different personality from his father, who was a temperamental man and a vehement advocate of the political philosophy of jōi (‘expel the barbarians’), he did inherit his father’s interest in poetry and continued to compose poems throughout his life. In fact, poetry was the sole outlet through which he expressed his emotions.1 Taught practically from the cradle, he perfected the art of encapsulating his moods and sentiments in the highly abbreviated waka form. He had been brought up in the rarefied atmosphere of court culture when the imperial court was still located in Kyoto during the last years of the Tokugawa period, and he retained a deep attachment and affection for the ancient capital even after he moved to Edo, which was subsequently renamed Tokyo. An Emperor in Motion Mutsuhito became emperor in January 1867, when he was a mere 14 years of age. The proclamation of the Charter Oath and the accession ceremony for the new emperor that followed the Meiji Restoration were carried out in the Hall for State Ceremonies (Shishinden) in the imperial palace in Kyoto. However, before long, the leaders of the new government decided, for practical reasons, to move the capital to the east, and in 1868 the emperor left Kyoto for the first time in his life, and headed for Edo. On this journey, called tōkō, or the ‘eastern progress,’ the emperor was accompanied by a retinue of 3,300 people. This sight found representation in many contemporary nishiki-e, multicolored woodblock prints. As was the custom of the time, the young and rather slightly built emperor was kept out of the view of the public and remained sitting inside his palanquin. The woodblock 1 Donald Keene, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World 1852–1912 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 50–51.

the ‘great emperor’ meiji

Fig. 1. Above: The Meiji Emperor (Mutsuhito) in 1874, at the age of 22. On the right: Empress Haruko (posthumous name: Empress Dowager Shōken) in 1889, at the age of 40.

215

216

hara takeshi

prints merely record the great procession of people, and none of them actually attempts to depict the emperor himself.2 However, in tandem with the great transformation that Japan was going through in the name of bummei kaika, or ‘Civilization and Enlightenment,’ certain changes occurred regarding the physical appearance of the emperor. In time, the emperor donned a western-style military uniform, grew a beard and moustache, rode on horseback, and boarded battleships. The emperor’s new role was to symbolize the unity of the nation, and it was of the utmost importance to the success of the Meiji Restoration that the people become aware of his existence. From 1872 to 1885, the emperor made no fewer than six, large-scale imperial tours (referred to as the rokudai junkō, or Six Great Imperial Progresses). For the first time in Japanese history, the imperial trips were made to places far and wide throughout the realm, from Hokkaido in the north to Kyushu in the south. The imperial tours provided an opportunity for the emperor to manifest himself to the people. He visited agricultural reclamation and land improvement projects, local government offices, judicial courts, schools, military facilities, and industrial complexes. In doing this, he gave the impression of dispensing the blessings of civilization from Tokyo to the provinces. On a visit to Niigata Prefecture in 1878, he discovered that there were numerous people suffering from eye disease, and he immediately made an ‘imperial grant’ (kashi ) of the money that he had to hand. Such acts increased the popular support for the imperial institution.3 The tradition of members of the imperial family bestowing blessings and beneficence on their tours and visits continues today. Influence of Motoda Nagazane The education of the emperor, in order that he might become a fitting symbol of the nation, was a highly important issue for the Meiji government. In 1871, a system of imperial instructors (jidoku, ‘imperial tutor’; renamed jikō, ‘lecturer,’ in 1875; and jiho, ‘imperial aid,’ in 1877) was instituted to provide the monarch with the requisite training in statecraft. The Confucian scholar Motoda Nagazane (his given name is also pronounced Eifu) was employed in 1871 as an imperial tutor to 2 3

Taki Kōji, Tennō no shōzō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 1988), p. 18. Kunaichō, ed., Meiji tennō-ki (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1970), Vol. 4, p. 755.

the ‘great emperor’ meiji

217

instruct the emperor in kangaku, or Chinese Studies, and from this time on the emperor came under the influence of his way of thought. Motoda taught the emperor, on the basis of books such as The Analects of Confucius and the Book of Documents, to hold the sages of ancient China as his ideal. He emphasized the idea that good governance should not rely on superficial words alone; but should be an expression of the virtue (toku) that naturally wells out of one’s inner being.4 When the emperor visited Niigata Prefecture and gave money from his own purse to people suffering from eye disease, he did so because of the influence of Motoda’s teachings. His tutor’s advocacy of the avoidance of an over-reliance on words was also something the emperor gladly accepted. He had always striven to avoid wordiness, and had perfected the poetic technique of encapsulating his own emotions in 31–syllable verses. The course toward which Motoda and others, such as Sasaki Takayuki, were steering the emperor was a Confucian-inspired direct imperial rule. This ran counter to the wishes of men such as Itō Hirobumi and Iwakura Tomomi, whose objective was to effect a transformation of Japan into a modern nation-state. As a result, in 1880 the system of employing an imperial tutor to instruct the emperor was discontinued. From this time on, the emperor followed the path marked out by Itō Hirobumi toward constitutional sovereignty, which culminated in the promulgation of the Constitution of the Great Empire of Japan in 1889.5 However, the emperor did not cease to be influenced by Motoda’s philosophy. A Monarch of Few Words In 1868 the emperor took up residence in Edo Castle, which had become the Tokyo palace. However, in 1873 a fire broke out, and the emperor had to move to the Akasaka Provisional Palace. The Meiji Palace (meiji kyūden) was completed on the grounds of the present imperial palace in 1888. It was in this palace that the Meiji Emperor

4 Motoda expounded these views in a letter to Chief Chamberlain Tokudaiji Sanetsune. Kindai nihon shiryō sensho 14: Motoda nagazane kankei monjo (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1985), pp. 184–185. 5 For further details, see Sakamoto Kazuto, Itō hirobumi to meiji kokka keisei (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1992).

218

hara takeshi

spent the greater part of his daily life (this palace was destroyed in the allied air raids of 1945). The Meiji Palace consisted of the omote, the outer quarters, and the oku, the inner quarters. The outer quarters included the o-gakumonjo (Imperial Reception Hall), while the inner quarters included the o-naigi (Inner Palace). The former was the area in which the emperor conducted affairs of state, while the latter was a space in which he lived his private life. Every day, the emperor would walk from the inner quarters to the outer quarters, and then back again.6 In the outer quarters, the rooms incorporated elements of western architecture, and the emperor would don western clothes (a frock coat, and later a military uniform) to play his role as commander-in-chief, and to hold audience with other members of the imperial family and members of his government. In the inner quarters, which were still pervaded by the atmosphere of the old court culture of Kyoto, he would change into traditional clothes and live modestly and simply, surrounded by just a few youths and ladies-in-waiting. In the outer quarters, the emperor was a man of extremely few words—he never smiled, and rarely let any emotion show on his face. Here one can see the influence of Motoda Nagazane, who held that inner virtue was far superior to outer expression, whether in words or emotion. Prince Chichibu, grandson of the Meiji Emperor and younger brother of the Shōwa Emperor, later wrote in an essay that the Meiji Emperor had been a ‘frightening’ (kowai) and ‘terrifying’ (osoroshii ) presence for him. As a child, he visited the imperial palace to meet his grandfather three times a year, in the spring, autumn and the emperor’s birthday in November, but never once did he hear his grandfather’s actual voice.7 If it was difficult for members of the imperial family and government officials, who were permitted access to the inner precincts of the imperial palace, to hear the voice of the emperor, for ordinary members of the public it was utterly impossible. Even when the emperor went on his great imperial progresses, he did not actually pose the questions directed 6 For further details, see Yonekubo Akemi, Meiji tennō no ichinichi (Tokyo: Shinchō Shinsho, 2006). According to Itō Yukio, after the Sino-Japanese War, an audience hall was built in the inner quarters of the palace, so that in times of emergency the emperor could receive reports on affairs of state in his inner apartments. Itō Yukio, Meiji tennō (Tokyo: Minerva Shoten, 2006), p. 190. 7 Chichibu no miya yasuhito shinnō, Kōzoku ni umarete—chichibu no miya zuihitsushū (Tokyo: Watanabe Shuppan, 2005), p. 14.

the ‘great emperor’ meiji

219

toward the dignitaries and officials selected for imperial audience, as these questions were read out by the accompanying officials. The only times that the emperor spoke in his own voice outside the environs of the imperial palace were at the promulgation of the Constitution in 1889, and when he proclaimed the opening of the first Imperial Diet in 1890. There again, only the very few people permitted to be present could hear his actual voice. From 1890 onwards, the trips the emperor took to outlying regions started to be limited to military ceremonies, such as troop inspections and military parades. As commander-in-chief, the emperor was no longer allowed to show his person to all and sundry but could only appear at special ceremonies and parade grounds. The Japanese people now lost all opportunity not only to hear him speaking, but also to know what he actually looked like.8 As the real emperor disappeared from public view, the official portrait of the emperor (go-shin’ei, ‘august likeness’) started being distributed to schools all over the nation. This official portrait was not a direct representation of the emperor, but a photograph of a portrait by the Italian engraver Edoardo Chiossone (1833–1898) that had been painted from a sketch. Not all schools were able to get a copy of the ‘august likeness’—only about 60 percent of elementary schools had received the portrait by the end of the Meiji period.9 Now that the actual physical body of the emperor had disappeared from view, these official portraits of the emperor started to play a role as substitutes for the emperor himself. The emperor that was represented in these official portraits was not a real human being—someone who was destined to grow weaker with age and finally to die—but a man whose dignity and charisma had been emphasized to an extreme degree, someone whose body was eternal and unchanging—in short, a living god. The emperor had an extreme aversion to the camera, and so only very few photographs were taken of him during his life.

Hara Takeshi, Kashika sareta teikoku (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 2001), pp. 71–88. Kobayashi Teruyuki, “Gakkō e no go-shin’ei no shintō katei,” in Suzuki Hirō, ed., Nihon kindai kyōikushi no kenkyū (Tokyo: Shingaku Shuppan, 1990). See also Kagotani Jirō, Kindai nihon ni okeru kyōiku to kokka no shisō (Tokyo: Aunsha, 1994), pp. 55–101. 8 9

220

hara takeshi A Constitutional Monarch

The constitution of 1889 announced in its opening paragraph (Article 1) that ‘The Empire of Japan shall be reigned over and governed by a line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal.’ This seemed to imply that the emperor was the ruler of Japan. However, in reality, the emperor was much more of a constitutional monarch, with severely limited powers. Under the framework of government, as laid out in the constitution, power was shared between several bodies. Since there was no central authority comparable to the bakufu of the Edo period, some participation by the emperor in the government as mediator was inevitable and even essential.10 One example of the emperor’s participation in state affairs occurred in 1892, during the second general election of the lower house of the Diet, when a confrontation broke out between factions based on the old domains. Itō Hirobumi then tendered his resignation as president of the Privy Council and Shinagawa Yajirō tendered his resignation as home minister, but the emperor refused to accept the former even though he accepted the latter. Another example was in 1893, when there was a clash between the cabinet and the Diet, which had refused to pass the ship-building budget. Rather than allowing the lower house to dissolve, the emperor instructed the cabinet and the parliamentary parties to reach an agreement. This interference by the emperor in government was limited, and hardly what one might call autocratic—some scholars even claim that the emperor’s participation in politics was comparable to that of the constitutional monarch of Great Britain at the time.11 However, in the limited number of statements made by Emperor Meiji about his hopes and wishes for the government, one can discern the influence of Motoda Nagazane, who had hoped to create a system of direct imperial rule. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 was the first full-scale war with another country that the Meiji Emperor experienced. He had had little enthusiasm for this war from the start. Nevertheless, he established the Imperial Headquarters not in Tokyo but in Hiroshima, which was nearer the front line, and he himself resided there for a while. This not For a study that discusses this aspect of the Meiji Emperor, see Mikuriya Takashi, Nihon no kindai 5: Meiji kokka no kansei (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron-shinsha, 2001). 11 Itō Yukio, Shōwa tennō to rikken kunshusei no hōkai (Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppansha, 2005), p. 18. 10

the ‘great emperor’ meiji

221

only increased his own awareness that he was commander-in-chief, but also made the troops on the front realize that the emperor was taking his responsibility very seriously. Fifty years later, in September 1945, after Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War, the journalist and historian Tokutomi Sohō compared the Shōwa Emperor to the Meiji Emperor in the following manner: “Had [the Shōwa Emperor] during the Great Asia War left Nijūbashi [the main entrance of the palace] and, like the Meiji Emperor, established his Imperial Headquarters in Hiroshima, what a great influence that might have had on the outcome of the war! I must admit, in all reverence, that his failure to do so was highly regrettable.”12 The Meiji Emperor stood in great contrast to his father Emperor Kōmei with regard to his attention to his successor’s training. Unlike Emperor Kōmei, who had instructed his son in the art of poetry, going so far as to correct his poems himself, the Meiji Emperor was quite uninterested in his son, Prince Yoshihito (later the Taishō Emperor). He left the education of his heir entirely to Gakushūin, the Peers School, and to the Tōgū Palace (the residence of the crown prince) tutors. He did, however, take a personal interest in his grandson Prince Hirohito (later the Shōwa Emperor). In 1908, he appointed General Nogi Maresuke, a celebrated soldier and a most loyal servant, as principal of Gakushūin, where his grandson was enrolled. In all likelihood, the emperor had low expectations of his immediate heir, and he placed his hopes instead in the man who would be successor to his successor.13 Daily Life and Ceremonies at the Palace The Meiji Emperor was a man of very few words when he was holding audience in the omote, or outer quarters, of the palace. However, he became a different person when he was in the oku, or inner quarters. There he could relax completely, express private opinions, and enjoy himself in conversations with his ladies-in-waiting and in various other

Tokutomi Sohō, Tokutomi sohō shūsengo nikki (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2006), p. 170. As Asukai Masamichi wrote, “The emperor had probably resolved not to allow his grandson Hirohito to repeat the poor health, weak will, and waywardness of his son Prince Haru (later the Taishō Emperor). This was why he appointed General Nogi Maresuke to the position of principal at the Gakushūin, and gave him complete charge of the education of his grandson.” Asukai Masamichi, Meiji taitei (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1989), p. 272. 12 13

222

hara takeshi

pursuits. The inner palace was fitted out with a bathing area, referred to as oyūdono. However, the bathing that took place there was more ceremonial and official than for personal pleasure, as the emperor had to purify himself before participating in the palace rites (kyūchū saishi).14 These palace rites were held in the kashikodokoro (‘Place of Awe’ or imperial sanctuary), the kōreiden (Shrine to Imperial Ancestors), and the shinden (Shrine to the Deities of Heaven and Earth). When the Meiji Palace was completed in 1888, the three structures were connected to form the kyūchū sanden (Three Sacred Halls). The palace religious ceremonies consisted of ‘Major Rites’ (taisai) and ‘Lesser Rites’ (shōsai). The former category comprised the kigensetsu-sai (Festival of the Imperial Era’s Origin, on 11 February, to commemorate the ascension to the throne of the mythical first emperor Jimmu), the kan’name-sai (Festival of the God’s Tasting, in mid-October, in which the first fruits of rice are offered to the sun goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami), and the niinamesai (Festival of the First Tasting, on 23 November, in which the emperor offers the newly harvested rice to the gods and then partakes of it in communion with them). The latter category included the shihō-hai (Worship of the Four Quarters, at New Year, when the emperor prays for peace and prosperity of Japan), the saitan-sai (New Year Festival), the kōkaku tennō reisai (commemorating Emperor Kōkaku, great-grandfather of the Meiji Emperor), and the ninkō tennō reisai (commemorating Emperor Ninkō, grandfather of the Meiji Emperor). There were also shunsai, or rites performed on the first day of each month. Most of these rites, with the exception of the shihō-hai and niinamesai, had been inaugurated with the start of the Meiji period. In the early years of his reign, the emperor was an enthusiastic participant in all these rites, but after the Sino-Japanese War he became noticeably less interested. This might have been due to the fact that as a man who was not overly fond of bathing, he had started to find it tiresome to have to take a bath before each and every rite and ceremony.15 It is also possible that Emperor Meiji considered the ancient capital of Kyoto as the true locus of tradition, and therefore regarded the palace rites in Tokyo as a sham.

This protocol is still observed today. According to Hinonishi Sukehiro, a noble courtier who had served the emperor from 1886 to 1912, the Meiji Emperor only took baths in the summer. Hinonishi Sukehiro, Meiji tennō no go-nichijō (Tokyo: Shingakusha, 1976). 14 15

the ‘great emperor’ meiji

223

During the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–5 the emperor stayed in Tokyo, a great contrast to ten years earlier during the Sino-Japanese War when he had moved his headquarters to Hiroshima. However, although he was in residence in the palace, he participated in almost no palace rites and ceremonies.16 This was in striking contrast to the later behavior of his grandson, the Shōwa Emperor, who during the Pacific War participated in all palace rites without fail, even making special journeys to the Ise Shrine to pray for victory. How was the Meiji Emperor occupying himself in private? He was composing a huge number of waka poems in the inner quarters. In 1904, the year in which the Russo-Japanese War broke out, the emperor composed 914 poems—his greatest number to date. The emperor had not been particularly enthusiastic when war had been declared against China, and the same was true when war was declared against Russia. He was never exuberant when Japan gained her victories, and expressed no great joy in his poems either. This reveals a rather sympathetic side of the Meiji Emperor, a lack of war zeal that would be difficult to find in the leaders of other countries at that time. As Donald Keene has observed, his muted reaction to Japan’s victories was totally different from “the bombast that would have accompanied a proclamation by the German kaiser or Russian czar after a similar victory.” 17 Only in one poem, composed at the New Year of 1905, after Port Arthur had been captured by the Japanese, do we get an intimation of the emperor’s delight: Atarashiki toshi no tayori ni ada no shiro hirakinikeri to kiku zo ureshiki.

How happy I was To hear at the beginning Of the year the news That the enemy’s fortress Had fallen to our soldiers.18

Many of the poems composed by the emperor at this time make reference to the sun goddess, either by her name Amaterasu or by her position Ise no ōkami (‘The Great Deity of Ise’). The Shōwa Emperor also composed poems, but his poems made no references to gods or

16 The Meiji Emperor attended only six palace rites during the Sino-Japanese War: the first-day-of the-month ceremonies (shunsai ) five times, and the niinamesai once. He attended no other rites, either major or minor. Kunaichō, ed., Meiji tennō-ki, vols. 10, 11 (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1973). 17 Keene, Emperor of Japan, p. 621. 18 Keene, op. cit., p. 620.

224

hara takeshi

divinity. The Meiji Emperor started to absent himself from the palace rites, but alongside his Confucianism he believed in Amaterasu and was convinced that Japan was a sacred country founded by the gods. According to the journalist Maeda Renzan, “The emperor believed that he was a living god, and that he was always in spiritual communion with the goddess of the Ise Shrine.”19 If this is true, then the fact that the emperor started to absent himself from the religious rites at the palace at this time may have derived from the fact that as a living god he no longer recognized the need to attend the rite. Later Years and Death From the 1890s onwards, the emperor’s physical health began visibly to decline. By 1899, due to a lack of exercise, he gained weight and the court doctors warned him about his health. In 1904, he was discovered to be suffering from diabetes as well as from chronic kidney disease. Even so, the emperor took no heed of the doctors’ advice to rest in Kyoto, or to spend summers and winters in the imperial villas in Numazu and elsewhere that had been built for the benefit of the crown prince. Instead, he continued to spend his time in his official duties in Tokyo. In this sense, the Meiji Emperor was a person who ignored his personal needs, in contrast to the Taishō and Shōwa emperors who succeeded him. On 19 July 1912, while he was eating his dinner, the emperor complained of feeling dizzy and lost consciousness. A bare ten days later, on 29 July, he passed away (although the official date for his death was announced as 30 July). For the majority of the populace, the death of the emperor, who was a living god, was utterly inconceivable. The writer Tokutomi Roka could not believe that the emperor had died. His son quotes him saying: “I was under the impression that the Meiji era would last forever.”20 These were sentiments that were shared by much of the nation. In August 1912, the deceased emperor was given the posthumous name of Meiji, or ‘Enlightened Rule,’ which until then had only been

Maeda Renzan, Rekidai naikaku monogatari (Tokyo: Jijitsu-shinsha, 1961), vol. 1, p. 187. 20 Tokutomi Kenjirō, Mimizu no tawakoto (Tokyo: Iwanami Bunko, 1977), vol. 2, p. 83. 19

the ‘great emperor’ meiji

225

the name of the era. This marked the beginning of the tradition of proclaiming one era for the entire reign of an emperor, and posthumously naming him after the era in which he reigned. In September, the taisō no gi, or Rite of Funerary Service, was conducted in the Aoyama Military Parade Grounds in Tokyo, and the emperor’s remains were interred in the Fushimi Momoyama Cemetery in Kyoto. Ironically, his lifelong wish to return to the ancient capital was granted after his death. In 1920, the Meiji Shrine (meiji jingū), was built in Tokyo, and the residents of the capital were heartened that they could worship him in Tokyo. In 1925 the Korea Shrine (chōsen jingū) was built in Seoul, the first shrine in a Japanese colony where one could worship Amaterasu and the Meiji Emperor. In this way, the Meiji Emperor had literally become a god. In the Shōwa period, when the emperor’s charisma was growing again, veneration of the Meiji Emperor was revived. 3 November, the Meiji Emperor’s birthday, was made into a national holiday, called Meiji setsu. A special edition of the popular magazine King was devoted to Meiji taitei (Meiji the Great). In the early Shōwa years, a campaign was begun by the Ministry of Education to have all the places where the Meiji Emperor had stayed or stopped on his tours officially designated as seiseki (sacred sites), because they had once been honored by the imperial presence. It now fell to the Shōwa Emperor to live up to the hopes of his grandfather, who had had great expectations of his ‘successor’s successor.’ The Shōwa Emperor was expected to make the Japanese forget about the reign of Taishō, and indeed many people believed that he would be a reincarnation of the emperor who had reigned in the splendid Meiji era. [A shorter version of this essay appeared under the title “Meiji tennō,” in Hara Takeshi & Yoshida Yutaka, Iwanami tennō kōshitsu jiten (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2005), pp. 72–81]. (Translated by Lucy North)

TAISHŌ: AN ENIGMATIC EMPEROR AND HIS INFLUENTIAL WIFE Hara Takeshi Introduction The Taishō Emperor was born in 1879 and died in 1926 at the age of forty-seven. His personal name was Yoshihito, and his childhood name was Haru no Miya, or Prince Haru. By the traditional count, the Taishō Emperor was the 123rd ruler of Japan. He was the third son of the Meiji Emperor, and his biological mother was the imperial concubine Yanagihara Naruko. His reign lasted from 1912 to 1926. Unfortunately, he suffered from poor health, and in 1921, when his brain disease worsened, his son—Crown Prince Hirohito (later the Shōwa Emperor)—was made regent, and the ailing emperor withdrew from public life. At the end of his life, various stories about his bizarre behavior circulated. The most famous of these was the so-called ‘telescope incident,’ according to which the emperor, at the opening of the Imperial Diet, rolled up the sheet of paper on which his speech was written, and instead of reading it, simply stared at the assembly through the roll. This story contributed to the creation of an image of a mentally deranged emperor. However there is no evidence that this incident ever took place. After his death, the Taishō Emperor was interred in the Tama Imperial Mausoleum in Hachiōji, western Tokyo, becoming the first Japanese emperor to be buried in Tokyo. The wife of the Taishō Emperor, Sadako, known posthumously as Empress Teimei, lived from 1884 to 1951. She was the fourth daughter of Kujō Michitaka, head of the Kujō branch of the aristocratic Fujiwara clan. After their marriage in 1900, Sadako gave birth to four sons: Hirohito, Chichibu, Takamatsu, and Mikasa. It was with Sadako that monogamy was effectively established in the imperial family: there was no more need of concubines as the empress herself bore four boys. Unlike Haruko, the wife of the Meiji Emperor (known posthumously as Empress Dowager Shōken), who had involved herself in causes different from those of the emperor, Sadako usually accompanied her husband, demonstrating a modern type of conjugal unit. When the

228

hara takeshi

emperor’s health deteriorated, she became absorbed in kannagara no michi (‘the way of the gods,’ i.e., Shinto), and clashed, on the matter of the Shinto rites, with her son Hirohito. Sadako was an active patron of various philanthropic causes—lending her support to sufferers of leprosy and other disadvantaged members of society. After her death, she was buried next to her husband in the Tama Imperial Mausoleum in western Tokyo. Sickly Childhood and Marriage The Taishō Emperor was born in the Aoyama Palace in Tokyo on 31 August 1879, and received the name of Haru no Miya Yoshihito. He was the third son of Emperor Meiji, however all of his brothers died young, and he was the only son to survive. At the time of his birth, he had a rash over his entire body, and the following year he contracted meningitis. As was the palace custom, he was entrusted upon his birth to the care of the seventy-year-old Nakayama Tadayasu, the maternal grandfather of Emperor Meiji, who had also raised Emperor Meiji himself. In 1885, at the age of six, he was sent back to the palace, but was brought up without any direct contact with his parents. It was some years, in fact, before he learned that Haruko, the wife of the Meiji Emperor, was not his real mother. Despite his sickly disposition, at the age of eight, Yoshihito was officially adopted by the empress and, albeit belatedly, entered the Gakushūin, or Peers School. In 1889, at the age of ten, he was designated crown prince. During the 1890s, a number of imperial retreats were built in Numazu, Hayama and Nikko where he could rest and recuperate. As his health did not enable him to keep up with his classes, he withdrew from school in 1894 and continued to study at home with private tutors. These tutorials made him even more socially awkward and less interested in studies. He was often sick, and in 1895 even became seriously ill. However, there was one subject in which he did show interest: a course in Chinese classics, given to him by his tutor Mishima Chūshū. Unlike Motoda Nagazane, the personal tutor to the Meiji Emperor who had concentrated on teiōgaku, or training a crown prince to become an emperor, Mishima placed greatest emphasis on Chinese poetry. The Taishō Emperor ended up being better at composing Chinese poetry than Japanese waka, unlike any emperor before him.

taish}: an enigmatic emperor and his influential wife

Fig. 1. Above: The Taishō Emperor (Yoshihito) On the right: Empress Sadako (posthumous name: Empress Teimei).

229

230

hara takeshi

The Meiji Emperor did not involve himself in the education of Yoshihito, but was deeply concerned about the matter of his son’s health. Conscious of the emperor’s concern, Prince Arisugawa Takehito, who had been appointed guide to the crown prince, suspended his lessons and suggested that the young man, free of official duties, travel in the countryside to regain his health. In May 1900, at the age of twenty, Yoshihito married fifteen-year-old Kujō Sadako. It was the first wedding in the imperial family to be conducted as a Shinto ceremony, in accordance with the newly enacted imperial wedding ordinance. Following the wedding, the crown prince went on unofficial visits to Fukuoka, Saga, Nagasaki, and Kumamoto prefectures, and in 1902 he visited Niigata, Nagano, Gumma and Ibaraki prefectures. All of these trips were planned by Prince Arisugawa. An Active Crown Prince Like the Meiji Emperor, who after the Meiji Restoration went on the ‘Six Grand Imperial Progresses,’ Yoshihito, following his marriage, traveled all over the country. But there was a difference: the Meiji Emperor had followed routes prescribed by others and had not spoken directly to the people along his route, meeting only with a few specially designated dignitaries. In contrast, Yoshihito unilaterally changed the daily agenda, spoke spontaneously with people, and in addition to addressing mayors and headmasters, talked freely and casually with textile workers, fishermen, and rickshaw men. Crown Prince Yoshihito’s words were reported in vivid detail in the local newspapers. Prince Arisugawa respected the crown prince’s freedom and did not try to prevent him from this freedom. Indeed, these trips bore good results. Erwin Baelz, the German physician to the emperor, noted in his diary that the crown prince’s health and vigor visibly improved during this period.1 Yoshihito’s tours of the country continued even after Arisugawa retired in 1903 for health reasons. By the time Yoshihito ascended the throne in 1912, he had paid visits to every prefecture, with the sole exception of Okinawa. In 1907 he visited Korea, which was then a protectorate of Japan. Following that visit, he began taking lessons

1 Erwin Baelz, Awakening Japan: The Diary of a German Doctor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), p. 364.

taish}: an enigmatic emperor and his influential wife

231

in Korean language. After the Russo-Japanese War, the ceremonial aspects of these tours became more pronounced, and the crown prince began inspecting the prefectures as a representative of his father, the emperor. This did not mean, however, that he felt himself less free to act as he chose. He would slip away between military maneuvers to visit old friends or to eat soba noodles at a local restaurant. He would also confront local officials, like mayors and headmasters, in the regions that he visited, with blunt questions. When he returned to Tokyo from these trips, Princess Sadako and his three young sons—Hirohito, Yasuhito (Chichibu), and Nobuhito (Takamatsu)—would be waiting to welcome him. The long-lasting system of imperial concubinage, in which ladies-in-waiting served as concubines for emperors and crown princes, to bear them sons, had finally come to an end. After 1905, the three little princes went to live in a temporary palace, built especially for them next door to the Tōgū Palace in central Tokyo, and the ties between the family members deepened. The modern monogamic family had finally been established in the imperial household. Succession to the Throne In July 1912, upon the demise of the Meiji Emperor, Yoshihito ascended the throne. No sooner had he become emperor than he demonstrated that he was a different man from his father. He continued to reside in the Aoyama Detached Palace, which had been his residence as crown prince, and for a while commuted to the imperial palace by carriage, with Empress Sadako accompanying him. Witnessing this daily event, the residents of Tokyo could see that the Meiji era, in which the emperor, as the ‘father of the nation,’ had been the sole conspicuous imperial figure, was truly over. The changes in the Taishō Emperor’s life, after he ascended the throne, were enormous, and inevitably, they took their toll. No longer was he at liberty to take trips to outlying regions, and the sojourns that he used to take every summer and winter to imperial retreats likewise became less frequent. At the army’s grand maneuvers in Saitama in November 1912, shortly after he had ascended the throne, the emperor asked to make a small trip for his own enjoyment and also requested some changes in the official schedule, but his requests were turned down. It was a clear indication that he had lost all freedom. The

232

hara takeshi

Taishō Emperor, ill-accustomed to affairs of government in Tokyo, was often taken advantage of by politicians such as Katsura Tarō, and was manipulated by statesmen such as Yamagata Aritomo and Yamamoto Gonnohyōe, who held the Meiji Emperor as their ideal and professed only false obedience to his heir. In May 1913, the emperor fell ill, with a raging temperature of nearly forty degrees. Due to his failing health, in July 1913 the practice of the emperor and his wife staying in the imperial retreats in Nikko and Hayama, was revived. These retreats were the only places where the Taishō Emperor could still enjoy the liberty he had tasted in the past. There, be it at Nikko or Hayama, he could engross himself in pleasurable pursuits such as horse-back riding, boating, and composing Chinese poetry. The latter was a particular source of solace to him. In the four years between 1913 to 1916, the emperor composed 141 Chinese poems. According to Kinoshita Hyō, who was in charge of the imperial household library, the total number of Chinese poems composed by the Taishō Emperor amounted to 1,367, more than any other emperor had ever written.2 He seems to have poured all his emotions, impossible to express in the short waka form, into these Chinese poems. The Taishō Emperor was never enthusiastic about the religious Shintō rites practiced in the palace. He had inherited this attitude from his father the Meiji Emperor, who had lost interest in the palace rites after the Sino-Japanese War. However, whereas the Meiji Emperor refused to participate in the ceremonies while he was in Tokyo, the Taishō Emperor was often absent from the capital, residing in one of the imperial retreats and could not attend the rites.3 In the published poems composed by the emperor, there is no mention of deities, such as Amaterasu or ‘the god of Ise,’ that one finds in the waka poems of

2 According to Kinoshita Hyō, up until 1912, when he ascended the throne, the Taishō Emperor had composed no more than ten poems a year. In 1913, however, he composed thirty-two poems. In 1914, he composed forty-three; in 1915, thirty-seven; and in 1916, twenty-nine. Some poems recorded in the Taishō tennō jitsuroku are not mentioned in Kinoshita’s book. Most poems were composed in the Nikko Tamozawa Imperial Villa and the Hayama Imperial Villa. Kinoshita Hyō, Taishō tennō gyosei-shishū kinkai (Tokyo; Meitoku shuppansha, 1960). 3 From 1915, the Taishō Emperor took long sojourns every year, spending the period from early January until the end of March in the Hayama Imperial Villa, where he could get away from the cold weather. During these months, various palace rites were held, including Kōmei tennō reisai, kigensetsu, kinen-sai, and Ninkō tennō reisai, but he returned to Tokyo only on the occasion of kigensetsu, staying out of the capital during the other rites.

taish}: an enigmatic emperor and his influential wife

233

the Meiji Emperor. On the contrary, in the Taishō compositions we find frank expressions of how much he disliked returning to Tokyo, and how happy he felt when he was boating in Sagami Bay, or walking in the countryside around Nikko.4 But the world around the Taishô Emperor was shifting and he could not escape the waves of change. In the summer of 1914, the First World War broke out, and the Japanese government decided to join it on the side of the allies. The emperor cut short his plans to stay in Nikko and returned to Tokyo. In the poems he composed at that time he expressed anxiety about the way the world conflagration was spreading. In August, the imperial conference, in the presence of the emperor, decided to declare war on Germany.5 Prime Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu, unlike Yamagata Aritomo, was on good terms with the new emperor and succeeded in obtaining his support for the war. Japan’s participation in the First World War was minimal, but it enabled her to capture the German base of Qingdao and the German rights in the Shandong Peninsula in China, as well as parts of the German-held islands in the Pacific Ocean. Whenever the Japanese army scored a victory, the emperor, as befitted a commander-in-chief, celebrated it by composing a Chinese poem in its praise.6 In November 1915, the sokui no rei and daijōsai enthronement ceremonies were held in Kyoto, in accordance with the Imperial House Law. The Taishō Emperor managed to complete the grueling schedule of these ceremonies, which lasted nearly a month, without any mishap. He then returned to Tokyo to attend other festivities, such as the event to mark his accession held in Ueno Park. In January 1916, he reviewed a military parade in front of the imperial palace. For a while, it seemed that he was finally conducting himself in a way that befitted an emperor. However, the continuous pressures and demands took their toll on him. In July 1918, when the rice riots erupted and he again cut short his vacation in Nikko and returned to Tokyo, his health began to deteriorate. That year he failed to attend the military parade, the parade on honor of his birthday, and the opening ceremony of the Imperial Diet. He did not attend any palace rites when he was

Kinoshita, Taishō tennō gyosei-shishū kinkai, pp. 156–157; Yoshida Shimayōsuke, Taishō tennō gyosei-shishū no kisoteki kenkyū (Tokyo: Meitoku Shuppansha, 2005), pp. 7–39. 5 Taishō tennō jitsuroku (Tokyo: Kunaichō), vol. 56, pp. 14–17. 6 Kinoshita, Taishō tennō gyosei-shishū kinkai, pp. 199–200. 4

234

hara takeshi

in Tokyo, and he was unable to compose poems in either Chinese or Japanese even when he was staying at the imperial retreats. Deterioration of the Disease and the Emperor’s ‘Retirement’ In February 1919, Prime Minister Hara Kei was informed by the vice minister of the imperial household ministry, that ‘there might be some illness in the august brain.’7 The First World War had already come to an end with Germany’s surrender, and revolutions had broken out in Russia and Germany. European governments were collapsing, and in Japan democracy and labor movements were on the rise. These developments created fear in the ruling circles that a revolution might break out also in Japan. The fact that the emperor was suffering from an incurable brain disease at such a critical moment posed a grave threat to the prestige of the imperial institution and both Hara and Yamagata were greatly concerned. Thus was born the initiative to appoint Crown Prince Hirohito, who in April 1921 had turned twenty, as regent, a position which for all intents and purposes would make him emperor. As a first step, it was necessary to inform the public that the reigning monarch was so ill that he was no longer capable of performing his duties. Between March 1920 and November 1921, the ministry of the imperial household made five public announcements about the state of the emperor’s illness. At first, the ministry used rather vague, indirect expressions to refer to the symptoms. But gradually, the statements began to indicate quite clearly that this was an incurable illness. Meanwhile, in March 1921, the crown prince was sent on a European tour that lasted half a year. Movies of this robust young man making his tour of Europe were shown all over the country, drawing public attention from the sick emperor to the healthy crown prince. When Hirohito returned to Japan in September 1921, he was met with an overwhelmingly warm reception. On November 4, Prime Minister Hara Kei was assassinated, but this did not affect the government’s intention with regard to the emperor. On November 25, Hirohito was officially declared regent. On that day, the imperial household ministry announced that the emperor’s illness was not caused by the ‘breakdown of an internal organ,’ but was the result of a steady ‘deterioration of

7

Hara Kei, Hara kei nikki (Tokyo: Kangensha, 1950), Vol. 8, p. 160.

taish}: an enigmatic emperor and his influential wife

235

the august brain’ due to a childhood brain disease.8 This created the belief that the emperor had been suffering, ever since his childhood, from some mental disorder. All sorts of rumors began to circulate about the mental illness of the emperor, including that of the dubious ‘telescope Incident’ mentioned earlier. This incident was one with which every Japanese was familiar, at least till the 1970s. Yet even in the midst of his illness, the emperor showed signs of assertiveness. Once he refused to let the crown prince use his seal, on the grounds that it was reserved for the reigning emperor.9 Certain ladies-in-waiting overheard chamberlains complaining that they would have to force him to retire.10 Even after Hirohito became regent, the Taishō Emperor continued to make trips to his retreats in Nikko, Hayama, and Numazu. But his health did not improve. In 1925, he was diagnosed with cerebral arteriosclerosis, and in December 1925 and again in May 1926 he fainted because of cerebral anemia. In August 1926, the ailing emperor set off from the imperial railway station in Harajuku, a station that had been built for his exclusive use, for the imperial retreat at Hayama. This proved to be a trip from which he did not return. He died in Hayama on December 25, at the age of forty-seven. His state funeral was held in Shinjuku Gyoen Park on 7 February 1927. On the following day, his body was interred at the Tama mausoleum near Tokyo. In 2002, access was allowed to some of the Taishō tennō jitsuroku (Documents Concerning the Taishō Emperor), a collection of ninety-seven volumes compiled in 1937 by the imperial household ministry. But many documents in this collection had still been unavailable by 2008. Empress Sadako Becomes a Devout Shinto Believer On New Year’s Day, 1925, Empress Sadako, composed the following waka poem: Aratama no toshi no hajime ni chikau kana kannagara naru michi o fuman to11 (At the start of the New Year, we pledge to tread the Way of the Gods)

Tōkyō asahi shimbun, November 26, 1921. Shikama Kōsuke, Jijū bukan nikki (Tokyo: Fuyō Shobō, 1980), p. 279. 10 Yamaguchi Kōyō, Tsubaki no tsubone no ki (Tokyo: Kindai Bungeisha, 2000), p. 137. 11 Kakei Katsuhiko, Taishō no kōgōgū o-uta kinshaku: teimei kōgō to kannagara no michi (Tokyo: Kakei Katsuhiko Hakase Chosaku Kankōkai, 1961), p. 226. 8 9

236

hara takeshi

The empress explained that kannagara naru michi, which means the Way of the Gods or Shinto, is: The way by which one recognizes the gods, makes belief in them one’s main pursuit, and merges with their Great Life; the way by which one understands that all things have a meaning, and the world is filled with truth, goodness, beauty and love; the way by which one’s heart, at any moment, overflows with gratitude, no matter what happens; the way by which one’s heart remains pure and bright.12

The person who inspired the empress with such a devout attitude toward Shinto was Kakei Katsuhiko (1872–1961), a professor in the School of Law at Tokyo Imperial University. Until she met him, Empress Sadako had been a fervent believer in Nichiren Buddhism. But in the course of eight lectures that Kakei delivered in the emperor’s presence at the Numazu Imperial Villa during the months of February to May 1924, she decided that she had been wrong in believing that Buddhism was better than Shinto. Interestingly, Sadako also professed positive feelings toward Christianity. According to her biographer Katano Masako, she once said: If Christianity could be accommodated with Shinto and adjust to the conditions of Japan, it could become the protecting religion of our empire, just as Buddhism was in the past.13

The illness of her husband was a contributory factor to Sadako’s fascination with the Way of the Gods. The Taishō Emperor frequently absented himself from the palace Shinto rites, preferring the more enjoyable pastimes of sailing and horseback riding around the imperial villas in Hayama and Nikko. The empress accompanied her husband, staying with him in the imperial retreats. When his health deteriorated and she witnessed the eccentric behavior resulting from his brain disease, she may well have thought that this was a divine retribution for an emperor who had neglected his religious obligations. This explanation is corroborated by the fact that Sadako pleaded with Crown Prince Hirohito not to repeat the mistake of his father and to treat the religious palace rites with due seriousness. Sakado initially opposed Hirohito’s European tour; it would keep him away from the palace for a while, unable to attend religious palace rites. When Hirohito became regent and started to reform the system of imperial

12 13

Ibid. Katano Masako, Kōgō no kindai (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2003), pp. 156–157.

taish}: an enigmatic emperor and his influential wife

237

ladies-in-waiting, Sakado opposed the changes, out of fear that they reflected a disdain toward the palace ceremonies. In September 1922, Sadako complained to Imperial Household Minister Makino Nobuaki about Hirohito: The prince is incapable of sitting in the formal seiza position, which makes it very difficult for him to perform the palace rites. Please make him practice seiza, so that he can endure a formal sitting position. Over the past year, he has become lax in carrying out his religious duties. He should perform these duties voluntarily with a willing heart, and not as a mere obligation.14

When Makino informed her that Hirohito would not be able to attend the niiname-sai (Harvest Festival) of that year, because of a planned tour of the provinces, the empress expressed doubt whether the crown prince, who could not even sit correctly in the formal position, was able to pray to the gods in sincerity. When the wedding of the crown prince to Princess Kuni Nagako was scheduled for 1924 (having been postponed because of the Great Kanto Earthquake in September 1923), the empress told him that she would give her consent only on the condition that he officiate in the coming niiname-sai, something which he had not done since he became regent.15 Sadako’s devotion to the Way of the Gods did not diminish after her husband died, Hirohito became emperor, the new era of Shōwa started, and she herself became empress dowager. Even after the year of mourning was over, she continued to dress in black. Every morning she would close herself off in her room and pray to the portrait of her late husband.16 In October 1928, before Hirohito’s soku-i no rei enthronement ceremony in Kyoto, President of the Privy Council Kuratomi Yūzaburō recorded in his diary that elder statesman Saionji Kimmochi had told him: The empress dowager is fervent in her devotion to the gods and quite dissatisfied with His Majesty’s behavior. She believes that His Majesty is performing the palace rites differently from the way they were performed in the Meiji and Taishō eras . . . She is convinced that if he does not perform these rites properly and with real respect, the gods will punish him.17

Makino Nobuaki, Makino nobuaki nikki (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1990), p. 65. Ibid., p. 73. 16 Chichibu no Miya Yasuhito Shinnō, “Naki hahaue o shinobu,” in Kōzoku ni umarete (Tokyo: Watanabe Shuppan, 2000), p. 80. 17 Kuratomi Yūzaburō, Kuratomi yūzaburō nikki (Tokyo: Kokuritsu Kokkai Toshokan, Kensei-shiryōshitsu Shozō), entry for October 20, 1928. 14 15

238

hara takeshi

The empress dowager seems to have thought that even if she herself could not ascend the throne and perform the rites, by possessing a ‘pure and bright heart’ she could draw near to the female deity Amaterasu. Having seen her husband struck with a brain disease as punishment from the gods, she believed that she should warn her son, who had inherited the mantle of Amaterasu, to behave in a way that would save him from divine retribution. The Empress Dowager and the War The dispute between Hirohito and his mother over the Shinto rites at the palace continued even after he became emperor, as can be seen in the diaries of Prince Takamatsu and Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Kido Kōichi. Only during the war did the emperor start taking these rites seriously. His punctilious performance of them and his frequent prayers to Amaterasu Ōmikami for Japan’s victory in the war were probably the result of his mother’s supplications.18 In August 1941, shortly before the war started, Hirohito tried to convince his mother to leave Tokyo and evacuate to an imperial retreat in the country, but she refused to listen to him. In December 1941, immediately after the outbreak of the Pacific War, she finally agreed to move to the imperial villa in Numazu, but after a year, in clear defiance of the emperor, she returned to Tokyo and settled in the Ōmiya Palace, where she was surrounded by ladies-in-waiting, and continued to offer prayers to the portrait of her deceased husband. According to the diary of Prince Takamatsu, on 20 January 1945, as the war situation was getting worse, Sadako complained to Princess Kikuko, the wife of Prince Takamatsu, who visited her: The situation is not developing well, no matter which way one looks at it. There is no one in the imperial household ministry who knows what is happening. All I do nowadays is write poems and pray to the gods. If I only could, I would like to get hold without prior notification of those in charge, and tell them in a few words what I really feel. I think that if I do it now it may still have some effect; but if I wait, soon there will be no point in doing it. As for myself, these days I take extra care of my health, and go to bed earlier than I used to. No matter how many

18 Takamatsu no Miya, Takamatsu no miya nikki (Tokyo: Chūō-Kōronsha, 1995), Vol. 3, p. 277.

taish}: an enigmatic emperor and his influential wife

239

people die, my heart tells me that we should persevere and pray to the gods for help.19

Two days later, at the New Year palace poetry-reading party, Sadako composed a waka poem that included a prayer for Japan’s victory.20 In July 1944, when Japan lost the island of Saipan, the palace group around Prince Takamatsu and Prince Konoe Fumimaro urged the emperor to bring the war to a close as early as possible. But the emperor favored the army’s stand of continuing the war until some victory had been achieved. It may have been that his tough position on this matter can also be attributed to the influence of his mother. On 20 February 1945, Lord Keeper Kido visited the Ōmiya Palace and submitted a detailed report to the empress dowager on the “latest developments of the war situation, the prospects for Japan, and world conditions.”21 At dawn of 26 May 1945, American planes carried out a major firebombing raid on Tokyo, in which the imperial palace and the Ōmiya Palace were razed to the ground. Prince Takamatsu, far from bewailing this event, expressed hope that the destruction of both palaces would “present a suitable opportunity for reconciliation between Ōmiya [ i.e., the empress dowager] and the palace [i.e., the emperor].”22 On June 14, the Shōwa Emperor had an audience with his mother, who was living in the air raid shelter of the Ōmiya Palace, and urged her to evacuate to Karuizawa. She refused to do so, and it seems that a heated exchange of words took place between the two. On that occasion, Sadako might once again have used the phrase ‘divine retribution’—for no sooner had the emperor returned to the palace than he collapsed, not leaving his bed for two days.23 On 22 June, at the Imperial Conference, Hirohito finally broached the subject of bringing the war to an end.

Takamatsu no miya nikki, Vol. 8 (1998), p. 19. Teimei kōgō o-utashū (Tokyo: Shufu no tomosha, 1988), p. 325. 21 Kido Kōichi, Kido kōichi nikki (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1966), Vol. 2, p. 172. 22 Takamatsu no miya nikki, Vol. 8, p. 91. 23 Handō Kazutoshi, Seidan (Tokyo: PHP Bunko, 2006), p. 388. 19 20

240

hara takeshi

[A shorter version of this essay appeared under the title “Taishō tennō,” in Hara Takeshi & Yoshida Yutaka, Iwanami tennō kōshitsu jiten (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2005), pp. 155–159]. (Translated by Lucy North).

EMPRESS NAGAKO AND THE FAMILY STATE Sally A. Hastings Introduction Visual images invoking the history of the years 1926 to 1945, the early Shōwa era, take a variety of forms: hungry children during the depression, Japanese soldiers occupying Chinese cities, victims of the atomic bombs.1 Wartime kamikaze attacks and female labor in ordnance factories present a sharp contrast to the well-furnished living room of a middleclass home in the late 1920s.2 One of the most common images of the era, however, is the emperor on horseback, reviewing his troops.3 The embodiment of the state, he portrays the nation in arms. As the international tensions of the 1930s escalated into full-scale war, rhetoric from various points of view proclaimed that imperial soldiers died for the emperor. Several scholars, believing that the willingness of Japanese soldiers to die cannot be explained solely in terms of allegiance to an authoritarian figure at the apex of a hierarchical order, point to the motherly aspects of the emperor. Referring to the emperor in his writings from the 1960s as ‘an emotional point of reference,’ Robert Bellah de-emphasized the militaristic and authoritarian image of the monarch and suggested that the Japanese emperor is a mother figure.4 The feminist activist and writer Kanō Miyoko, has drawn attention to the ‘motherly’—loving, forgiving, and comforting—aspects of the emperor, which were instrumental in persuading common citizens to sacrifice themselves for the

1 These are the photographs that appear in Peter Duus, Modern Japan, Second Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). 2 These images appear in Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Anne Walthall, and James B. Palais, Modern East Asia: From 1600 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). 3 See for instance Kenneth B. Pyle, The Making of Modern Japan, Second Edition (Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1996), p. 194 for an image from 1937. 4 Robert Bellah, “Japanese Emperor as a Mother Figure,” in Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 176–183. This essay was first presented as a paper in 1967.

242

sally a. hastings

nation.5 These characterizations of the emperor ignore the fact that the empress was a significant part of the public image of the imperial family. Although there was language in modern Japan referring to the emperor as the father and mother of the people, I tend to agree with Ueno Chizuko that, in the 1930s, the Japanese emperor was not subject to feminization. To a large extent, the empress represented the motherly aspects of the imperial institution.6 In this essay, I explore the different ways in which the empress played a role in the crafting of the national myth and the effect that her own deployment had in facilitating the identification of conscript soldiers and their families with the imperial household and the nation. To a certain extent, this is compensatory history, for the iconic image of the emperor on horseback has obscured the presence of the empress. In fact, the common image of the imperial institution, especially in the representations to which ordinary Japanese were actually exposed in their homes and schools, was of the emperor and empress together, as if they were the dolls at the top of a Girls’ Day Display. So they appeared in the imperial portraits treasured by elementary schools, in the photographs included in the opening pages of important books, in commemorative publications, and in the albums maintained by military units at the front.7 My interest is not in the agency of the empress or the Imperial Household Ministry but rather in how the image of the empress was appropriated by the mass media and made available to every family who could buy a radio, a magazine, or even a newspaper.

5 On Kanō Miyoko, see Fujitani, T., Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 171–172; 242. 6 Ueno Chizuko, “In the Feminine Guise: A Trap of Reverse Orientalism,” in Contemporary Japanese Thought, ed. Richard F. Calichman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 239. 7 Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 85; 91 mentions that the school ceremonies carried out after about 1891 involved photographs of both the emperor and the empress and that charitable donations were often made in the name of the empress. For a detailed description of the school ceremonies surrounding the imperial portraits, see Willard Price, Japan and the Son of Heaven (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1945), pp. 123–124. School portraits are also mentioned in Hugh Byas, Government by Assassination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), p. 310. There are portraits of the emperor and empress in the opening pages of every volume of Who’s Who in Japan. On paintings of the emperor and empress in commemorative volumes, see Morris Low, Japan on Display: Photography and the Emperor (London: Routledge, 2006), 40–41. On imperial portraits in the official albums of military units, see Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History (New York: The New Press, 1992), p. 5.

empress nagako and the family state

243

In my opinion, the relationship between monarch and subject was not simply unidirectional, emanating from the imperial palace. A number of years ago, John Whitney Hall drew attention to the fact that the Japanese people themselves shaped the imperial institution by the hopes they attached to it. We must consider not only how the image of the empress affected women but also how popular hopes and ‘unanticipated enthusiasm’ reinforced or redirected state policies. That is, we must ask how women sought to use the empress’s image to legitimize their own activities.8 The Identity of Family and Nation The Shōwa empress, Nagako, was heir to rituals that had been established in the Meiji era. In the 1880s, when the Meiji leaders, anxious to win recognition from the Western powers as a civilized nation no longer subject to extraterritoriality, studied the monarchies of Europe to devise an appropriate set of rituals for Japan, they devised new imperial pageants that included the empress. For instance, Empress Haruko took part in the celebration of the promulgation of the constitution in 1889. Such events, which took place in Western-style rooms, featured couples: the emperor’s officials were accompanied by their wives. The emperor and empress likewise appeared as a couple, riding together in the same carriage. The empress appeared in the Western clothing she had adopted in 1886 not only at formal celebrations of the emperor’s birthday and at annual garden parties but also at events that took place in schools and hospitals: places where Japanese women were encouraged to take new public responsibilities.9 The image of the emperor and empress as a Western-style married couple was given further prominence in a national pageantry on 9 March, 1894, when, borrowing from the customs of Western monarchs, the nation staged a celebration of the imperial couple’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. This focus on the conjugal relationship between emperor and empress was further reinforced by the elaborate celebration of the marriage of the crown prince on 10 May, 1900. Such celebrations 8 John Whitney Hall, “A Monarch for Modern Japan,” in Political Development in Modern Japan, ed. Robert E. Ward (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 54. On ‘unanticipated enthusiasm,’ see Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, p. 120. 9 Sally A. Hastings, “The Empress’ New Clothes and Japanese Women, 1868–1912,” The Historian 55, no. 4 (Summer 1993), pp. 680–681.

244

sally a. hastings

of ordinary, human events ‘contributed to the sense of nearness between the ruler and the ruled.’10 All families became the imperial family, writ small. The prominence of the imperial couple in national pageantry combined with the new system of national holidays to generate a series of practices that reinforced the identification of the imperial family with all other families, and the empress was central to the process by which citizens made the imperial family their own. The official holidays proclaimed in early Meiji included tenchōsetsu, the emperor’s birthday. Diaries show that the Japanese people incorporated the imperial family into their personal lives, noting birthdays, death anniversaries, and marriages as they would events in their own families. A member of a Kyoto household in 1910 contemplated a visit to the Emperor Kōmei’s tomb on his festival on 30 January, and the family sang the national anthem on the emperor’s birthday.11 The imperial family reinforced the incorporation of all Japanese into one large family when they bestowed charitable contributions on their subjects to mark changes in the imperial family. When Empress Dowager Eishō (Asako) died in 1897, the imperial household gave funds to charity, including a gift to the Tokyo Poorhouse.12 The government mobilized young people in public institutions to mark significant junctures in the lives of the imperial family. Groups of organized subjects such as students and military reservists celebrated the marriage of the crown prince to Princess Sadako in 1900.13 The notorious anarchist Ōsugi Sakae (1885–1923) remembered being taken as a military cadet to a railroad station to greet the newly married couple as they passed through the area on their pilgrimage to the Ise Shrine.14 Women’s organizations appropriated events in the lives of imperial family members to support their own agendas. When Emperor Meiji and Empress Haruko celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in 1894, the Japan Woman’s Christian Temperance Union ( JWCTU) sent a brocade box, poems, and a handkerchief in celebration of the Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, pp. 111–121; 163. Nakano Makiko, Makiko’s Diary: A Merchant Wife in 1910 Kyoto, trans. Kazuko Smith (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 79–80; 198. 12 Sally Ann Hastings, Neighborhood and Nation in Tokyo, 1905–1937 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1995), p. 33. 13 On the celebration in 1900, see Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, p. 121. 14 Ōsugi Sakae, The Autobiography of Ōsugi Sakae, trans. Byron K. Marshall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 97. 10 11

empress nagako and the family state

245

marriage.15 The JWCTU hailed the wedding of the Crown Prince in 1900 as an endorsement of monogamy and thus used the event to promote its goal of marital fidelity. The JWCTU members promoted their temperance goals by urging sobriety at the celebratory parade for the nuptials and recommended that the commemorative sake cups be replaced with candy dishes.16 Although the day was not hailed as an official national holiday, the empress’s birthday provided an occasion for a variety of women’s activities. Meiji women educators and women’s magazines designated the empress’s birthday Chikyūsetsu, using a phrase from the Laozi parallel to Tenchōsetsu, the term for the emperor’s birthday. The Tokyo-Yokohama Women’s Prayer Society and the JWCTU urged the government to make Chikyūsetsu a national holiday, on par with the emperor’s birthday.17 The day was used as an occasion to display women’s accomplishments. A Kyoto housewife wrote of Chikyūsetsu in her diary in 1910, “On this day at Mr. Matsumiya’s house they customarily display all kinds of things their pupils have learned to make, such as flower arrangements, sewing, and Japanese and Western-style cooking, as well as demonstrating the tea ceremony.” The diarist herself went to see that year’s display.18 The Crown Prince and his Princess One element in the relationship between Empress Nagako and the imperial family to the Japanese people was the impression that the public had formed of her in the years before she became empress. The crown prince and his family were much more accessible to the public than the emperor and empress, whose images were highly regulated. Some of the news stories that thrust the young crown prince into the public eye were his betrothal, his European tour, his marriage, and the birth of his first child. The era in which the engagement and marriage of Crown Prince Hirohito were headline news was one in which news media were expanding. Newspapers and women’s magazines flourished.

15 Elizabeth Dorn Lublin, “Wearing the White Ribbon of Reform and the Banner of Civic Duty: Yajima Kajiko and the Japan Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in the Meiji Period,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal No. 30–31 (2006), p. 4. 16 Lublin, ibid., pp. 13–14. 17 Lublin, ibid., p. 13. 18 Nakano, Makiko’s Diary, p. 138.

246

sally a. hastings

Public figures appeared in newsreels shown in movie theaters. Radio broadcasting began in 1925.19 Nagako, daughter of Prince Kuni Kuniyoshi, became Crown Princess of Japan on 26 January, 1924, when she married the imperial regent, Crown Prince Hirohito. Her personal life changed, of course, from the moment the betrothal was arranged in January 1918. Her betrothal became headline news in early 1921 when allegations that color blindness in the Shimazu family of her mother precipitated efforts by the elder statesman Yamagata Aritomo to call off her engagement.20 Once the possibility of a broken engagement and the reconfirmation of the wedding plans had drawn attention to Nagako, newspapers eagerly reported on her life, saying that she was athletic, played tennis and practiced Swedish gymnastic exercise, and was ‘an assiduous student of geography and politics.’21 Hirohito’s European tour in 1921 attracted extensive press coverage and popular interest. Large numbers of people participated in celebratory send-off festivities. The New York Times reported that “fifteen thousand soldiers and police lined the streets from the palace to the station.”22 Setting sail from Yokohama on the warship Katori on 3 March, 1921, the prince and his party called at ports in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Egypt, Malta, and Gibraltar, arriving on 7 May for a three-week visit in England where for part of the time he was the guest of King George V and Edward, Prince of Wales.23 On 31 May, he reached Paris; from there he traveled to Belgium and then Holland, where he was received by Queen Wilhelmina.24 On 11 July, he arrived in Naples, preparatory to a visit to Rome as the guest of King Victor Emmanuel.25 His itinerary positioned Hirohito as the peer of European royalty, the representative of a proud Japanese nation.

On the early years of radio in Japan, see Gregory J. Kasza, The State and Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 72–101. 20 This story has been told many times. See for instance, Ben-Ami Shillony, Enigma of the Emperors: Sacred Subservience in Japanese History (Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 2005), p. 179. 21 “Clans Spur Fight on Royal Marriage,” New York Times, February 15, 1921. 22 New York Times, March 5, 1921. 23 Shillony, Enigma, p. 180; “Prince Hirohito Reaches England,” New York Times, May 8, 1921. 24 “French Ministers Welcome Hirohito,” New York Times, June 1, 1921; “Holland Greets Hirohito,” New York Times, June 16, 1921. 25 “Rome’s Plans for Hirohito,” New York Times, July 12, 1921. 19

empress nagako and the family state

247

When Prince Hirohito returned to Japan in September, there was wide popular participation in the festivities to welcome him home. On 13 August, the Imperial Household Ministry advised the public that: “The people lining the Imperial route are asked to clap their hands and give cheers, disregarding all old customs.”26 The instructions were in contradiction to the existing practice that imperial subjects remained silent in the presence of their rulers. The crowd gathered at the dock in Yokohama to welcome the prince included members of the government-sponsored young men’s associations that had seen Hirohito off on his travels earlier in the year.27 Thousands lined the streets in Yokohama. Newspapers printed special editions with congratulatory messages from public figures. Lantern processions were held in Tokyo and other large cities.28 After the crown prince had returned to Japan, attention turned once again to his upcoming nuptials. Multiple images of his bride-to-be circulated in the press. Two photographs showed her standing, dressed in a kimono.29 A photograph more in keeping with the Western clothing favored by the women of the imperial family for public appearances showed Nagako in an ankle-length Western dress with a flower at her waist, her neckline adorned with a triple strand of pearls.30 (See figure 1.) The wedding, which was scheduled for November 1923 was postponed and upstaged by the Kantō Earthquake of 1 September, 1923, which devastated the capital city of Tokyo. The re-scheduled wedding on 26 January, 1924, took place in an urban landscape still dotted with piles of debris. Nevertheless, there was wide popular participation in the event. Great crowds thronged the open spaces in front of the palace where the wedding took place. Crowds, along with soldiers and police, lined the streets through which the prince and princess passed as they traveled from their residences to the palace and then to their home.

“Japan to Cheer Hirohito,” New York Times, August 14, 1921. Hastings, Neighborhood and Nation, p. 114. 28 “All Japan Cheers Hirohito’s Return,” New York Times, September 5, 1921. 29 A good reproduction of one of these photographs can be found in Kawahara Toshiaki, Nagako kōtaigō: Michiko kōgō no oshutomesama ga ayunda michi (Tokyo: Nesuko, 1993). A slight variant on this photograph (the face looks slightly to the viewer’s left) appeared in Burnet Hershey, “Hirohito’s New Path,” New York Times, July 23, 1922. A picture of her in a different Japanese outfit with seemingly shorter hair appeared in Current Opinion December 1, 1923. 30 Current Opinion, July 1, 1923. The same photograph appeared in the New York Times, May 25, 1924. 26 27

248

sally a. hastings

Fig. 1. Princess Nagako, Prince Hirohito, 1923, during their Engagement.

empress nagako and the family state

249

Flags were hung from the buildings. Spectators climbed up on piles of debris left from the earthquake to gain a better vantage point.31 Public participation in the celebration of the crown prince’s marriage was not confined to the immediate vicinity of the palace. Thanks to Japan’s military equipment, sounds of the celebration reverberated throughout the land: “At a quarter of 11 the first of a salute of 101 guns from the battery at Miyake Hill announced the completion of the ritual; it was taken up simultaneously by the warships in Shinagawa Bay and other warships and forts throughout the country.”32 Fortyseven military planes dropped small parachutes with congratulatory messages over the capital city. In honor of the wedding, the imperial family bestowed monetary awards on valued subjects, issued pardons and commuted sentences to criminals.33 The Japan Young Men’s Hall, an institution affiliated with government-sponsored young men’s associations, celebrated the marriage and sent the couple a congratulatory telegram.34 The celebratory activities of the young men paralleled the festivities of students, reservists, and cadets for the marriage of the crown prince in 1900, but the young men’s associations, open to all young men between the completion of elementary school and the age of twenty, incorporated a much larger portion of the population into the national pageant. The press and the public maintained an interest in the newly married couple. On 20 February, the Tokyo Asahi shinbun included a picture of the Crown Prince and Princess boarding a train at Tokyo Station. A photograph showing the crown prince and his new wife in elegant Western clothing was issued by the Imperial Household Ministry in May 1924.35 (See figure 2.) There was also publicity about the Crown Princess’s public duties such as appearing at Red Cross meetings. (See figure 3.) Similar to their wedding, the birth of the first child of Crown Prince Hirohito and Nagako was a public event. The pregnancy of the crown princess was announced on 15 April, 1925. Her due date, originally estimated as 20 November, was revised to 26 November, and from the “Japan’s Regent Wed,” New York Times, January 27, 1924. Leonard Mosely, Hirohito, Emperor of Japan (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1966), p. 88. 33 Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: Perennial, 2001), p. 144. 34 Hastings, Neighborhood and Nation, p. 114. 35 Asahi Shimbunsha, Shashinshū shōwa tennō (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1989), p. 74. 31 32

250

sally a. hastings

Fig. 2. Crown Prince Hirohito and Crown Princess Nagako, as a young married couple.

empress nagako and the family state

Fig. 3. Crown Princess Nagako, leaving a Red Cross meeting.

251

252

sally a. hastings

24th of the month reporters began keeping an all-night emergency vigil. Arrangements were made to announce the birth on the radio and to inform the residents of Tokyo by means of a signal. A military band stood by to play the national anthem on the radio microphone. All over Japan, local governments planned celebrations and awards for mothers who bore children on the same day as the crown princess.36 Crowds waited for hours outside the Akasaka Palace until Nagako finally gave birth to a daughter on 6 December, 1925.37 (See figure 4.) Women’s magazines took a proprietary interest in the new baby, Princess Teru no Miya Shigeko. For instance, Fujo shimbun published the photograph commemorating her first birthday.38 (See figure 5.) By the time that the Taishō Emperor suffered his final illness, the Japanese public was well acquainted with Hirohito and Nagako. The media had given substantial coverage to their engagement, Hirohito’s European tour, their marriage, and the birth of their first child. This coverage had included photographs of the young fiancée, the newly married couple, and their baby daughter. As the Taishō era came to an end, the public prayed for the imperial family as they had celebrated with them. Members of ward-level branches in Tokyo prayed for the emperor during his final illness, as did schoolgirls gathered at the Meiji Shrine.39 Producing an Heir for the Emperor When Hirohito and Nagako became emperor and empress on 25 December, 1926, they moved to the imperial palace and their portraits became the ones enshrined in the schools. Their new sanctity made them less directly visible to the people. In the official portraits, Hirohito stands stiffly in his military uniform and Nagako wears formal Western evening attire far beyond the experience of most of her subjects. (See figure 6.) The first photograph of Hirohito that appeared in the New 36 Kojima Noboru, Tennō (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1974), Vol. 1, p. 343; Kawahara, Nagako kōtaigō, p. 118; Itoko Koyama, Nagako: Empress of Japan (New York: The John Day Company, 1958), p. 63; and Mosely, Hirohito, pp. 93–94. Kawahara says that one shot was fired to signal the birth of a girl. Kojima says that the siren would sound one blast for a boy and two for a girl. Since the memories from 1933 are that two blasts was the signal for a boy, I question Kojima’s version. 37 There is a picture of the crowd in Elsie Weil, “Heirs of the Japanese Sun Goddess,” Asia 27 (March 1927), p. 176. 38 Fujo shimbun, No. 1383, December 12, 1926, p. 4. 39 A picture of the schoolgirls appears in Weil, “Heirs,” p. 181.

empress nagako and the family state

253

Fig. 4. Crowds waiting outside the Akasaka Palace for word that the crown princess had given birth, December 1925.

254

sally a. hastings

Fig. 5. Princess Teru-no-miya Shigeko, 1926.

empress nagako and the family state

Fig. 6. Official portrait of Empress Nagako, 1928 (age 25).

255

256

sally a. hastings

York Times after his ascent to the throne was this formal pose, although without its pair, the portrait of Nagako.40 Less formal poses still circulated, however. A photograph published on 27 October, 1929 showed the emperor as a private person, dressed in a business suit and seated at a desk, with a book in front of him.41 The Japanese people, who had followed the news of their crown prince’s engagement, marriage, and assumption of parental responsibilities, did not have to see the emperor to imagine his home life. Portraits of the imperial children were issued on a regular basis. (See figure 7.) Newspapers and women’s magazines published these photographs and regularly reported the movements of the imperial family, their public appearances and their departures for their various homes outside the city. Moreover, the formal images of the imperial couple were available for use by civic organizations or commercial publications to associate the imperial couple with commoner interests. Women’s magazines appropriated the double portraits to connect the imperial couple with their women readers. Fujo shimbun published two pairs of official photographs (Yoshihito and Sadako; Hirohito and Nagako) on 2 January, 1927 to acknowledge the death of the Taishō Emperor.42 Fujin shimpō used the double portrait to celebrate the coronation in 1928.43 Morris Low notes that the insertion of pictures of the emperor and his family into the personal and family albums of Japanese subjects reinforced the idea that the emperor was the father of all Japanese.44 Producing a male imperial heir was a project with which the public identified closely. When Hirohito and Nagako became emperor and empress in 1926, their first daughter Princess Shigeko had just turned one. Over the next thirteen years, Nagako bore six more children, four daughters and two sons.45 Since Nagako gave birth to four daughters in a

New York Times, January 9, 1927. Hugh Byas, “All in the Day’s Work of an Emperor,” New York Times, October 27, 1929. 42 Fujo shimbun, No. 1386, January 2, 1927, pp. 1 & 3. 43 Fujin shimpō, No. 368, November 1928. 44 Low, Japan on Display, p. 83. 45 Stephen S. Large, Emperor Hirohito and Shōwa Japan: A Political Biography (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 27, 224 n. 6. Their dates of birth were as follows: Princess Teru-no-miya Shigeko, 6 December 1925. Princess Hisa-no-miya Sachiko, 10 September 1927. Princess Taka-no-miya Kazuko, 30 September 1929. Princess Yori-no-miya Atsuko, 7 March 1931. Prince Tsugu-no-miya Akihito, 23 December 1933. 40

41

empress nagako and the family state

Fig. 7. Princess Teru-no-miya Shigeko, 1929.

257

258

sally a. hastings

row before a son was born, and only males could inherit the throne, the entire nation became engaged in the task of producing a male heir. Before the funeral of the Taishō Emperor had even taken place, the absence of the empress from certain events provoked speculation, freely published in women’s magazines, that she was pregnant.46 On 3 March, 1927, the Imperial Household Ministry officially announced that the empress was pregnant and would give birth in August.47 Loyal subjects gathered at Shinto shrines to pray for a male heir. On 27 July, the empress donned a sacred girdle in preparation for the birth.48 By the end of August, more than one hundred newspaper reporters were keeping watch outside the palace. Arrangements were set that the imperial cannon (normally fired every day at noon) would fire one shot for a girl and two for a boy. The news would reach the nation beyond the capital by radio.49 It was announced on 7 September that the birth was near. A crowd comprised mainly of women stood outside the palace for three days before a second daughter was born at dawn on 10 September.50 The little girl lived less than a year. A third baby girl, Princess Kazuko, was born 30 September, 1929.51 (See figure 8.) National hopes for a male heir were high for the empress’s fourth pregnancy in 1931. Once again, newspaper reporters and radio announcers, as well as the Japanese public, kept vigil, and sirens were installed to inform the residents of the capital: one blast for a girl, two for a boy. When the baby was born on 7 March, 1931, the people of Japan waited in vain for the second blast, for the baby was yet another princess.52 In October 1932, court physicians announced that the empress was pregnant and would give birth in late spring; the nation suffered yet another disappointment when the empress miscarried.53 Prince Yoshi-no-miya Masuhito (Hitachi), 28 November 1935. Princess Suga-no-miya Takako, 2 March 1939. 46 See for instance Fujo shimbun, No. 1390, January 30, 1927, p. 2. 47 Fujo shimbun, No. 1396, March 13, 1927, p. 2 and New York Times, March 4, 1927. 48 “Empress of Japan Dons the Sacred Girdle,” New York Times, July 28, 1927. 49 “All Japan is Praying for an Heir to the Throne,” New York Times, August 28, 1927. 50 “Nippon’s Tiny New Princess,” New York Times, September 18, 1927. 51 Mosely, Hirohito, pp. 99–100; 104–105. 52 “When a Baby Princess Arrives in Japan,” Literary Digest 109 (April 11, 1931), p. 13 and Mosely, Hirohito, p. 107. Koyama, p. 68, says that the signal for a boy was one blast, and ‘When the nation heard two loud blasts on a May morning in 1931, everybody felt cheated.’ Her account of the signals does not correspond with the memories recorded for 1933, and she has the month wrong. 53 For the announcement, see “Empress of Japan Expects Fifth Child,” New York Times, October 18, 1932. On the miscarriage, see Bix, Hirohito, p. 271.

empress nagako and the family state

259

Fig. 8. Princess Teru-no-miya Shigeko (left) and Princess Taka-no-miya Kazuko in 1930.

260

sally a. hastings

The empress’s pregnancy in 1933 generated yet more frantic hopes for a male heir to the throne. Loyal subjects sent charms and talismans guaranteed to produce male progeny to the Imperial Household Ministry. Large crowds gathered in temples, at Shinto shrines, and at the gates of the palace to pray. Sirens were set up in every part of Japan to notify the people of the child’s birth.54 Preparations were made to select wet nurses.55 When a male heir was indeed born, the joy of Japan was audible. Ambassador Grew wrote in his diary on 23 December, 1933, at the birth of Crown Prince Akihito: Alice awoke me punctually at 7, saying ‘It’s the siren.’ Sure enough, the siren was blowing to announce the birth of the Imperial babe, one minute if a girl, and two minutes, with a ten-second interval, if a boy. I waited eagerly through that ten-second interval, and when the second blast shrieked out, we were happy.56

Within hours, flags fluttered from buildings, streetcars, and buses.57 Another American, some miles away in Hayama, recalled that the two long blasts of the siren were followed by “the booming of temple bells and the roaring of all the neighbors’ radios, turned up to the deafening pitch favored by Japanese listeners.”58 Kido Kōichi wrote in his diary, “At last we hear two blasts of the siren. Finally the nation’s fervent desire has been fulfilled; the great problem has been solved.”59 A brief announcement and the playing of the national anthem went out on radio waves to every part of Japan. The naming of the imperial prince six days later was the occasion for more radio broadcasts and public celebrations. The capital city was decorated with flags and streamers and Chinese lanterns. In the evening, searchlights played

“Japan’s Crown Prince,” Literary Digest 117 ( January 6, 1934), p. 6; Price, Japan and the Son of Heaven, p. 28; Toshiaki Kawahara, Hirohito and His Times (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1990), p. 92; Kawahara, Nagako, p. 124; and Mosely, Hirohito, p. 129 all mention that two blasts of the siren would announce a male child and that only one blast would signify the birth of a princess. 55 “Japan Asks Gods for a Royal Son,” New York Times, November 19, 1933. 56 Joseph C. Grew, Ten Years in Japan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944), p. 109. Grew was in Tokyo for the birth of two more imperial children, but he does not include his diary entries for those days in Ten Years in Japan. 57 “Our Envoy Visits Palace,” New York Times, December 23, 1933. 58 Price, Japan and the Son of Heaven, p. 29. 59 Kawahara, Hirohito, p. 93. 54

empress nagako and the family state

261

across the sky, planes with illuminated wings flew overhead, and fireworks shot up from within the palace grounds.60 The celebration of the birth of a male heir was an occasion for amnesty as well as for extended festivities. On 11 February, National Foundation Day, the emperor proclaimed imperial clemency that commuted death sentences to life imprisonment and life imprisonment to twenty years. He also announced gifts to individuals who had made outstanding contributions to society. The Tokyo city government ran free programs of theater, dance and motion pictures in the public parks. Crowds drew near the imperial palace to pay their respects to the new heir.61 Two more children were born to Hirohito and Nagako. Court physicians announced on 9 July, 1935 that the empress was expected to give birth to a child in November.62 On 20 July, she donned the sacred girdle. On that day, one hundred representatives of the Japanese Midwives Association prayed at the Meiji Shrine for the empress’s safe delivery.63 On 28 November, the empress gave birth to her second son. Once again sirens and radio carried the news to the nation and Tokyo buildings were draped with flags.64 Not quite three years later on 26 September, 1938, it was announced that the empress expected another child to be born in April of 1939.65 On 2 February, 1939, the court gynecologist and attendant midwives were standing by and the announcement of the midwives was imminent. The sirens were ready to announce the birth.66 There was a considerable wait before a daughter was born on 1 March.67 Speculation continued about the possibility that the empress might bear more children. In

Price, Japan and the Son of Heaven, p. 31. “Amnesty Granted to 35,000 in Japan,” New York Times, February 11, 1934. 62 “Empress Expects Child,” New York Times, July 10, 1935. This announcement revised an earlier one that a child would be born in January or February. “Tokyo Awaits New Heir,” New York Times, June 25, 1935. 63 “To Don Historic Girdle,” New York Times, July 21, 1935. 64 “Tokyo Draped in Flags,” New York Times, November 28, 1935. See also “Second Heir to Son of Heaven,” Literary Digest 120 (December 7, 1935), p. 12. 65 “Another Child Expected By the Empress of Japan,” New York Times, September 27, 1938. 66 “Birth of a Child Awaited by Japanese Empress,” New York Times, February 2, 1939. 67 Daughter to Japan’s Empress,” New York Times, March 2, 1939. 60 61

262

sally a. hastings

1941, when the empress failed to attend services at Yasukuni Shrine, rumors circulated that she was pregnant.68 Akihito Grows Up From the time of his birth, there was great interest in every aspect of Crown Prince Akihito’s life. A photograph of his nurse Noguchi Yoshiko, arriving at the palace, appeared in the New York Times. Noguchi, the wife of an army officer, was chosen for her duties as a wet nurse as one of the two healthiest women in Japan.69 The ritualists who carried out the ‘Ceremony of Reading the Classics and Twanging the Bowstring’ when the crown prince was bathed in preparation for receiving his name were duly photographed.70 Hospital administrators and press photographers fostered a sense of identity between the infant prince and other children of Japan. A photograph shows uniformed nurses in a Tokyo hospital holding babies born the same night as the crown prince and waving Japanese flags.71 The first photograph of the crown prince was taken on 23 March, when he was three months old.72 Annual photographs of Crown Prince Akihito were widely circulated.73 For his second birthday, he was dressed in white.74 In the picture taken on his fourth birthday, he is wearing a suit with a white collar, shorts, tights, and buckle shoes.75 A photograph published in 1939 shows the crown prince in Japanese attire.76 Interest in the crown prince was so high that photographers seized opportunities to photograph the young heir surreptitiously. An Associated Press photograph shows the prince as a toddler in 1935, walking through a Tokyo railroad station on his way to the imperial villa at

“Empress to Honor War Dead,” New York Times, October 20, 1941. January 21, 1934. [Times Wide World Photos] 70 January 21, 1934. [Times Wide World Photos] 71 New York Times, January 21, 1934. [Times Wide World Photos] 72 For the photograph, see New York Times, April 21, 1934. [Times Wide World Photos] 73 This continued an older practice; a photograph of Hirohito’s younger brother Prince Sumi (Mikasa) appeared in the New York Times, January 4, 1925. A picture of him playing ball at the Peers’ School appeared in the same paper, May 2, 1926. 74 New York Times, January 19, 1936. [Times Wide World Photos] 75 New York Times, January 16, 1938. The picture for his third birthday appeared in the same paper, January 24, 1937. 76 “24 Boy Peers,” New York Times, May 3, 1939. 68 69

empress nagako and the family state

263

Hayama.77 In 1939, he was photographed dressed in a sailor suit as he gazed out a train window on his way to Nikkō for his summer holidays.78 In an image showing him heading off for the Peers’ School in 1940, he is wearing a navy blue school uniform and carrying his books in a backpack.79 In parallel fashion, when his oldest sister began school in 1932, the women’s magazine Shufu no tomo did an entire article on her preparations. (See figure 9.) This attention to entering school, a life event shared with every child in Japan, helped to cement the identity between the imperial family and the families of their subjects. When the Imperial Household Ministry issued photographs and descriptions of Akihito’s activities, it fed the appetite of the Japanese public for information about the imperial children. At the same time, such attention to the small children served to position the imperial family as a model for sacrificial wartime behavior. In 1937 an article on Akihito’s birthday party with two of his sisters concluded with the report that, “Because of the warfare in China, however, the customary birthday dinner was omitted.”80 Mourning the War Dead The empress was not simply a token of private, domestic life. In the 1930s, the empress continued to have public duties of her own: visiting hospitals, factories, and schools; presiding over Red Cross meetings and making donations to worthy causes on behalf of women and children. When she was indisposed, other women of the imperial family went in her place, but official announcements made it clear that the duties were hers. Moreover, because both members of the imperial couple participated in greeting diplomats from abroad, honoring distinguished citizens, and sending condolences to the families of those who had died in the service of the state, the empress could not help but participate in Japan’s expansion abroad and nationalism at home. She appeared at major national celebrations such as the 2600th anniversary of the

77 78 79 80

New York Times, October 26, 1935. New York Times, August 20, 1939. New York Times, April 29, 1940. “Japanese Heir is 4 Years Old,” New York Times, December 24, 1937.

264

sally a. hastings

Fig. 9. Princess Teru-no-miya Shigeko, ready for school, 1932.

empress nagako and the family state

265

founding of the Japanese empire in 1940.81 In May 1941, great publicity was given to her pilgrimages to the shrines of Kyoto.82 As empress she gave audiences to imperial officials such as Nakagawa Kenzō, Governor General of Taiwan, on 30 March, 1936, and entertained the heads of Japanese puppet states, for instance Henry Pu Yi in 1935 and Wang Ching-wei in 1941.83 As Japan became embroiled in war on the continent, the empress assumed responsibility for mourning the dead. In September 1937, she wrote a poem of consolation for the families of soldiers at the front: “There are no words with which to console families who live in worry over sons and fathers at the front.”84 In December of the same year, she wrote, “Take sweet seeming sleep in the name of the sovereign, those spirits of the brave who sacrificed for the homeland.”85 When the young men of Japan were dying for the nation, newsreels showed her visiting Yasukuni Shrine to pray for the soldiers who had died in the defense of Japan.86 In honor of the empress’s birthday in 1943, the official magazine of the Great Japan Women’s Organization published a picture of the empress visiting soldiers in the hospital.87 In 1943, each of the imperial princesses was deputized by the empress to visit military hospitals; the public appearances of the Empress Dowager and the wives of Hirohito’s brothers were already celebrated in a painting that appeared in a woman’s magazine.88 (See figure 10.) It was the female half of the imperial couple who sent bereaved families molded cakes to be used as offerings to the dead and thus expressed the identity between her family and theirs.89 She also honored the war victims by sending notes to bereaved families, ‘thanking them for their service to the nation.’90 81 Gr ew, Ten Years in Japan, p. 352, says this occurred in November. Byas, Government by Assassination, p. 296 seems to describe exactly the same events, which he says took place on February 11. 82 Otto D. Tolischus, Tokyo Record (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1943), p. 125. 83 On Nakagawa, see Japan Times & Mail, March 31, 1936; on Henry Pu Yi, Kawahara, Hirohito, pp. 60, 62; on Wang Ching-wei, Tolischus, Tokyo Record, p. 137. 84 New York Times, September 22, 1937. 85 New York Times, December 2, 1937. 86 I am indebted to Roger Purdy for the privilege of seeing Nihon nyūsu, No. 231: 2 November 1944. 87 Nihon fujin, 1, no. 5 (March 1943). 88 Setsuko, Princess Chichibu, The Silver Drum: A Japanese Imperial Memoir (Folkestone, Kent: Global, Orient, 1996), p. 159. 89 Cook and Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History, p. 470. 90 Edward Behr, Hirohito: Behind the Myth, (New York: Villard Books, 1989), p. 283.

266

sally a. hastings

Fig. 10. Painting (from left to right) of Empress Dowager Sadako, Princess Chichibu, and Princess Takamatsu at Yokosuka Naval Base, 1941.

empress nagako and the family state

267

These gifts and epistles to bereaved families conformed to the long-standing custom whereby the emperor and empress extended condolences to the families of those who died in the service of the nation. Just as the emperor, the empress, and the empress dowager sent representatives to attend the funerals of their own relatives, such as the Dowager Princess Kitashirakawa Tomi who died in 1936, so they sent messengers to offer incense at the funerals of government officials such as Kawasaki Takukichi, Minister of Commerce and Industry, who died on 27 March, 1936.91 In the aftermath of the February 26 Incident, both the empress and the empress dowager sent messengers with condolence presents to the homes of Takahashi Korekiyo and Saitō Makoto, two high officials who were assassinated in the incident.92 Later, both women sent messengers and wreaths to Takahashi’s funeral.93 The Japanese soldiers who were cut down in their youth on distant battlefields thus received parallel honors to elderly statesmen who died, however violently, at a much later stage in life. The effectiveness of the empress’s gifts was enhanced by the fact that state and society collaborated in the production of the humanized imperial image. The public fascination with Nagako’s motherhood was primarily a product of popular rather than official image-making. The public understanding of the imperial household as a nuclear family required active imagination. Newspaper readers had to mentally rearrange the pictures of the imperial children that the state issued annually in order to create the emperor’s family portrait. Although photographs of Hirohito, Nagako, and their children exist, these were not known to the prewar public. The emperor and empress appeared only in official photographs or in newsreel performances of their official duties. In this respect, the imperial family of Japan differed from European royalty, for whom family portraits were common. The state did not, in fact, portray the empress primarily as a mother. The Shōwa empress, like her Meiji counterpart, visited schools, hospitals, and Red Cross meetings, encouraging women to be students, nurses, and patriotic volunteers. By promoting women’s education, she contributed to the production of ‘good wives and wise mothers,’ the prewar Japanese feminine ideal. Nevertheless, we must not exaggerate

91 92 93

Japan Times & Mail, 26 and 31, 1936; Grew, Ten Years in Japan, 181. Japan Times & Mail, March 9, 1936. Japan Times & Mail, March 27 and 28, 1936.

268

sally a. hastings

the prominence of imperial women as mothers. Emperor Meiji’s heir was a son by a concubine, and although Empresses Sadako and Nagako bore children, they did not raise them themselves.94 Interest in Nagako’s role as a mother arose from popular identity with the imperial family. Such identity was reinforced by the public staging of family events. Princess Setsuko, whose husband Prince Chichibu was heir to the throne when they married in 1928, remembers that the sides of the road were thronged with people as she and the prince rode in their carriage through Tokyo.95 The celebration of imperial birthdays that began in Meiji continued into the war years. Admiral Ugaki, in his diary, noted the emperor’s birthday and the birthday of the Meiji Emperor. On 22 October, 1941, he recorded the engagement of Prince Mikasa (the emperor’s younger brother) to Takagi Yuri.96 Because the empress was less rigidly defined in ritual and mythology than the emperor, her image lent itself more easily to popular co-optation. In the 1930s, celebrations of Chikyūsetsu, the empress’s birthday, became public events that mobilized organized women in support of the national mission. On 6 March 1933, the Patriotic Women’s Association sponsored its first celebration of the empress’s birthday, and this became an annual event.97 In 1936, the court celebrations for her birthday had to be postponed because of the military uprising known as the February 26 Incident, but members of the Patriotic Women’s Association held ceremonies in her honor at the Yasukuni Shrine and then paid their respects to the imperial family in the plaza opposite the palace.98 Plans for the 1939 celebration called for 40,000 members of the PWA and 10,000 school girls to parade through the streets of the capital.99 Benedict Anderson argues that the nation is an imagined community, one for which people are willing to die.100 When the Japanese people of

94 See for instance Koyama, Nagako: Empress of Japan, pp. 128, 133 on Prince Akihito being taken from his parents at the age of three and Prince Yoshinomiya being sent to a nursery in the country. 95 Setsuko, The Silver Drum, pp. 86–87, 89. The wedding of Hirohito’s oldest daughter Princess Shigeko took place on October 13, 1943; because it was wartime, everything was done very simply. Setsuko, The Silver Drum, p. 159. 96 Matome Ugaki, Fading Victory: The Diary of Admiral Matome Ugaki (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), pp. 13, 19, 117, 257, 365, 506, 599. 97 Nihon fujin mondai shiryō shūsei (Tokyo: Domesu, 1980), 10:167. 98 Japan Times & Mail, March 4 and 8, 1936. 99 Japan Times & Mail, March 5, 1939. 100 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Revised edition; New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 6–7.

empress nagako and the family state

269

the early Shōwa era imagined their nation, they imagined it as a family state headed by a couple. Perhaps some Japanese died confidently for the emperor, but Ienaga Saburō and John Dower tell us that many died for their mothers. Whatever the motivation of the dying soldier, it was Hirohito’s mother and Akihito’s mother who mourned their deaths. This account, of how the Japanese people prayed and listened for imperial births, celebrated them, and then watched the royal children grow, offers us several insights into Japan’s wartime coherence. First, we see that the Japanese people had frequent reminders of the emperor’s human, mortal, and reproductive aspect. Second, the various images and rituals of simultaneity that bound the nation together around the births of imperial children and other events in the imperial family offers us an understanding of Japanese nationalism that is not dependent upon the imperial line, unbroken through the ages, and thus on the uniqueness of Japan. Finally, this account sheds new light on the great ‘humanization’ of the emperor that advocates of the imperial institution engineered in the early postwar period.101 One means of humanizing the emperor was to advertise his personal life, often through the use of family photographs.102 The photographs themselves were new revelations, but the attention to the emperor’s family was an interest that the people and the press had maintained even in the days of nationalism and military expansionism.103

101 Herbert P. Bix, “Inventing the ‘Symbol Monarchy’ in Japan, 1945–52,” Journal of Japanese Studies 21 (1995), p. 331. 102 “One of the first candid family shots of Emperor Hirohito and his family” appears in Otis Cary, From a Ruined Empire: Letters—Japan, China, Korea 1945–1946 (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1984). On p. 282, in a letter of December 21, 1945 to Don Keene, Cary tells of how he advised Prince Takamatsu, the emperor’s brother, with respect to photographs: “I suggested that since informal pictures of the emperor or his family had never been released, some good ones be taken and given to the Japanese press. Any shots would be fine, but they must be candid, catching them in any part of their daily lives, attempting merely to show the Japanese people that the first family is not very different from any other Japanese family, probably not so lavish as some.” 103 This is not to deny, of course, that there was an increase in the intensity of the focus on the emperor as a family man in 1946, a point made by Kenneth J. Ruoff, The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945–1995 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), p. 206 and echoed by Low, Japan on Display, pp. 111, 129, and 138.

AXES TO GRIND: THE HIROHITO WAR GUILT CONTROVERSY IN JAPAN Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi Introduction On 14 August 1945, the Shōwa Emperor, known as Hirohito in the west, issued an ‘august decision’ to accept the Potsdam Declaration and end the Second World War. Among other things, this meant disbanding the imperial armed forces under his command, seeing his nation occupied by foreign armies, and placing his trusted state leaders on trial for war crimes. The Proclamation required that: The Japanese Government shall remove all obstacles to the revival and strengthening of democratic tendencies among the Japanese people. Freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought, as well as respect for basic human rights shall be established.

Imperial government authorities, however, continued to suppress those rights with unabated vigor well into October, when Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) General Douglas MacArthur ordered an immediate end to all such violations. Nevertheless, the cabinet headed by imperial prince Higashikuni Naruhiko was bent on ‘preserving the kokutai,’ or divinely created national polity, which specifically denoted Hirohito’s ‘sacred and inviolable’ status as sovereign head of state plus all of his powers stipulated in the 1899 Imperial Constitution. Higashikuni told SCAP that he would uphold laws against lèse majesté, retain the Peace Preservation Law, and invoke these against anyone seeking to abolish the Emperor System or seeking to alter Japan’s form of government and system of private property. SCAP dissolved Higashikuni’s cabinet, and within a week the U.S. Army ordered the release of over five hundred political prisoners, including Tokuda Kyûichi of the outlawed Communist Party who had been incarcerated for eighteen years. This was too late, however, to save the scholar Miki Kiyoshi and others, including Korean dissidents, who had already died in captivity.1

1 Hidaka Rokurô, Sengo shisōshi o kangaeru (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1980), pp. 1–14; Takemae Eiji, Senryō sengoshi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1992), pp. 94–169.

272

bob tadashi wakabayashi

Thus, over two months after Japan’s putatively unconditional surrender—and only as a direct result of SCAP intervention—did imperial subjects come to enjoy basic human rights as stipulated in the Potsdam Declaration. Only at the behest of an enemy army, then, did imperial subjects become able to broach the issue of Hirohito’s war guilt. As novelist Takami Jun sneered: When you lose a war and foreign armies take over your country, you would expect them to curtail your freedoms; but here they are upholding these. What a humiliating disgrace!2

The Shidehara Kijūrō Cabinet formed on 9 October 1945, in a resolution dated 5 November, reaffirmed its predecessor’s position on Hirohito’s non-responsibility for the war.3 But opinion polls showed that foreign peoples deemed Hirohito a class-A war criminal equivalent to Hitler and Mussolini, and there was deep-seated mistrust and resentment toward him even in Japan. Law professor Yokota Kisaburō of Tokyo University cited the precedent of Germany’s Wilhelm II as a monarchic head of state subpoenaed on war crimes charges after the First World War.4 The president of Tokyo University Nambara Shigeru, the president of the Peers College Abe Yoshishige, several other leading academics, and Ōyama Ikuo, a party politician returned from exile, all urged Hirohito to abdicate on moral grounds. As Nambara wrote: “This is not just my personal opinion; indeed, all teachers in Japan from primary school to university share it.”5 Even Hirohito’s close advisors and relatives—Konoe Fumimaro, Tajima Michiharu, Kido Kōichi, and Princes Mikasa Takahito and Higashikuni Naruhito—counseled that abdication was unavoidable. However, it is imperative to note, that they spoke more from a desire to preserve the imperial line descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu, rather than from the same considerations that motivated critics such as Abe and Nambara.6

Takami Jun, Haisen nikki (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjūsha, 1991), p. 296. Awaya Kentarō, ed., Shiryō nihon gendaishi 2: Haisen chokugo no seiji to shakai 1 (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 1980), pp. 334–343. 4 Yokota Kisaburō, Sensō hanzai ron (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1947), pp. 23–29; also Yokota, Tennōsei (Tokyo: Rōdō Bunkasha, 1949), pp. 268–275. 5 Asahi shimbun, 13 June 1948. 6 Yoshida Yutaka, Shōwa tennō no shūsenshi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1993), pp. 87–90; Takahashi Hiroshi, Shōchō tennō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1987), pp. 51–54; Ōyama Ikuo, “Sensō sekinin to tennō no taii,” in Yoshimoto Takaaki, ed., Sengo nihon shisō taikei 5: Kokka no shisō (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1969), pp. 275–281. 2 3

axes to grind: the hirohito war guilt controversy in japan 273

Fig. 1. Above: The Shōwa Emperor (Hirohito). On the right: Empress Nagako (posthumous name: Empress Kōjun).

274

bob tadashi wakabayashi

Takano Iwasaburō, director of the Ōhara Institute for Research on Social Problems, went so far as to contend that a republic should replace the monarchy—an assertion punishable by death only five months earlier.7 On 21 March 1946, ‘Arai Sakunosuke’ (Katō Shūichi’s pseudonym) argued that the time for talk was over: “By now, we’ve said all that can be said about the Emperor System; we don’t need to ask whether to abolish it any more.”8 Like Takano, Katō went beyond the issue of Hirohito’s personal war guilt, straight to the core of the problem—the emperor system. But, far from being over, the war guilt controversy intensified, reaching a crescendo with Hirohito’s death and Akihito’s accession in 1989. It seemed at first that Hirohito’s critics had won. The writer Kawahara Toshiaki, for example, proclaims ‘boundless love and respect for the emperor,’ but still admits candidly: “Deep in their hearts, all Japanese admit that the emperor is culpable for the war; they just don’t push the issue.”9 Kodama Yoshio agreed. A violent wartime ultranationalist, Kodama was incarcerated but arbitrarily released without trial for class-A war crimes, and later emerged as a backroom fixer for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) with links to the underworld. Yet even he asserted, “Wholly apart from the military cliques, His Majesty bears culpability for the war.”10 “I wanted him to show a sense of responsibility; concretely speaking, that means abdicating.”11 By a strange quirk, Maruyama Masao, a Tokyo University law professor who excoriated ‘emperor state fascists’ like Kodama, also wrote: “Concretely speaking, there is no way for the emperor to take responsibility for the war except by abdicating.”12 However, as previously noted, ‘abdication’ is a tricky concept in the Japanese political context. It derives from a practice of the Fujiwara regents in the Heian period (794–1156), whereby a loyal head minister would force a wayward emperor to retire in favor of a crown prince.

Shinsei, February 1946. For details, see Tanaka Nobumasa, Dokyumento shōwa tennō (Tokyo: Rokufû Shuppan, 1993), vol. 8, pp. 8–20. 8 In the [Tokyo] Daigaku shimbun; see Katō Shūichi, “Tennōsei o ronzu,” in Katō shūichi chosakushū (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1979), vol. 8, p. 93. 9 Kawahara Toshiaki, Tennō hirohito no shōwashi (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjūsha, 1989), p. 454. 10 Kodama Yoshio and Maruyama Kunio, “Tennō to seiji,” in Maruyama Kunio, ed., Tennōkan no sengoshi (Tokyo: Shirakawa Shoin, 1975), p. 309. 11 Kodama Yoshio, “Watakushi no uchi naru tennō,” Seiron, May 1975, p. 85. 12 Maruyama Masao, “Shisō no kotoba,” Shisō, March 1956, reprinted in Senchū to sengo no aida (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1976, pp. 597–602. 7

axes to grind: the hirohito war guilt controversy in japan 275 Jien, a medieval historian, lauded Fujiwara no Motozane’s dethronement of Emperor Yōzei in 885 in favor of his grandfather’s brother Kōkō as one of ‘the Fujiwaras’ three great meritorious deeds.’ Jien’s rationale was: An emperor who is clearly evil must be replaced both for his own good and for that of the world at large; because of this principle, the state of Japan has been happily well-governed ever since that time.13

By deposing individual evil emperors, a head minister generally deflected criticism away from imperial rule and thus helped preserve Japan’s ruling dynasty descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu. That is why Kitabatake Chikafusa and Rai Sanyō—hailed for their ‘imperial loyalism’ before 1945—profusely praised Motozane.14 In other words, by not pressing to abolish the imperial house as an institution, Maruyama unwittingly affirmed and strengthened Japan’s kokutai, or divine national polity, ‘unbroken throughout the ages eternal.’ His call for the ‘abdication’ of one wayward emperor was in tune with remonstrations by Konoe Fumimaro, Tajima Michiharu, Kido Kōichi, Mikasa Takahito and Higashikuni Naruhiko; and it decisively differed from revolutionary demands for ‘abolition’ of the Emperor System made by Takano and Katō. However, it is also true that many Japanese not only absolved Hirohito of war guilt, they lauded his moral leadership under wartime tribulations. Thus the social affairs critic Kase Hideaki proclaims: It was the emperor’s august decision—not any act by the Allies—that ended the war. His august decision saved not only Japan, but also the entire world [from destruction]. It’s too bad that foreigners don’t appreciate this fact.15

Kawauchi Masaomi, of the Japan Motorboat Association in Hiroshima Prefecture, put his own spin on Kase’s assertion. According to Kawauchi, late in the war, Army Minister Sugiyama Hajime related the following episode: 13 Jien, Gukanshō, in Okami Masao and Akamatsu Toshihide, ed., Nihon koten bungaku taikei 86: Gukanshō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1967), p. 348. 14 Kitabatake Chikafusa, Jinnō shōtōki, in Iwasa Tadashi, ed., Nihon koten bungaku taikei 87: Jinnō shōtōki, masukagami (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965), pp. 122–123; Rai Sanyō, Nihon seiki in Uete Michiari, ed., Nihon shisō taikei 49: Rai sanyō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1977), pp. 155–156. 15 Kase Hideaki, Tennōke no tatakai, pp. 231–232.

276

bob tadashi wakabayashi Just when we had obtained uranium and were about to perfect the atomic bomb, His Majesty, for humanitarian reasons, upbraided us and made us scrap plans to produce it, saying, ‘even if Japan were to suffer nuclear attack by allowing other nations to win the race to develop this weapon, we should never be the first to use it.’16

Acrimonious feuds have raged over the nature and extent of Hirohito’s war guilt, especially since his death in 1989, and these contain ideological dimensions inimical to objective scholarship. Historically speaking, in international law in 1945, the very idea that aggressive war is illegal and that state leaders who waged it must be held criminally liable had a tenuous basis. This war guilt debate, then, anachronistically assumes contemporary normative assumptions about how pre-1945 Japan ‘ought to have acted’ under the emperor.17 Even when historians broach this nettlesome issue in a detached fashion, they often find their views twisted for partisan aims. Muramatsu Gō, a professor at Tsukuba University, once claimed: “As [ Edwin] Reischauer wrote in Time magazine, ‘the Shōwa emperor was not just the longest reigning monarch, but also the greatest monarch in history.’ ”18 Or, on the Diet floor in 1988, cabinet minister Okuno Seisuke quoted Reischauer, a former ambassador to Japan, writing that the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge Incident was ‘a chance occurrence.’ Hence, Okuno conveniently inferred, Japan bore no culpability for a war of aggression against China.19 Each camp in the Hirohito war-guilt debate has an axe to grind. In this essay, I shall introduce the main arguments and outline their political agendas. In order to convey a feel for the public opinion in Japan, I shall try as much as possible to cite newspapers, popular periodicals, and paperback books rather than academic works.20

Kawauchi Masaomi, “Tennō to gembaku,” (pamphlet, n.p.) p. 7. On value standards in modern/contemporary history, see “‘Hohitsu’ o meguru ronsō: Ienaga saburō—nagai kazu ōfuku shokan,” in Ritsumeikan bungaku, no. 521 (1991), pp. 929–987. 18 Agawa Hiroyuki, et alii, “Shōwa jidai no shūen,” Chūō kōron, March 1989, p. 56. 19 Okuno Seisuke, “Sore de mo shinnen wa kawaranai,” Shokun!, July 1988, pp. 27–33; Date Tatsumi, “Okuno mondai o rikai suru tame ni,” Shokun!, July 1988, pp. 34–41. 20 A concise introduction to the English-language controversy is Shillony, Ben-Ami, “Review: Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 28:1 (Winter 2002), pp. 141–46. For Japanese scholarly articles, see Akazawa Shirō, “Shōchō tennō no keisei to sensō sekinin,” Rekishi hyōron, no. 315 ( July 1976), pp. 40–54; Ara Kei, “Tokyo saiban: sensō sekinin no genryū,” Rekishi hyōron, no. 408 (April 1984), pp. 2–22; Yoshida Yutaka, “Jūgonen sensōshi kenkyū to sensō sekininn mondai,” Hitotsubashi ronsō, vol. 97, no. 2, (February 1987), pp. 196–215; Yoshida Yutaka, “Nihonjin no jūgonen 16 17

axes to grind: the hirohito war guilt controversy in japan 277 Indictors: Revolutionary Republicanism The Indictors hold Hirohito guilty of, or mainly responsible for, starting and prolonging an imperialist war of aggression that brought death and destruction to Japanese and non-Japanese alike. Like Takano and Katō, their ultimate goal—at least originally—was to end the Emperor System and establish a socialist or republican form of government, either through a violent revolution or through legal political means. According to Muramatsu Gō, “the Communist Party is at the core of this faction, along with persons who never rid themselves of bitterness about the war.”21 One might also include organized labor, Christians, professors, and ‘progressive persons of culture.’ Though not necessarily Communists, their left-wing views are obvious. They portray Hirohito in harshly derogatory terms; e.g., he ‘has a lousy command of Japanese,’22 ‘is like a monkey on a leash,’23 ‘is the master of barnyard animals,’24 or ‘is that low dog who kowtowed before the enemy [MacArthur].’25 The Indictors’ main arguments are as follows: Japan’s pre-1945 Emperor System was an absolute monarchy based on a strange class alliance of feudal landlords and monopoly capitalists. The 1889 Meiji Constitution gave Hirohito supreme power as commander-in-chief of imperial armed forces, and made him ‘head of state’ who ‘held and exercised all sovereign power.’ State Shinto made Japan a theocracy

sensōkan to sensō sekinin mondai,” Rekishi hyōron, no. 460 (August 1988), pp. 2–15; Akazawa Shirō, “Sensō sekininron no tenkai,” Rekishi hyōron, no. 460 (August 1988), pp. 16–25; Utsumi Aiko, “Nihon no sensō sekinin to Ajia,” Rekishi hyōron, no. 460 (August 1988), pp. 40–50; Takizawa Tamio, “Sensō sekinin mondai to rekishi kyōiku,” Rekishi hyōron, no. 460 (August 1988), pp. 51–64; Arai Shin’ichi and Hirata Tetsuo, “Rekishika no sensō sekinin o megutte,” Rekishi hyōron, no. 460 (August 1988), pp. 78–93; Okabe Makio, “Meiji kempō to shōwa tennō,” Rekishi hyōron, no. 474, (October 1989), pp. 10–23; Yoshida Yutaka, “Senryōki ni okeru sensō sekininron,” Hitotsubashi ronsō, vol. 105, no. 2 (February 1991), pp. 121–138; Kobayashi Naoki, “Sengo nihon no shukenron ( jō),” in Kokka gakkai zasshi, vol. 104, no. 9–10, (October 1991), pp. 1–79; Yoshimi Yoshiaki, “Senryōki nihon no minshū ishiki: sensō sekininron o megutte,” Shisō, no. 811 ( January 1992), pp. 73–99. 21 Agawa Hiroyuki, et alii, “Shōwa jidai no shūen,” Chūō kōron, March 1989, p. 56. 22 Gomikawa Jumpei, Shinwa no hōkai (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjūsha, 1991), p. 269. 23 Watanabe Kiyoshi, Watakushi no tennōkan (Tokyo: Henkyōsha, 1981), p. 267. 24 The phrase is Masaki Hiroshi’s. Masaki Hiroshi and Satomi Kishio, “Tennō daironsō,” Nihon shūhō, 15 March 1955, pp. 3–4; Masaki Hiroshi, Chikaki yori 5: teikokushugi no hōkai (Tokyo: Shakaishisō-sha, 1991), pp. 288–309. 25 Watanabe Kiyoshi, Kudakareta kami (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1994), p. 33.

278

bob tadashi wakabayashi

under which he was a personified deity, to whom his subjects owed blind obedience and limitless sacrifice. As commander-in-chief, he approved military operations throughout what leftists call the Fifteen-Year Asia Pacific War (1931–45); this fact alone proves that he bears responsibility for that conflict. Sakai Saburō, Japan’s greatest fighter ace, professed support for the Emperor System; but as to Hirohito’s culpability for the war, he declared, “the answer to this question is so obvious that even to pose it is absurd.”26 “We servicemen of course believe that the emperor bears responsibility. He was our supreme commander. We believed in the truth of the imperial rescript that he promulgated to begin the war; that is why we risked our lives fighting it. It is totally impossible for the person who issued our orders not to bear responsibility for the war” [emphasis added].27 Hirohito’s regime, the Indictors hold, may not have been ‘fascist’ according to strict academic criteria. But like wartime Italy and Germany, the emperor state enjoyed a monopoly over the use of violence in the state. Military and thought police suppressed basic human rights and civil liberties at home, and Japan inflicted hideous atrocities against foreign peoples in a war of naked aggression. Hirohito’s Japan is thus comparable to Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany, for the major affinities outweigh any slight differences.28 As Murakami Hyōe wrote as early as 1956, imperial rescripts, issued as declarations of war, had always enjoined obedience to international law, but Hirohito omitted this statement in 1941, and thus indirectly encouraged imperial armed forces to commit war crimes.29 Article 3 of the Imperial Constitution made Hirohito ‘sacred and inviolable’ in a peculiar Japanese sense that infused him with godly authority. In 1935, right-wing legal scholar Uesugi Shinkichi insisted that “the emperor is a blood descendant of Sun Goddess Amaterasu and rules his state as a personified deity; hence, this Article is totally unlike apparently similar ones in foreign Quoted in Shūkan shinchō, 5 January 1995, p. 48. Quoted in Asahi shimbun, 26 November 1994. 28 For example, see Ienaga Saburō, Taiheiyō sensō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, second edition, 1986), p. 111, and p. 145. 29 Murakami Hyōe, “Tennō no sensō sekinin,” Chūō kōron, June 1956; reprinted in Yoshimoto Takaaki, ed., Sengo nihon shisō taikei 5: kokka no shisō (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1969), pp. 310–313. By 1975, Murakami would assert that reports of the Nanking Atrocity March were ‘delusory’ and ‘largely unsubstantiated,’ and by 1989, he had recanted his earlier indictment of Hirohito’s wartime conduct; see Murakami, “Kaisetsu,” in Tsunoda Fusako, Issai yume ni gozasōrō (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1975), pp. 440–441; and “‘Senchūha’ no tennōkan,” Shokun!, March 1989, pp. 100–109. 26 27

axes to grind: the hirohito war guilt controversy in japan 279 constitutions.”30 Uesugi’s interpretation became binding after the 1935 Emperor Organ Incident and government-sponsored campaign to clarify the kokutai. Popularly elected representatives in the Diet did not formulate imperial state policy, Indictors claim. Rather, the emperor and his closest advisors formulated it in secret through an extralegal three-step process of leading questions: 1) Hirohito queried subordinates (gokamon) in statements with veiled hints; 2) in reports back to him (naisō), they tailored policy proposals to suit the wishes he had thus intimated; and 3) then he granted formal approval to those proposals as if these had originated from his advisors. By conveying his desires during such clandestine interlocutions, Hirohito skirted constitutional checks so as to manage policy formulation.31 Once a policy was fixed in this extralegal manner, imperial conferences and rescripts conferred formal ratification. Imperial conferences, with no basis in law, were not just ritual ceremonies; these were forums through which Hirohito’s sacerdotal authority silenced dissent and forced compliance.32 Imperial rescripts, which did not bear the countersignatures of cabinet ministers as stipulated in the 1889 Imperial Constitution, also lacked any legal basis. But, for example, after Hirohito issued a rescript praising army operations in Manchuria in 1931, no imperial subject might voice opposition to the war or the military. The emperor’s ‘august remarks’ (okotoba), whether written or verbal, had coercive powers transcending law.33 His godly authority, brutally enforced by the military and thought police, was pre-modern and non-constitutional in nature. As such, it contradicted the basic human rights enjoyed in modern civil societies that honor freedom of expression, the rule of law, and democratic processes. In August 1945, Hirohito’s ‘august decision’ silenced fanatic opposition by the military. It forced his government to surrender and disband the armed services, thus ending the longest war in modern Japanese 30 Quoted in Suzuki Masayuki, Kōshitsu seido (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1993), pp. 185–186. 31 Inoue Kiyoshi, Tennō no sensō sekinin (Tokyo: Gendai Hyōronsha, 1975), pp. 225–227; Yoshida Yutaka, “Tennō no sensō sekinin,” in Fujiwara Akira, et al., Tennō no shōwa-shi (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppan, 1984), pp. 45–46. 32 Tanaka Nobumasa, “Shōwa tennō wa rikken kunshu de atta ka,” in Fujiwara Akira, et al. ed., Nihon kindaishi no kyozō to jitsuzō (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 1989), p. 296; Ienaga Saburō, Sensō sekinin, pp. 43–45. 33 Miyaji Masato, “Seijishi ni okeru tennō no kinō,” in Rekishigaku Kenkyūkai, ed., Tennō to tennōsei o kangaeru (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1986), p. 84; Kuroha Kiyotaka, Jūgonen sensōshi josetsu (ge) (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1984), pp. 258–310.

280

bob tadashi wakabayashi

history with minimal disruption. These simple facts refute the opposing view that Hirohito was powerless to resist military leaders who had forced Japan into war against his will. Since he had enough power to end the war in 1945, it is argued, he could have stopped it from the beginning as well. In fact, he did order army staff officers to terminate operations that he deemed reckless at Jehol, Shanhaikuan, Changkufeng, and elsewhere. Thus, he could have exercised his sovereign right of supreme command to rein in the military and halt the slide to war. Hirohito knew of plans for a Pacific war in 1941, for military leaders had briefed him fully. After studying their reports carefully, he approved plans to bomb Pearl Harbor precisely because he felt confident that Japan could achieve its war aims despite a possible American entrance into the conflict.34 According to the Indictors, Hirohito is also culpable of prolonging needless slaughter. When Konoe Fumimaro counseled him to seek a negotiated peace in February 1945, Hirohito refused, saying: “That’s not feasible until we score another victory.” Even after he abandoned hopes for a last ditch defense of Japan and resigned himself to launching peace feelers in June 1945, he twice confirmed the Allies’ consent to ‘preserve the kokutai’ before issuing his ‘august decision’ on 14 August. As sovereign head of state and commander-in-chief, he refused to end the war long after defeat was self-evident. This criminal nonfeasance caused 3.1 million Japanese deaths, including innocent non-combatants.35 The point, Indictors insist, is not to saddle Hirohito with responsibility for losing the war, for that implies he would bear none if Japan had won. Instead, by refusing to use his power to end the war quickly when its outcome was obvious, he showed no concern for the lives and welfare of his subjects; and that constitutes criminal negligence. As one critic snorted, “The emperor calls his people [by a classical metaphor] ‘the grass.’ Yes indeed! He mows them down or tramples them under as he sees fit.”36 In sum, Hirohito was far more concerned with preserving the kokutai, with keeping Amaterasu’s divine line intact, and with defending the Sacred Imperial Treasures at Ise Shrine than he was with protecting his people’s lives and property. His actions were inimical to modern demoFor details, see Inoue Kiyoshi, Tennō no sensō sekinin and Yamada Akira, Shōwa tennō no sensō shidō (Tokyo: Shōwa Shuppan, 1990), passim. 35 Ienaga Saburō, Sensō sekinin, pp. 230–233. 36 Masaki Hiroshi, Chikaki yori 5: Teikokushugi no hōkai, p. 300. 34

axes to grind: the hirohito war guilt controversy in japan 281 cratic principles. Hence, through these actions, he repudiated his own legitimacy. Imperial Japanese subjects had but a fragile tradition of civil rights to begin with. Their freedom of expression was denied, and their access to information about the war was severely curtailed. Education and thought control under the emperor state had turned them into what the activist lawyer Masaki Hiroshi called ‘barnyard animals,’ meek in the face of authority, or else into vicious fighting dogs who attack their master’s enemies without question. Either way, it is held, they stood in stark contrast with Italians and Germans who strove to destroy their wartime polities and execute their leaders.37 Wartime imperial subjects displayed loyalty to the emperor by ‘dying a meaningless dog’s death.’ Only his ‘august decision’ saved them from extinction, and only U.S. intervention gave them the freedom to question his culpability for the war. In conclusion, Indictors hold, the Emperor System was an atavistic feudal relic that impeded the healthy development of Japanese subjects into modern citizens with a revolutionary consciousness. For Cold War strategic reasons, we are told, the Americans demoted Hirohito from being a ‘sovereign’ to a ‘symbol,’ but chose not to prosecute him with other class-A war criminals. According to Japan’s 1947 Constitution, which enshrines the principle of popular sovereignty, his official acts of state are now subject to ‘advice and consent’ of the cabinet, and thus formalistic in theory. This ‘symbolic emperor,’ Indictors say, is bogus. For example, his verbal ‘august remarks’ are supposed to have been merely symbolic; but as one critic decried, these actually “are highly political pronouncements that affirm LDP policy from beginning to end; it’s as if he were a spokesman for the LDP.”38 As Maruyama Masao argued, he “plays his greatest political role by masquerading as a non-political entity.”39 The U.S. chose not to prosecute Hirohito, or even to impair his dignity by calling him as a witness at war crimes trials; but this was because his political use-value was ‘equal to twenty divisions.’ Homma Masaharu (who had received a laudatory imperial rescript) and Yamashita Tomoyuki were generals under Hirohito’s command who were executed for the class-B war crime, not of commission, but of omission; i.e., ‘neglecting to take effective steps to uncover and suppress criminal acts by subordinates.’ As Yokohama City University Ienaga Saburō and Hidaka Rokurō, “Rekishi to sekinin,” Gendai to shisō, December 1977, pp. 13–15; Ienaga Saburō, Sensō sekinin, pp. 349–351. 38 Watanabe Kiyoshi, Watakushi no tennōkan, p. 266. 39 Maruyama Masao, “Sensō sekinin no mōten,” in Senchū to sengo no aida, p. 600. 37

282

bob tadashi wakabayashi

professor Kanda Fumito notes, “if this logic had been applied [consistently], the issue of ultimate culpability for the war—and by extension the emperor’s indictment—could not have been avoided.”40 The Tokyo class-A trials were defective as well because foreigners determined who qualified for indictment. Former naval recruit Watanabe Kiyoshi was one who, in Muramatsu Gō’s words, ‘never rid themselves of bitterness about the war.’ Watanabe noted in November 1945: “We Japanese know best of all what we did; we are best able to identify and arrest the right persons.”41 That never happened. Moreover, in prosecuting Japanese war criminals, there was no need to rely on ‘crimes against peace and humanity’ trumped up by U.S. occupation in post hoc fashion. Tokyo University of Education emeritus professor Ienaga Saburō consistently argued that, apart from the emperor who enjoyed legal immunity under the old Imperial Constitution, all war crimes suspects could have been tried under prewar domestic laws such as ‘malfeasance or gross negligence resulting in death.’ But postwar Japanese governments refused to launch their own trials.42 The immunity granted to Hirohito came under attack with reference to Japan’s treatment of former colonial peoples—Koreans and Taiwanese who volunteered for paramilitary guard duty in prisoner of war (POW) camps and were executed as class-B and class-C criminals, or those who were drafted into Japan’s armed services and were killed or wounded in action. Colonial subjects who committed war crimes at the lowest level on orders from above were punished; but their sovereign, who bore supreme responsibility for starting the war, came away scot-free. These colonials fought to defend Japan and were convicted as Japanese war criminals. But after the occupation ended, Tokyo arbitrarily stripped them of citizenship and thus cut them off from all social assistance programs such as military pensions and medical treatment for wounds. As Keisen Women’s University professor Utsumi Aiko notes: “There is a problem here with how the Japanese people perceive responsibility for the war.”43 Her understatement assumes added meaning when we consider that Kishi Nobusuke, a wartime cabinet minister and class-A Kanda, Shōwa no rekishi 8: Senryō to minshushugi (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1989), p. 210. Watanabe, Kudakareta kami, p. 80. 42 Ienaga Saburō, “Tokyo kyōiku daigaku bungakubu de no saishū kōen: rekishigaku to hōritsugaku no setten,” in Ienaga, Rekishi to sekinin (Tokyo: Chūō Daigaku Shuppanbu, 1979), pp. 63–100. 43 Utsumi, Chōsenjin “kōgun” heishitachi no sensō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991), p. 41; also Utsumi, Chōsenjin B-C kyū sempan no kiroku (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1982), passim. 40 41

axes to grind: the hirohito war guilt controversy in japan 283 war crimes suspect, became a prime minister, or that Ikeda Suguru, a high-ranking official in the thought police, became a Supreme Court judge. After being depurged, such men did very well under the symbolic emperor.44 Thus, Indictors claim, the symbolic Emperor System—born of Cold War opportunism—has furthered interests other than those of the U.S. military. As Murakami Hyōe once noted: The idea that ‘to be depurged is to be absolved’ has corrupted Japan. This can be seen in the [postwar] careers of wartime politicians, zaibatsu leaders, militarists, and bureaucrats.45

Former Lieutenant Onoda Hirō, who emerged from the Philippine jungles to be disillusioned by life in postwar Japan, said this after emigrating to Brazil: The emperor should have discharged his responsibility [for the war]. By feigning innocence, he created the climate of irresponsibility that now reigns supreme in Japan. If, for example, you ask young people or petty officials to correct their wrongdoings, they snap back: ‘Don’t give me flak over such trifles; lots of people higher up get away with much worse.’46

Onoda’s statement eerily reflects the scandals that plague postwar Japanese politics. Finally, Indictors claim, modern democracies observe the principle of legal egalitarianism: all persons are equal before the law. Monarchy and royalty belong to medieval times, and as such, on the scrap heap of history. The transition from monarchy to republic has been almost a universal truth. France was the sole republic among the great powers before the First World War, but Britain was the only one with a monarchy at the end of the Second World War. Even there, the British people had left behind their ‘barnyard animal’ condition by decapitating their king and forming a republic under Cromwell. In contrast, Masaki Hiroshi and Nezu Masashi said, the Japanese remain in that abject condition.47 Thus, to Indictors, Hirohito and the Emperor System are the source of everything evil in modern Japan. The imperial house, ridden with war guilt, is a malignant tumor; the ‘symbolic’ Emperor

Ienaga and Hidaka, “Rekishi to sekinin,” p. 13. Murakami Hyōe, “Tennō no sensō sekinin,” p. 22. 46 “Burajiru no onoda hirō, nihon musekinin o kataru,” Asahi jaanaru, 3 October 1975. 47 Masaki Hiroshi and Satomi Kishio, “Tennō daironsō,” pp. 3–4; Nezu Masashi, Tennō to shōwashi (ge) (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō, 1976), pp. 260 and pp. 350–353. 44 45

284

bob tadashi wakabayashi

System is a ruse that benefited American imperialists and Japanese war criminals. As long as the system remains intact, Japanese will remain arrogant toward Asians and blindly servile toward authority. Until this tumor is excised, peace and democracy will remain unrealized, for imperial subjects will not become citizens in modern civil society. Establishing Hirohito’s war guilt and eliminating the Emperor System are means to achieving these goals. Above, I have outlined the Indictors’ main arguments in this controversy. Below, I shall briefly examine their political agenda. The platform at the Fourth Convention of the Japan Communist Party ( JCP) in early December 1945 was largely a restatement of its Moscow-dictated ‘1932 Thesis’; the first item of which called for ‘overthrowing the Emperor System and establishing a republic.’48 In the 29 January 1946 issue of the JCP organ, Akahata, proletarian writer Nakano Shigeharu disclosed the merits of land reform vis-à-vis Japan’s biggest landlord: If we were to build houses on 15-square tsubo lots where the imperial palace now stands, we would get 22,000 new homes. Assuming five persons per home, a town of 110,000 people would arise. I’d like to see families who lost their homes in air raids resettled there.49

Such a scenario was plausible; at that time, revolution seemed possible. During the 1946 May Day for Food,’ an estimated 250,000 people amassed in front of the imperial palace, and some managed to force their way inside with a red flag. But, as Kyushu University law professor Yokota Kōichi grudgingly admits, “Even back then, most Japanese felt no enmity toward the emperor at all; that, and only that, is what allowed MacArthur to find ‘use-value’ in him.”50 Far from inciting violent revolution, the Indictors could not even persuade the Japanese people to accept their more moderate political plank of clarifying Hirohito’s war guilt as the first step in establishing a republic through peaceful, legal means. Why did they fail? Tōyama Shigeki, a Yokohama City University emeritus professor, points to the JCP’s laziness and lack of direction. He admits that it refused ‘to show

48 49 50

Kanda Fumito, Shōwa no rekishi 8: senryō to minshushugi, p. 102. Nakano shigeharu zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1961), vol. 15, p. 314. Yokota Kōichi, Kempō to tennōsei (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1990), p. 46.

axes to grind: the hirohito war guilt controversy in japan 285 people why this policy would improve political conditions in Japan.’51 Historian Arai Naoyuki found that: Kawasaki [a heavy-industry town] is where extra editions about Crown Prince Akihito’s [1959] wedding sold best. Unions eagerly launched spring offensives for wage hikes and opposition to personnel cuts, but they never criticized [Shōda Michiko’s] Cinderella story. Josei jishin [a mass ladies’ weekly] had the good sense to ignore the new princess in its first issue, but 52 per cent of the run went unsold. So, beginning with the second issue, it loaded up on stories about her and achieved great popularity.52

Such setbacks put the Indictors on the defensive. They were forced to adopt a policy to ‘defend the constitution,’ by which they would prevent the emperor’s twelve official ‘acts of state’ from being expanded through measures based on contrived constitutional interpretation by conservatives. Thus, by the harshest of ironies, Indictors—who should have been bent on destroying the emperor system—‘defended’ the very constitution that ensured its continued existence. Apart from his official acts of state, the emperor’s proliferating non-constitutional ‘public acts’ were another headache for Indictors. Imperial family members, for example, engaged in ‘royal diplomacy’ and uttered ‘august remarks’ that bolstered conservative rule. The government passed legislation making imperial reign titles such as ‘Shōwa’ and ‘Heisei’ the official calendar, and it exploited the ruse of ‘administrative guidance’ to make ‘His Sovereign Majesty’s Reign’ (Kimigayo) Japan’s national anthem in reality, without bothering to pass laws for this purpose until 1999. The 1947 constitution declared that sovereignty resides with the people; so, logically speaking, there can be no reigning ‘Sovereign Majesty.’ Nevertheless, teachers and school children who refused to sing his national anthem were subject to disciplinary action and even criminal charges.53 In October 1961, Fujita Shōzō, a young assistant professor at Hōsei University, heatedly spoke of destroying the Emperor System: We, who have this obsession, must resolve to battle on alone. People in society see us as a joke because we strain away so defiantly in isolation.

51 Ishimoda Shō, et al. ed., Gendai no hakken 4: gendai no tennōsei (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1963), p. 79. 52 Quoted in Sonobe Hiroyuki, “Tennōsei bika ni hantai shi, shisō, ryōshin, shinkyō, no jiyū to minshushugi o mamoru 2–11 shūkai,” Rekishigaku kenkyū, May 1990, p. 39. 53 High School Section Chief in the Ministry of Education Tomioka Kenji, Asahi shimbun, 22 May 1993.

286

bob tadashi wakabayashi But so long as the Emperor System remains, we must endure their derision; for, in the end, our resolve may have great significance.54

What became of Indictors like Fujita? Thirty years later, in the fall of 1991, Akahata editors declared “the JCP takes the view that the Emperor System will be abolished as a matter of course in the future when Japanese society progresses and democracy develops.”55 The lack of a subject and the passive voice ‘will be abolished’ are suggestive. There is no hint of ‘obsession’ or ‘straining.’ Instead, what we find in the 1991 declaration is wishful thinking at best, and hopeless dreaming at worst. Little has changed in the years since. Absolvers: Restoring an Imperial Head of State Absolvers defend Hirohito against charges of war guilt. They represent Japan’s establishment in a broad sense—government bureaucrats, the courts, the LDP and splinter conservative parties, big business, as well as certain influential academics, social critics, and journalists—who aim to re-establish Hirohito as a ‘sovereign monarch’ and ‘head of state.’ They link the Indictors to a so-called ‘reformist camp’—the JCP and other leftist parties—through derogatory invectives: “The JCP is taking a whip to the deceased emperor.”56 “The JCP takes cheap shots at people who sign ledgers praying [for Hirohito’s recovery in 1988–9] or at those who call him our ‘head of state.’ ”57 “Leftover warriors from reformist parties who fuss about ‘culpability for the war’ are a real joke.”58 “They stupidly carp about ‘responsibility for the war.’ ”59 “These ignorant fools say the emperor is culpable for the war.”60 “Reformist parties that harp on this issue should know they will never attract voters with more than a high school education.”61

Quoted in Ishimoda, Gendai no hakken 4: gendai no tennōsei, p. 66. Akahata, 16 September 1991. 56 Watanabe Shōichi, “Tennōsei ni tsuba suru kyōsantō no ‘minshushugi,’ ” Seiron, April 1989, p. 96. 57 Enohara Takeshi, “Tōkon ‘tennōsei ronsō’ o tadasu,” Seiron, December 1988, p. 88. 58 Sugimori Hisahide, “Nihon minzoku no shinshō toshite no tennō,” Chishiki, March 1989, p. 58. 59 Kobori Keiichirō, “Kunō suru kami,” Seiron, March 1989, p. 63. 60 Irie Michimasa, “Tennō ni sensō sekinin nashi,” Chishiki, December 1988, p. 95. 61 Sugimori, “Nihon minzoku no shinshō toshite no tennō,” p. 58. 54 55

axes to grind: the hirohito war guilt controversy in japan 287 At most, Absolvers will admit that Hirohito ‘was not totally blameless’ for the war, but quickly add, “He was in effect no more than a trademark misused by advertisers.”62 First, they object on semantic grounds; i.e., the terms “‘responsibility’ or ‘culpability’ for the war” (sensō sekinin) are fraudulent. Western historians, Absolvers say, always discuss the Nuremberg ‘war crimes’ trials. Why does the ambiguous term ‘war responsibility’ hold sway in Japan?63 Ōhara Yasuo, a Kokugakuin University professor, cites ‘intellectual laziness,’ saying, ‘people hop on hobby horses without defining their terms.’64 But that is not all, Absolvers claim. In postwar academic scholarly circles, where materialist conceptions of history reign supreme, the open-ended term ‘responsibility’ dovetails into ‘criminality.’ Indictors, we are told, purposely conflate legal, moral, personal, political, and institutional ‘responsibility’ or ‘culpability’– both in starting and ending the war—when they ought to be clarifying the distinctions. According to Absolvers, this is no accident: Indictors are slyly instilling mistrust toward their emperor among the people in order to foment revolution. Men such as Masaki Hiroshi and Nezu Masashi deride the Japanese people as ‘barnyard animals,’ liken them to English subjects before 1653, and imply that political maturity is attainable only through regicide. But Hayashi Kentarō, a former President of Tokyo University and Diet member, refutes those assertions: “The British executed their king and set up a republic, but the results were so terrible that they restored the monarchy.”65 Once a self-styled ‘down-and-out Marxist in hiding’ who converted to conservatism after Japan’s defeat,66 Hayashi argued, “The emperor’s presence has thwarted a Red takeover of Japan and thus greatly contributed to world democracy.”67 ‘The emperor’s responsibility’ is also a problematic term for Absolvers. Article 4 in the 1889 Imperial Constitution made him ‘head of state who holds and exercises sovereign power in accordance with the

Ibid. Kobori Keiichirō, “Kinjō tennō ron ( jō),” Seiron, June 1986, pp. 32–40; Hayashi Kentarō, “Sensō sekinin to wa nani ka,” Bungei shunjū, (March, 1989), p. 264. 64 Ohara Yasuo, “Aratamete ‘tennō no sensō sekinin,’ ” Seiron, April 1989, p. 107. 65 In Agawa, et alii, “Shōwa jidai no shūen,” p. 53. 66 Hayashi, Shōwa-shi to watakushi (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjūsha, 1992), pp. 188–190 and 193. 67 Hayashi Kentarō and Muramatsu Gō, “Eimei datta shōwa tennō,” Seiron, March 1989, p. 49. 62 63

288

bob tadashi wakabayashi

provisions of this Constitution.’ Thus, despite nominally possessing supreme authority, Hirohito exercised his ruling powers within strict legal limits. Some Absolvers, such as former Tokyo University professor Itō Takashi, loathe the term ‘Emperor System,’ which smacks of Marxism-Leninism.68 But if used in the value-neutral sense of ‘the political structure peculiar to prewar and wartime Japan headed by the emperor,’ it resembled the British monarchy that ‘reigns but does not rule.’ The Emperor System functioned as a normal parliamentary democracy. But, unfortunately, it had an Achilles Heel—a Prussian-style general staff system that antedated the constitution and facilitated the services’ autonomy. This posed no real problem in the pre-Hirohito Meiji and Taishō eras (1868–1926) while Satsuma and Chōshū oligarchs and their followers held key posts in both the armed services and government. From the late-1920s onward, however, the armed services exploited the emperor’s independent ‘right of supreme command’ so as to destroy parliamentary politics. Hirohito, Absolvers declare, had no choice but to authorize the undeclared Manchurian Incident of September 1931 and China Incident of July 1937, plus other fait accompli plotted by the military. The conclusion of the Axis Pact in September 1940 and attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 were cabinet decisions that Hirohito, under the 1889 constitution, could not alter; so, although desiring peace, he was powerless to curb the military or prevent the slide to war. This impotence sprang from his position as a constitutional monarch—one he took pains to uphold.69 Furthermore, Absolvers insist, the Japanese term ‘tennō’ causes misunderstanding because it is variously mistranslated as ‘emperor,’ ‘god,’ ‘tzar,’ or ‘kaiser.’70 The wartime allies spread propaganda to the effect that Axis leaders were more or less alike; so, the Chinese, for example, mistakenly asserted, “Emperor Hirohito is a criminal both legally and politically, who should be treated on a par with Hitler and Mussolini.” 71 68 Itō Takashi says “I do not like the term.” See Chūō kōron, March 1989. In reviewing Sakamoto Kazuto, Itō hirobumi to meiji kokka keisei, he praises Sakamoto for “having the good sense not to use the term ‘tennōsei.’ ” Asahi shimbun, 16 February 1992. 69 See Watanabe Shōichi, Nihon-shi kara mita nihonjin: shōwa hen (Tokyo: Shōdensha, 1989), passim. 70 On mistranslations, see Muramatsu Gō, “ ‘Idai naru chichi’ no taijō,” Shokun!, March 1989, pp. 155–156; Agawa Hiroyuki, et al., “Shōwa jidai no shūen,” pp. 52–53; and Takeyama Michio, “Tennōsei ni tsuite,” Shinchō, April 1963, p. 176. 71 Editorial in an early postwar issue of I-shih-pao (Chungking). See Yamagiwa Noboru and Nakamura Masanori, ed., Shiryō nihon senryō 1: tennōsei (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 1990), p. 327.

axes to grind: the hirohito war guilt controversy in japan 289 Foreigners, who fail to grasp the unique subtleties of Japanese politics and society, created this fallacy; and Absolvers insist on refuting it, reputedly to thwart Indictors who deviously import and exploit it to advance revolutionary aims. Absolvers will admit that Hirohito’s power and authority were put to evil use, but insist he was never a dictator or a divinity. They might admit that Japan waged a war of aggression in emulation of Caucasian great powers during an age of imperialism, but retort that Japan was never ‘fascist’ or demonic like the Mussolini or Hitler regimes.72 Article 3 of the Imperial Constitution did say that the emperor was ‘sacred and inviolable,’ but this was not a fanatic notion peculiar to Japan; at that time, many European monarchies had constitutions containing similar clauses.73 The foremost authority on prewar constitutional law in Japan, Minobe Tatsukichi, wrote: There is an English saying, ‘the King can do no wrong,’ which should not be taken literally. It only means that he can’t be punished under the law, which is no different from being ‘sacred and inviolable.’74

The Imperial Constitution of 1889 stipulated that ‘state ministers assist the emperor and assume responsibility for him,’ and that ‘all laws, imperial ordinances, and other imperial rescripts related to affairs of state require the countersignatures of ministers’ in order to take force. Hirohito was exempt from responsibility for conducting affairs of state; so the term, ‘emperor’s war guilt’ is a legal oxymoron under domestic Japanese law. Hirohito, say the Absolvers, did voice opinions when state policies or battlefield tactics were formulated; but in the end he had to respect decisions made by the cabinet in affairs of state, and by the general staff in matters pertaining to the supreme command. That was his role as a constitutional monarch—one he never betrayed. There were only two instances when he forced the government to follow his will: the 26 February 1936 Incident and his ‘august decision’ to accept the Potsdam Declaration in August 1945. But those were exceptional 72 For example, Nakamura Kikuo, “Tennōsei fuashizumu ron,” in Yoshimoto Takaaki, ed., Sengo nihon shisō taikei 5: kokka no shisō, pp. 224–249. Kase Hideaki relates experiences in West Germany as follows: “I was totally taken back when they likened Japan to Nazi Germany. I was absolutely shocked and felt that something had to be wrong when they said that we had to apologize the same way as they did for our responsibility for the war.” See “Soto kara mita ‘tennō kyō,’ ” Bungei shunjū, March special issue 1989, p. 405. 73 Kojima Noboru, Tennō to sensō sekinin, p. 112; Hayashi Kentarō, “Sensō sekinin to iu koto,” Bungei shunjū, March special issue 1989, p. 263. 74 Quoted in Suzuki Masayuki, Kōshitsu seido, p. 184.

290

bob tadashi wakabayashi

in that the government was paralyzed under emergency conditions, and thus do not disqualify him from having acted as a constitutional monarch.75 Some Indictors note that Article 55 of the Imperial Constitution required countersignatures by cabinet members before a policy or law could be enacted, but countersignatures by army and navy chiefs of staff were not required before orders could be issued. From this, they infer that the emperor may have been a constitutional monarch in affairs of state, but wielded absolute power over the armed forces owing to his right of supreme command. In other words, only the emperor had the power to curb the army and navy, so his refusal to do this constituted criminal malfeasance. In rebuttal, Absolvers assert that it was a binding custom in the imperial army and navy for orders to be issued only after approval had been obtained from general staff; and, the emperor was bound by this custom. Regardless of Sakai Saburō’s observations, cited earlier, some Absolvers assert that Hirohito was not ‘supreme commander’ despite his formal title, ‘commander-in-chief.’ So, strictly speaking, he did not have the power to ‘command’ in the sense of issuing orders; this explains why field-grade officers ignored his wishes in order to conduct arbitrary operations.76 To sum up thus far, the responsibility for exercising imperial prerogatives under the 1889 Imperial Constitution lay with cabinet ministers who conducted affairs of state, and with army and navy chiefs of staff who discharged the supreme command. Thus, Absolvers say, we cannot speak of the emperor’s war ‘guilt’ under domestic Japanese law; and, a careful look at his personality and actual historical role will refute such a charge anyway. As former prime minister Nakasone Yasuhiro held, “the emperor was a lover of peace; he adopted a negative attitude toward support of the war.”77 As Prime Minister Takeshita Noboru noted in his ‘Deferential Remarks’ after the imperial funeral in 1989:

75 Takeyama Michio, Takeyama michio chosakushū 1: Shōwa no seishinshi (Tokyo: Fukutake Shoten, 1983), pp. 39–40. Hirohito himself makes the same argument. See “Shōwa tennō no dokuhaku hachi jikan,” Bungei shunjū, (December 1990), p. 104. 76 This is the view of Handō Kazutoshi, Kojima Noboru, Itō Takashi, and Miura Shumon. See Handō, et al., “‘Dokuhaku roku’ o tettei kenkyū suru,” Bungei shunjū, ( January 1991), pp. 142–144; Miura Shumon and Yamamoto Shichihei, “‘Bansei ikkei’ no rekishi shinri,” Chūō kōron, March 1989, p. 77. By contrast, Hata Ikuhiko asserts that the emperor was “supreme commander of the army and navy.” See Hata, “ ‘Tennō no sensō sekinin’ o dō miruka,” Seiron, April 1989, p. 122. 77 Asahi shimbun, 9 October 1987.

axes to grind: the hirohito war guilt controversy in japan 291 His Majesty earnestly prayed for world peace and for his people’s happiness, which he strove to achieve everyday. He could not bear to see his people suffer in the war that had broken out contrary to his will. Based on that conviction, he made a heroic decision to end the war without a thought to whatever might befall him.78

These ‘Deferential Remarks’ gained formal affirmation in a 1989 cabinet resolution and thus represent the official position of the Japanese government—a position neither rescinded nor revised to this day. The phrase ‘without a thought to whatever might befall him’ refers not only to the risks that Hirohito assumed by accepting the Potsdam Declaration in August 1945, but also to what occurred at his first meeting with MacArthur on 27 September 1945. MacArthur’s memoirs say that Hirohito was overcome with contrition and went out of his way to request a meeting in order to assume full responsibility for the war. Historians have doubted the reliability of this document on this particular point for years.79 But Hayashi Kentarō chose to forego text criticism and insisted: “MacArthur [ himself ] wrote it, so this must be true. The emperor was ready to lay down not only his throne, but his very life.” Struck by this ‘courageous attitude,’80 Hayashi went on, MacArthur noted Hirohito’s unwavering commitment to pacifism and his staunch opposition to the military from prewar days, and therefore refused to indict the emperor for war crimes. Thus, Hayashi and other Absolvers contend, it was foreknowledge of innocence that explains MacArthur’s decision against prosecuting Hirohito. Since he was never tried under international law, he bears no legal responsibility for the war, for he could not be tried under domestic law. However, to most Absolvers, MacArthur’s decision was immaterial for a wholly different reason—the downright illegitimacy of the Tokyo war crimes trial in any case. Absolvers point to two major problems: all judges and prosecutors were allied personnel, and class-A ‘crimes against peace and humanity’ did not exist at the time that defendants

Asahi shimbun, 7 January 1989. Doubts were first raised in “Makkaasaa senki: kyokō to shinjitsu,” Bungei shunjū, June 1964. For recent studies, see Toyoshita Narahiko, “Tennō wa nani o kattata ka,” Sekai, February 1990, pp. 232–251; Toyoshita Narahiko, “ ‘Kūhaku’ no sengoshi,” Sekai, March 1990, pp. 231–251; Matsuo Takayoshi, “Shōwa tennō-Makkaasaa gensui daiikkai kaiken,” Kyōto daigaku bungakubu kenkyū kiyō, (March 1990), pp. 37–94; and Matsuo Takayoshi, “Shōchō tennōsei no seiritsu ni tsuite no oboegaki,” Shisō, April 1990. 80 Hayashi, “Kyōsantō no tennō hihan o hihan suru,” Bungei shunjū, December 1988, p. 102; Hayashi, “Sensō sekinin to wa nani ka,” p. 264. 78 79

292

bob tadashi wakabayashi

allegedly committed these. Japanese leaders were accused of conspiring to wage a war of aggression beginning in 1928, but there were no laws against such an action that specified penalties for its commission. The July 1945 Potsdam Declaration which, Absolvers claim, Japan accepted as the basis for a conditional surrender, stipulated that war criminals be tried and punished, but this did not mean for ‘crimes against peace and humanity,’ which only came into existence at Nuremberg later on; instead, that stipulation referred to conventional war crimes, such as killing civilians or mistreating POWs. Even if Japan had waged an aggressive war, this was not an outlawed act and could not be subject to criminal proceedings retroactively.81 Such injustices, forced on Japan by vindictive conquerors, violated the Potsdam truce accepted in good faith.82 Thus, Absolvers claim, it is ludicrous to argue that the emperor should have been indicted at trials that were illegal and illegitimate to start with. This reasoning logically produces the view that Hirohito and Japan were saddled with ‘culpability’ simply because they lost the war; had they won, this would be a non-issue. For Absolvers, Hirohito’s ignominious demotion to a ‘symbol’ cries out for rectification. If a ‘malignant tumor’ did exist in the prewar Japanese polity, it was the military that overrode and abused delegated authority, and this defect was none of Hirohito’s fault. Therefore, even if minor changes to the Meiji Constitution had been warranted after 1945, his position as sovereign head of state should not have been altered, as it was in the 1947 constitution. Most such occupation ‘reforms,’ Absolvers add, stemmed from ‘a US Enlightenment view that everything in Japan’s past belonged to the dark ages,’83 and ‘everything in the old order—most of all the emperor—was evil.’84 In fact, all that Japan required was a return to the constitutional monarchy of Taishō Democracy. This, in effect, meant reviving the Shidehara policy of collaborating with U.S. and British economic and trade interests, establishing strict civilian controls over the Self-Defense Forces, which are today’s counterparts to the imperial armed forces, and making full use of positive legacies Kiyose Ichirō, Hiroku: tōkyō saiban (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1986), p. 36. Ibid., pp. 52–58. 83 Hayashi Kentarō, “Kaisetsu,” in Takeyama michio chosakushū 1: shōwa seishinshi, p. 318. In this “Kaisetsu” of 1983, Hayashi had this to say about Takeyama’s Shōwa seishinshi written in 1955: “A vast amount of documents and other sources have appeared in the past [twenty-eight-year] interval, but Takeyama’s study has not lost any value at all. In fact, the correctness of his findings has been confirmed even more.” 84 Takeyama Michio, “Tennōsei ni tsuite,” p. 169. 81 82

axes to grind: the hirohito war guilt controversy in japan 293 bequeathed by the imperial house. Then, a postwar democracy suited to Japanese customs and conditions would have resulted. Instead, the Japanese people have blindly adhered to flawed policies forced on them by the occupation. Based on this historical view of calamitous, if not outright malevolent, foreign meddling, Absolvers in the LDP formulated a plank of constitutional revision. According to it, the emperor’s ‘symbolic’ status currently may be guaranteed as ‘hereditary’ in nature, but that is insufficient; His Majesty must be explicitly restored as Japan’s ‘sovereign monarch’ and ‘head of state’—a position needlessly and unjustifiably stripped away after the war. Hirohito is known to have been disgruntled with his status as a ‘symbol.’ In 1973, he posed a wartime-style ‘leading question to subordinates’ about the Self Defense Forces’ size and war-making capacity, and his ‘august remark’ that these ‘should adopt the good points of the imperial armed forces’ caused a furor. At that point, Hirohito grumbled, ‘only an emperor made of papier mâché’ can be a ‘symbol.’85 Depending on the political climate at successive points in time, this LDP revisionist plank has been asserted along with, or apart from, attempts to revise Article 9. In August 1973, Watanabe Michio, then a member of the hawkish Seirankai (whose members signed oaths in blood) said: The constitution outlaws armed forces because that is what the United States wanted. We must revise Article 9 so that we can have these for defensive purposes, and we should revise the emperor clauses to say that he is our ‘head of state.’ What’s wrong with being a monarchy, anyway?86

This policy of formal revision through rewriting the constitution lost steam by the 1970s.87 Postwar Japanese, by and large, support the present constitution that limits the emperor to having a ‘symbolic’ status and prohibits Japan from waging war—although popular sentiments are now changing on the latter issue. Thus the Absolvers’ scheme to restore Hirohito as a sovereign head of state failed just as badly as the Indictors’ scheme to eliminate him in favor of a president. The LDP

Irie Tametoshi, ed., Irie sukemasa nikki (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1991), vol. 5, p. 27. Shūkan gendai, 2 August 1973, quoted in Ienaga Saburō, Rekishi no naka no kempō (Tokyo: Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai, 1977), p. 738. 87 Watanabe Osamu, Nihonkoku kempō “kaisei” shi (Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha, 1987), pp. 378–382. 85

86

294

bob tadashi wakabayashi

Constitutional Survey Committee reacted nimbly, as early as 1964, saying: Contrary to our aims, this plan [to rewrite the Constitution] will turn people against the emperor, so why force the issue? Both in his actual functions at home and in treatment accorded him by foreign states, the emperor is Japan’s de facto head of state, so there is no need to rewrite those clauses.88

Thus the LDP, which had consistently flaunted revision of the ‘emperor clauses’ as a key party plank, reckoned it wise to abandon ideals for results. It deftly altered the nature and broadened the actual scope of the emperor’s ‘symbolic’ functions without touching the constitution—which is precisely the same tactic it employed to steadily expand the scale and role of the Self Defense Forces. In 1973, Tanaka Kakuei, then prime minister, told the Diet, “the emperor is ‘symbol of the nation’ and represents us in diplomatic relations; so, in a sense he is our ‘head of state.’ ” Since then, the ministry of foreign affairs has adopted this position as its official line.89 Thus the emperor’s status has changed in reality—as opposed to the letter of the law—as a result of contrived constitutional interpretation, the accumulation of fait accompli, and artful policies of administrative guidance. Absolvers have never apologized for this tactical about-face in pursuit of their political goals. Prior to the Akihito’s accession ceremonies in 1989, Hayashi Kentarō claimed in a round table discussion that: Japan’s constitution obviously was translated from English, especially in matters of religion, but outright revision [i.e., rewriting] is impossible immediately, so we must rely on ‘the interpretation argument’ to claim that [Shinto] accession ceremonies are not ‘religious acts’ prohibited by the constitution, but instead are among the emperor’s ‘acts of state.’

Muramatsu Gō replied, “I agree. This affects not only the imperial house, but all of Japanese culture, so we can’t just let the matter slide.”90 In 1989 Hayashi joined another round table talk, this one with Itō Takashi, a renowned expert on modern political history and then a Tokyo University professor. Both were government employees at that

Ibid., p. 381. Yamaguchi Asao, “Kono jiki, tennōsei hihan o tsuyomeru kyōsanto no jijō,” Seiron, December 1988, p. 107. 90 Hayashi Kentarō and Muramatsu Gō, “Eimei datta shōwa tennō,” p. 54. 88 89

axes to grind: the hirohito war guilt controversy in japan 295 time; and as such, they were legally bound by a ‘duty to respect and protect this constitution’ as stipulated in Article 99. Nevertheless, they said: Hayashi: Based on the present constitution, some people say the emperor is not our ‘head of state.’ But a head of state is indispensable; there is no state that lacks one. If our prime minister were head of state, there would be no need to stipulate what the emperor’s acts of state are. But the emperor does have these acts, and his signature is required for laws to take force. Although this is just a formality, it still shows that the emperor occupies a position above the Cabinet. Itô: It’s like saying the Self Defense Forces are not armed forces. In the eyes of foreign nations, these undoubtedly constitute an army, navy, and air force. When [the emperor] goes abroad, he receives canon salutes befitting [a head of state]. So, if we follow common sense as it prevails in the rest of the world, the emperor is actually our head of state. It just doesn’t say so in the constitution.91

Unlike Watanabe Michio, Muramatsu Gō, Hayashi Kentarō, and Itō Takashi did not assert outright rewriting of constitutional clauses related to the emperor and Self Defense Forces. Instead, they affirmed certain realities in Japanese politics and society that clearly contradict the constitution, or as with Shinto accession ceremonies, they argue that construal of the constitution be twisted to accommodate those realities. And, they relied on public apathy to achieve their goal. In the words of a former education minister Fujio Masayuki—who was fired because of foreign opposition to his stand on textbook screening—“the only way that the Yasukuni issue can be resolved is for enough time to pass that no one will care any more.”92 This is already true for the Hirohito war guilt issue. Conclusion Both camps in this debate had hidden political agendas. Indictors sought to establish Hirohito’s war guilt as a rationale to abolish the Emperor System and to set up a republic, either through a violent revolution or a peaceful constitutional change. They failed miserably owing to public indifference, and paradoxically wound up ‘defending the constitution’ that ensures the symbolic Emperor System’s continued 91 92

Agawa Hiroyuki, et al., “Shōwa jidai no shūen,” pp. 60–61. “ ‘Hōgen daijin’ ōi ni hoeru,” Bungei shunjū, October 1986, p. 128.

296

bob tadashi wakabayashi

existence. By contrast, Absolvers strove to clear Hirohito of war guilt charges as the first step in restoring his position as Japan’s sovereign head of state through a formal rewriting of the constitution. They too failed, for attempts to revise its emperor clauses, no less than attempts to rewrite Article 9, met with popular opposition or apathy. But the Absolvers have largely achieved their goals through end-runs and sleights of hand. They have gradually increased the number and scope of the emperor’s official acts of state, invented extralegal ‘public acts’ for him to execute, and exploited extra-legal ploys such as ‘august remarks’ and royal diplomacy to good effect. Having said that, it is inconceivable for today’s Emperor System to re-emerge in its fanatic, militaristic prewar form; hence, fears about the ancien regime reviving absolutism at home and pursuing aggression abroad were unfounded. Nevertheless, forms of nationalism centered on the imperial house remain strong among Absolvers. Below, I shall conclude by examining how this postwar nationalism relates to the Hirohito’s war guilt controversy. An NHK public opinion survey found that “those who maintain positive feelings for the emperor have a proportionally strong sense of Japaneseness and of superiority to foreigners.”93 Sophia University emeritus professor Watanabe Shōichi extolled ‘Hirohito the Great’ in a round table discussion where he mused: “The war began with the emperor’s signature, so logically speaking, we could say that he ought to take responsibility for it by abdicating.” But Watanabe then quipped, “It’s a sign of a great people not to follow such simple rules of logic.”94 This professor fully admitted that Hirohito warranted dethronement in principle, but absolved him and his people of the need to follow it because of their greatness. Absolver-style nationalism manifests itself in two prewar-to-postwar continuities that are repeatedly emphasized: 1) although imperial Japan perished in 1945, its state symbols—the Rising Sun and ‘His Sovereign Majesty’s Reign’—remain as the national flag and national anthem; 2) although demoted from a personified deity to a ‘symbol,’ the emperor occupies the highest post of honor at home and is acknowledged in actuality as ‘head of state’ by foreign governments. The Absolvers do not simply note those continuities as facts; they actively pursue these Quoted in Ueno Hirohisa, “Kokumin ishiki ni miru tennōzō,” Hōgaku seminaa, May 1985, p. 63. 94 Hayashi Kentarō, et alii, “Taitei hirohito no jidai,” Bungei shunjū (March 1985), pp. 106–107. 93

axes to grind: the hirohito war guilt controversy in japan 297 as state goals. This is why they vehemently declare Hirohito’s wartime innocence and why they insist on retaining ‘His Sovereign Majesty’s Reign’ as a national anthem despite its obvious incompatibility with the principle of popular sovereignty as enshrined in the postwar constitution. They wish to preserve the purity of such national symbols as enduring objects of ethnic pride. This impulse is apparent in their views of Japanese history, as displayed during the decades-long Ienaga textbook lawsuit. Kojima Noboru, who was summoned as a witness for the government, offered these observations on Japanese atrocities and aggression during the war: “It is clearly abnormal to cower in shame like an ex-convict, meekly accepting [foreign] view of history.”95 Kojima cites an unnamed German scholar as follows: When a vanquished people sinks into the abyss of servility, their state loses its vitality. In Germany, too, a similar sort of historical negativity once held sway, and still exerts influence. This foreign-inspired view of history may serve as a self-defense mechanism, but it also produces an unbearable sense of self-disgust.96

Itô Takashi also rejects the ‘Tokyo War Crimes View of History’ foisted on Japan by allied conquerors. As he describes it, “ ‘Japanese culture is bad, so the emperor who symbolizes it also is bad.’ We’ve been hearing that refrain ever since the war ended.”97 Or, “turn ‘the emperor is at fault’ on its head, and you get ‘the kokutai is at fault’; that explains all of Japanese history, doesn’t it?” Itō argues, “I’ve never thought about history with a view to ‘fixing blame’ ”; “I see no point in studying the past to discover ‘who was at fault.’ ”98 Itō interprets ‘war guilt’ realistically: “Whenever there is a war, it is presumed that one side is just and the other, evil. There is no way to determine which is just except by waiting to see who wins.”99 Itō rightly exposes arrogant hypocrisy common among American scholars: “War crimes trials were held after the Second World War, and we’ve had a series of wars since then, but what became of the war guilt issue?” “Americans often accuse the emperor of war crimes, so I reply, ‘Well, who was guilty in Korea and Vietnam? Why didn’t you have trials then?’ ”100

95 96 97 98 99 100

Kojima Noboru, Nit-chū sensō (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjūsha, 1989), vol. 5, p. 417. Kojima, Nit-chū sensō, vol. 5, p. 422. Agawa Hiroyuki, et alii, “Shōwa jidai no shūen,” p. 59. Ōe Shinobu and Itō Takashi, “Rekishiteki ‘sekinin’ no shozai,” p. 44, p. 45, and p. 48. Agawa Hiroyuki, et al., “Shōwa jidai no shūen,” p. 59. Ibid.

298

bob tadashi wakabayashi

Itō makes valid points. The 1889 Imperial Constitution ensured Hirohito’s immunity from criminal proceedings, and he was never charged with war crimes under international law, so his innocence is indisputable on strictly legal grounds. Except for a brief period in the 1960s and 1970s, few Americans advocated executing their own heads of state—Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon—for crimes against humanity as part of a conspiracy to wage aggressive war in Indochina. Robert McNamara, who bore top-level responsibility for directing the U.S. war effort, became president of the World Bank after leaving the Pentagon. But the thrust of Itō’s argument is that Americans who ignore their own war crimes had no right to try Hirohito and have no right to go on criticizing the Japanese for past atrocities. He is not saying that Americans and Japanese both should discharge their culpability for war crimes, but rather that the Japanese should emulate Americans by ignoring the pain they inflicted on other peoples. Tokyo University professor Nagao Ryūichi once cited continued German efforts to prosecute Nazi war criminals, and contrasted these with the Japanese attitude: Information on Unit 731 experiments has surfaced recently, and it is believed that men like Eichmann are alive in Japan today. But we Japanese are very tolerant toward persons who recant former beliefs. We’re not so uncouth as to dredge up and expose misdeeds committed in their early twenties, several decades later on.101

101

Nagao Ryūichi, “Kaisetsu,” in Kiyose Ichirō, Hiroku: tōkyō saiban, pp. 278–279.

THE EMPEROR IN THE CONSTITUTIONAL DEBATE Sigal Ben-Rafael Galanti Introduction The topic of Japan’s democratization—a process imposed upon imperial Japan by the United States after its defeat in the Second World War—includes an investigation of the Japanese attitudes toward the imperial institution.1 The imperial institution, as it was constructed in modern imperial Japan (1868–1945), was not a democratic institution. The emperor was defined as the sovereign, the government and the Imperial Diet were responsible to him, and the judicial wing functioned on his behalf. Understanding the Japanese attitudes, especially those of the influential elites, toward the emperor and the imperial institution can be helpful in understanding the Japanese vision concerning the country’s postwar democratic destiny, embodied in the idea of a New Japan. Although democracy was imposed on Japan, it is interesting to find out how the Japanese at the time perceived it: did the ruling elites strive for a liberal democracy, or did they prefer a more conservative regime? One approach to answering this question is to observe the way in which the issue of the Japanese emperor was debated in the Diet. As Ben-Ami Shillony has shown, there existed various ideas concerning the emperor and the imperial institution at the time of Japan’s democratization. Leftists accused the emperor of being a war-criminal, and demanded his resignation and the abolition of the imperial institution. Others were less extreme.2 Stephen Large has pointed out that at the time of Japan’s surrender, Hirohito considered abdicating the throne.3 Despite his contempt for the military, he was anguished by the 1 See for example: Ishida Takeshi, “Sengo no tennōsei”, in Kuno Osamu and Kamishima Jirō, eds., ‘Tennōsei’ ronshū (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō, 1974); Kawahara Toshiaki, Hirohito and His Times: A Japanese Perspective (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1990); Inoue Kiyoshi, Tennō no sensō sekinin (Tokyo: Gendai Hyōronsha, 1975). 2 Ben-Ami Shillony, “Admiring the Imperial Institution, while Expressing Ambivalence towards the Imperial Family” (lecture at The Hebrew University, 15 November, 2006). 3 Stephen S. Large, Emperor Hirohito and Shōwa Japan: A Political Biography (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 132–137.

300

sigal ben-rafael galanti

thought that military officers would be tried for war crimes, while he would remain on the throne. On his first meeting with General MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in occupied Japan, Hirohito assumed responsibility for all political and military decisions taken by Japan in the war, and offered himself up for judgment.4 Large mentions that in 1946 the Emperor’s brother, Prince Takamatsu, urged him to apologize to the gods at Ise Shrine for the complacency of government officials in dealing with the wartime sufferings of the people. Even Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko, Japan’s prime minister during the surrender, admitted that members of his government held the emperor morally responsible for the war and for the defeat and thought that it would be beneficial if he abdicated the throne. Former prime minister Prince Konoe Fumimaro, who served as deputy prime minister in the Higashikuni Cabinet and was in charge of constitutional reform, was most outspoken. He told foreign journalists in October 1945 that it would be good if the emperor retired to Kyoto and entered a Buddhist monastery.5 Konoe committed suicide two months later when the occupation authorities decided to arrest him as a war criminal. Nonetheless, as Large has shown, the emperor was surrounded by important figures who opposed his resignation. One of them was Marquis Kido Kōichi, the lord keeper of the privy seal. Fearing radical republicanism, Kido contended that the emperor should not abdicate the throne. Hatoyama Ichirō, leader of the rightist Liberal Party, who was to be purged in the spring of 1946, announced that ‘the central pillar in the Japanese political and economic structure is His Majesty the Emperor,’ and that ‘we must never lose this pillar because it supports the very political life of the Japanese people.’6 Large cites the example of Nambara Shigeru, a political theorist and the president of Tokyo University, who asserted that the cabinet, rather than the emperor, was responsible for following the military into war. Nevertheless, Nambara claimed that the emperor carried moral responsibility for the war and therefore should resign.7 The Japanese communists included the

Large, Emperor Hirohito, p. 132. Large, Emperor Hirohito, pp. 133–134. Hata Ikuhiko, “Tennō no shinshō”, Bungei shunjū, October 1978, pp. 374–392. 6 Large, Emperor Hirohito, p. 132. 7 Okubo Genji, The Problem of the Emperor System in Postwar Japan (Tokyo: Japan Institute of Pacific Studies, 1948), p. 17; see also Large, Emperor Hirohito, p. 133. 4 5

the emperor in the constitutional debate

301

emperor in their list of war criminals, and demanded the total abolition of the imperial system.8 T.A. Bisson has pointed out the substantial gap between the communists, who strove to abolish the imperial house, and some of the socialists who supported its retention.9 Edwin P. Hoyt has described Japan under the process of democratization as an environment of paradoxes. Many people considered the emperor to be divine, while others understood the impossibility of democratizing a country ruled by a deity. Hoyt mentions the importance of hunger in the immediate postwar years and cites the communist leader Tokuda Kyūichi, who shouted during a rally: “We are starving, how about him?”10 Howard B. Schonberger quotes the legal scholar Matsumoto Jōji, who headed the Constitution Investigation Committee that was appointed by Prime Minister Shidehara Kijūrō in January 1946. The committee’s purpose was to amend the Meiji constitution into a democratic one. Yet in opposition to the emperor’s own postwar pro-democratic approach, Matsumoto’s constitutional proposal held that the emperor should remain ‘supreme and inviolable’ and that the government should remain outside parliamentary control. MacArthur did not accept this document and handed the Japanese government his own version that had to be ratified as Japan’s postwar democratic constitution.11 Following some minor revisions, the government presented the draft to the Diet in the emperor’s name. The constitution draft, as handed down by the government, was debated in the new House of Representatives of the Imperial Diet (which in 1947 became the National Diet) in the summer of 1946. At that time, the House of Representatives, which had been elected in April of that year, was Japan’s first and only fully democratic political institution. The members of the house were given the power to shape and mold the draft. Ray A. Moore and Donald L. Robinson contend that:

Large, Emperor Hirohito, p. 134. T.A. Bisson, Prospects for Democracy in Japan (New-York: Macmillan Publishers, 1949), p. 78. 10 Edwin P. Hoyt, Hirohito: The Emperor and the Man (Westport, Connecticut and London: Praeger Publishers, 1992), pp. 154–160. 11 Howard B. Schonberger, Aftermath of War: Americans and the Remaking of Japan 1945–1952 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989), pp. 56–59. 8 9

302

sigal ben-rafael galanti It’s hard to say that Japan’s democratic constitution was an American imposition—there was a considerable Japanese input in its making and the elected House of Representatives took a major part in this task.12

Given these facts, it is vital to understand how these men, and for the first time also women, who had the power to decide the character of Japan’s new regime, perceived the future role of the emperor and the imperial institution. The present essay focuses on the debates conducted in the House of Representatives during the ninetieth session of the Imperial Diet from June to August 1946, which led to the adoption of the postwar constitution. The Emperor in the Eyes of Lawmakers: The Establishment Views Unlike the spectrum of ideas concerning the emperor and the imperial institution outside the Imperial Diet, in the parliamentary debate the views were less extreme. None of the political geoups in the Diet stated opposition to Hirihoto’s remaining in office, or to the continued existence of the imperial institution. Instead, a consensus developed over a model of a conservative democracy. Except for the communists, all other Diet members, including extreme nationalists and radical socialists, voted in favor of the draft constitution, following a few revisions. The constitutional draft was presented and explained to the House of Representatives by two statesmen, Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru and State Minister Kanamori Tokujirō, who was in charge of constitutional reform. Yoshida’s main point was that the Potsdam Declaration, accepted by Japan, stipulated (Article 10) that “the Japanese Government shall remove all obstacles to the revival and strengthening of democratic tendencies . . . Freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought, as well as respect for fundamental human rifhts shall be established”13 He explained that democracy was for him ‘a government aware of the will of the people at large, besides being in touch with reality,’ and that by becoming a democracy ‘Japan would enhance her reputation in the world . . . and lead to the establishing of world peace. . . .’14

12 Ray A. Moore and Donald L. Robinson, Partners for Democracy—Crafting the New Japanese State Under MacArthur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 13 Yoshida Shigeru, Official Gazette, Proceedings of The National Diet, Extra Issue of the Ninetieth Session of the House of Representatives of the Imperial Diet, 25 June 1946, p. 25. 14 Yoshida Shigeru, Official Gazette, Extra, 24 June 1946, pp. 1–2.

the emperor in the constitutional debate

303

As a conservative, Yoshida aspired to a co-existence between democracy and the imperial institution. In his view ‘the draft constitution provides that the emperor shall perform only certain designated functions with the advice and approval of the cabinet’ which is a legitimate democratic procedure. He added that: “The emperor shall be the symbol of the state and the unity of the people, deriving his position from the sovereign will of the people,” while “the mysticism and unreality that have surrounded the throne [in the past] are [now] completely wiped out.”15 For Yoshida, this contrasted with the Meiji Constitution, in which there existed a permanent “danger that a cabinet or person in power . . . may in the name of the emperor mislead the people and abuse the power of government.”16 He affirmed that “Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration after having assured herself that her national character would be preserved”17—i.e., that the sovereign and the subjects would warrant “a spontaneous outgrowth of the national will.”18 Concerning the specific case of Hirohito, Yoshida rejected the charges relating to his responsibility for the war, mentioning that the allied powers were of the same opinion. He expressed the overwhelming joy and gratitude of Japan’s government and House of Representatives regarding this attitude of the allies.19 Yoshida did not hesitate to blame the militarists and the ultra-nationalists for dragging Japan into war and destroying its nascent parliamentary system. He affirmed that the government was doing everything in its power to bring the war criminals to trial.20 Kanamori Tokujirō expressed a more conservative position.21 Japan, he believed, was mature enough to adopt a new basic law, which among other advantages would be helpful in coping with the severe social and economic problems the country had been encountering since the end of the war. Regarding sovereignty, Kanamori presented a kokutai interpretation of the draft constitution.22 He contended that the Meiji Constitution and the proposed one were ‘not entirely different.’ In the

Yoshida Shigeru, Official Gazette, Extra, 25 June 1946, p. 25. Yoshida Shigeru, Official Gazette, Extra, 25 June 1946, p. 25. 17 Yoshida Shigeru, Official Gazette, Extra, 25 June 1946, p. 5. 18 Yoshida Shigeru, Official Gazette, Extra, 26 June 1946, p. 11. 19 Yoshida Shigeru, Official Gazette, Extra, 25 June 1946, p. 5. 20 Yoshida Shigeru, Official Gazette, Extra, 25 June 1946, p. 25. 21 Kanamori Tokujirō, Official Gazette, Extra, 25 June 1946, pp. 26–27. 22 Kokutai means national polity, and kokutai ideology usually refers to the ultra-patriotic ideology of militaristic Japan. 15 16

304

sigal ben-rafael galanti

new document, he maintained, “sovereignty rests with the entire people including the emperor,” since “most Japanese would not subscribe to the idea of separating the emperor from the people in determining where sovereignty lies.”23 Furthermore, Kanamori clarified that once the democratic constitution was ratified, the crime of lèse majesté would not exist anymore and the people would enjoy freedom of speech.24 However, Justice Minister Kimura Atsutarō explained that until the new constitution was ratified, the old one remained in effect, which meant that the emperor was still head of state, and the criminal code included the lèse majesté provision.25 Among the Diet members of the ruling Liberal Party there was a range of approaches—from relatively progressive to strongly nationalist ones—but all of them ultimately agreed with Yoshida’s stance. Ashida Hitoshi (who joined the Progressive Party some months later) headed the parliamentary Constitutional Amendments Committee, which was charged with modifying the draft constitution in accordance with the representatives’ stances. His position was complicated. In his remarks in the committee and the plenum meetings, Ashida perceived the new constitution as “a great cannon of epochal importance,” which would create “a democratic state breathing the spirit of the new times . . . to reconstruct our fatherland.”26 Relating to the sovereignty issue, he explained that according to the government’s interpretation, the document displayed harmony between the people’s will and the emperor in a way that does not harm Japan’s national character. Sovereignty remained with the ‘whole people,’ including the emperor. He explained that in Europe a dichotomy exists between the monarch and the people and therefore it was unlikely that both could be considered as one entity. In Japan, however, the people and the emperor were one.27 Ashida said that by defining the emperor as a symbol, the constitution meant that when the people looked up to the emperor out of their own will, they would see him as the pillar of their unity.28

23 24 25 26 27 28

Kanamori Tokujirō, Official Gazette, Extra, 25 June 1946, p. 26. Kanamori Tokujirō, Official Gazette, Extra, 25 June 1946, pp. 26–27. Kimura Atsutarō, Official Gazette, Extra, 25 June 1946, pp. 25–26. Ashida Hitoshi, Official Gazette, Extra, 26 August 1946, p. 2. Ashida Hitoshi, Official Gazette, Extra, 26 August 1946, pp. 2–11. Ashida Hitoshi, Official Gazette, Extra, 26 August 1946, pp. 2–11.

the emperor in the constitutional debate

305

The Emperor in the Eyes of Lawmakers: The Nationalists’ Views Kita Reikichi, a right-wing intellectual from the Liberal Party and a member of Ashida’s committee, the younger brother of the thinker and activist Kita Ikki who had been executed in 1937 for assisting the February 26 rebels, expressed a more royalist attitude. At the start of the constitutional deliberations, he opposed the draft constitution, claiming it was too radical for Japan. But in the course of the deliberations, he became more aware of the draft’s advantages. His main idea was that Japan should remain a monarchy in compliance with its national character, i.e., the emperor at its center and in direct relationship with the people. He emphasized that the imperial institution did not oppose democratization or pacifism, especially since the emperor had declared that he was not a deity and that Japan was on its way to becoming a peace-loving nation. To support his idea, Kita presented the example of the constitutional scholar Minobe Tatsukichi, who held that the provisions of the imperial constitution were not faulty, though they had been abused by the military and the ‘privileged classes,’ who ‘interposed themselves between the emperor and the people.’ Such a thing could not repeat itself, since those circles ceased to exist after the war.29 Kita emphasized that both the emperor and the people were victims of the war and did not carry any blame for it. In a time of peace, he contended, a direct relationship between them could again progress toward democracy if the constitution was properly applied.30 He favored a constitutional monarchy on the European model: It’s better to adopt ‘good points’ of other countries, such as getting rid of feudalistic traditions, adopting human rights laws, and even looking at the European example of democratic monarchies, where monarchs still practice various roles.31

All in all, he claimed, New Japan should define the emperor as the head of the people and the symbol of their unity.32 Members of the right wing Progressive Party, that was part of the governing coalition, were concerned over the preservation of the national polity under the new constitution, but they found ways of compromising

29 30 31 32

Kita Kita Kita Kita

Reikichi, Reikichi, Reikichi, Reikichi,

Official Official Official Official

Gazette, Gazette, Gazette, Gazette,

Extra, Extra, Extra, Extra,

26 26 26 26

June June June June

1946, 1946, 1946, 1946,

p. p. p. p.

3. 3. 4. 6.

306

sigal ben-rafael galanti

with it. Hara Fujirō was willing to support the new constitution as long as it preserved the traditional family system which he associated with the imperial system. The two systems, he explained, are ‘God-ordained,’ ‘time-honored’ and ‘the basis of the Japanese culture,’ and they should remain part of any Japanese constitution.33 Yoshida Yasuji explained his support for the new constitution by employing the following metaphor: Japanese society had always been like Mount Fuji, he said, with the emperor at the peak and the people at the foothills. The constitution should therefore indicate that the people and the emperor continue to be parts of the same mountain.34 Referring to other issues, Aoki Taisuke, a hard-line conservative, bluntly opposed the socialist demand to add to the new constitution phrases concerning the past exploitation and destitution of the Japanese people.35 Others were more moderate. Kitaura Keitarō said that the imperial institution was very old and should continue to exist. He reminded his colleagues that formerly, too, “the Emperor’s authority was little more than nominal,” and suggested leaving the prerogative of amnesty in the hands of the emperor who was now to become independent from the political arena.36 Inukai Ken, the son of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi who had been assassinated in the abortive coup d’état of 15 May 1932, like many others, expressed approval of the new constitution, which in his view was compatible with the Potsdam Declaration that demanded the democratization of Japan. But he asked to ensure that “the Japanese people maintain their eternal reverence and love toward their Emperor . . . and the symbol of its unity.”37 Rightists of minor parties voiced similar ideas. Matsubara Kazuhiko of the Shinkō Kurabu expressed concern about the emperor. He declared that “Seventy million people in Japan are extremely distressed in consequence of the defeat,” but he was far more anxious about “the emperor who suffers unending distresses . . . due to the distress of the seventy million.” He claimed that since the war was waged in the name of the emperor, he might be held responsible, while the truth was that the facts were hidden from him when he gave the green light for the war. Matsubara praised the emperor for terminating the ‘atomic war’,

33 34 35 36 37

Hara Fujirō, Official Gazette, Extra, 27 June 1946, pp. 1–3. Yoshida Yasuji, Official Gazette, Extra, 28 June 1946, pp. 1–4. Aoki Taisuke, Official Gazette, Extra, 26 August 1946, pp. 17–18. Kitaura Keitarō, Official Gazette, Extra, 27 June 1946, pp. 5–10. Inukai Ken, Official Gazette, Extra, 26 August 1946, pp. 24–25.

the emperor in the constitutional debate

307

and expressed his gratitude for the allies’ decision to avoid blaming him for war crimes, “a thing that would have moved the Japanese to tears.” As for the imperial institution in New Japan, Matsubara respected the principles of the proposed constitution, according to which the unity of the Japanese people and their emperor remained untouched.38 In the same vein, Ōshima Tazō of the Shinseikai agreed that after its defeat, Japan had to re-emerge. “Nations are all alike; they wish to rise again in a godlike appearance, like god himself.” Adopting a new constitution was vital, he said, though a major problem for democratic regimes was the lack of a ‘unification of thoughts.’ Preserving the imperial institution as a symbol of unity among the Japanese, could be helpful in coping with the democratic challenge.39 The speakers of the right did not perceive Hirohito as guilty of the war. They were willing to support the draft constitution by interpreting the regime prescribed in it as a conservative democracy, in which the people and their symbol emperor constituted one sovereign unit. The Emperor in the Eyes of Lawmakers: The Center Views When it comes to the centrist political forces, it seems that they did not identify with the ‘emperor’s sufferings’ as voiced by the rightists, but they, too, did not hesitate to endorse the draft constitution. Speakers of the Cooperative Democratic Party, which combined nationalistic elements with social democracy, supported the draft but interpreted it mainly in reference to social perspectives. Kita Katsutarō criticized Yoshida for speaking of the New Japan as a democratic peace-loving nation, while failing to address the necessity to construct a social democratic society. He urged to put an end to the ‘suffering from capitalism.’40 Hayashi Heima assured the party’s support for the new constitution. The centrist representatives agreed with most of the major points of the document, such as the change in the emperor’s position, fundamental individual rights, and the abolition of the peerage.41 The only figure of the center who expressed critical views of the new constitution was 88–year-old Ozaki Yukio, a former mayor of

38 39 40 41

Matsubara Kazuhiko, Official Gazette, Extra, 25 June 1946, pp. 1–2. Ōshima Tazō, Official Gazette, Extra, 26 August 1946, p. 29. Kita Katsutarō, Official Gazette, Extra, 24 June 1946, pp. 11–14. Hayashi Heima, Official Gazette, Extra, 26 August 1946, pp. 27–29.

308

sigal ben-rafael galanti

Tokyo (1903–12) and a well-known anti-militarist liberal. In the Diet debates on the constitutional draft, Ozaki questioned the necessity to retain the imperial institution in a democratic regime. He pointed out that monarchies had been abolished in many defeated countries, such as Germany and Austria, suggesting that the same might be good for Japan. Kings without power could cause trouble for democracies, as ‘there is always a fear that clannish despotism and corruption might develop.’ Nevertheless, Ozaki did not rule out the continuation of the imperial institution in the democratic Japan. He contended that the Diet, which represents the people, should be the leading organ, while the executive should be subsidiary to it. ‘The Meiji period,’ he said, was ‘the golden age for the government,’ but its shortcomings were revealed by the fact that most of its leaders, such as Ōkubo, Ōkuma, Itagaki, and Inukai were either killed or persecuted. ‘In Japan,’ he warned, ‘people are very emotional and violent’ and therefore there was a need to install a democratic regime that would guarantee the welfare and the well-being of the people. Ozaki criticized the Meiji government, which overthrew the shogunate but gave the military a leading role in state affairs.42 The Emperor in the Eyes of Lawmakers: The Left-Wing Views On the left side of the political spectrum, one would expect the delegates of the Japan Socialist Party to radically oppose the throne, in the way they did outside the Diet. However, most of the Socialist speakers in the constitutional debate expressed moderate views and accepted the new constitution. The leader of the Japan Socialist Party, Katayama Tetsu, a moderate social-democrat, made two speeches: at the start and at the end of the constitutional deliberations. Katayama requested that the government obtain a full understanding of what democracy means, and asked for a deeper involvement of the public in the democratization process.43 He expressed disappointment over the fact that the draft constitution did not include a social democratic agenda, but expressed hope that it would provide the basis for a better future.44 Katayama agreed that democratization was not incompatible with the retention

42 43 44

Ozaki Yukio, Official Gazette, Extra, 26 August 1946, pp. 34–35. Katayama Tetsu, Official Gazette, Extra, 22–23 June 1946, pp. 3–6. Katayama Tetsu, Official Gazette, Extra, 26 August 1946, pp. 25–27.

the emperor in the constitutional debate

309

of the imperial institution: “While never losing sight of the history of our country and the thought and sentiments of our people, we put the spirit of democratization into the operation of the Constitution.”45 Suzuki Yoshio, another moderate socialist, expressed similar views. He, too, believed that the defeat in war provided Japan with an opportunity to set up a better regime. While supporting the draft, he found it necessary to ask for several amendments that would improve the text. Among his suggestions was a preamble that would explain the historical background in which the constitution was enacted. Suzuki requested stronger emphasis of the idea that the people possess sovereignty, and he demanded to insert a detailed text into the constitution regarding the relations between the sovereign people and the state. As for the emperor, whose role would be reduced to that of a symbol, Suzuki requested that the constitution clearly state that he should endorse the popular will as the ‘supreme authority in the state.’46 Morito Tatsuo, a former Tokyo Imperial University professor of economics who was much respected by the moderate socialists, gave a remarkable speech. He perceived the adoption of the new constitution as a founding act, comparable to “the creation of the state by Emperor Jimmu, the reforms of Taika and the Meiji Restoration.”47 Like his colleagues, he emphasized the importance of the elected representatives in the democratization process. He criticized the fact that the still unelected House of Peers (which would become the elected House of Councilors with the ratification of the new constitution) was to take part in this process. Morito demanded that the constitution display more clearly the issues of human and individual freedoms, as well as social rights. He endorsed the chapters of the draft dealing with the emperor, but insisted that the emperor should be no more than a ‘symbol of the state,’ and by no means should he be considered the ‘head of state.’ Morito emphasized that the emperor would hold ‘the highest, formal and ceremonial position, in accordance with the principle that the emperor reigns but does not rule.’ He referred to Emperor Hirohito personally, expressing his appreciation that following the defeat, and “after having been encumbered with deepest anxieties about the fate of our country . . . His Majesty has been profoundly solicitous for the

45 46 47

Katayama Tetsu, Official Gazette, Extra, 26 August 1946, p. 26. Suzuki Yoshio, Official Gazette, Extra, 27 June 1946, pp. 11–18. Morito Tatsuo, Official Gazette, Extra, 28 June 1946, p. 7.

310

sigal ben-rafael galanti

future of Japan and has been willing to accept the role and status of a symbol.” Now, said Morito, the emperor should face the challenge of contributing to Japan’s democratization.48 Speakers of the more leftist circles of the Japan Socialist Party, such as Katō Kanjū49 and Kikuchi Yōnosuke,50 described in their speeches the ideal regime in terms of a radical social democracy, but avoided any reference to the emperor. None of them accused Hirohito of war crimes, and none of them opposed the continuation of the imperial institution in democratic Japan. The only aspect that mattered in their eyes was the phrasing of a basic law regarding social rights. Hara Hyōnosuke, who spoke on the day of the vote, summed up the Socialists’ position. He assessed that the Constitutional Amendments Committee, in the proposed new text, had addressed 80 percent of the Socialists demands. He stressed that the party would be happier if the new constitution was more social-democratically oriented and had given greater emphasis to the principle of the people’s sovereignty. But he expressed satisfaction that the emperor would no longer be the sovereign.51 He stated that the Socialists did not think that democracy required the abolition of the imperial institution.52 Thus, in the Diet debates, the Socialists, stressing the need of Japan to become a social democracy, accepted the retention of the imperial institution, as a symbol of democratic Japan, and did not blame Hirohito for his role in the war. The only political group in the Diet which rejected the government’s draft was the Japan Communist Party. Yet, despite the party’s official platform, which demanded the abolition of the imperial institution, the Communist delegates in the Diet debates delivered quite moderate speeches—probably in an attempt to find a way of coexistence with the new regime. Tokuda Kyūichi demanded that the food problem—the number one problem of postwar Japan in his eyes—be solved before ratifying a constitution. He expressed his concern that the arrest of war criminals had been delayed, that some of them were still in government, and that many soldiers who had opposed the war were still in prison. Referring to the constitution, he declared that the government should first gain a thorough understanding of the causes of the war, such

48 49 50 51 52

Morito Tatsuo, Official Gazette, Extra, 28 June 1946, p. 10. Katō Kanjū, Official Gazette, Extra, 24 June 1946, pp. 3–6. Kikuchi Yōnosuke, Official Gazette, Extra, 26 August 1946, p. 17. Hara Hyōnosuke, Official Gazette, Extra, 26 August 1946, p. 13. Hara Hyōnosuke, Official Gazette, Extra, 26 August 1946, pp. 12–15.

the emperor in the constitutional debate

311

as the Emperor System, capitalism, imperialism and militarism. The main part of his speech touched on the people’s sovereignty. Tokuda agreed with the draft’s declaration that ‘the sovereignty rests with the people,’ but expressed fear that the government might interpret the term ‘people’ as a unity of the Japanese people and the emperor. ‘The tennō,’ he contended, ‘enjoys special privileges while the oppressed people are ruled,’ which makes it ‘absolutely impossible to place the two at the same rank.’ Nevertheless, unlike his declarations outside the Diet, Tokuda in this speech did not describe Emperor Hirohito as a war criminal and did not rule out the possibility that a symbolic emperor, devoid of any privileges, would continue to function in a democratic Japan.53 Shiga Yoshio, another communist leader, claimed that “the government has not been careful enough to faithfully consult the wishes of the entire Japanese people in drafting the constitution.” But Shiga did not address the topic of the emperor.54 The third communist leader who took part in the deliberations was Nosaka Sanzō, the party’s principal ideologue. Nosaka delivered two speeches. In the first one, he claimed that unlike the European monarchies, Japan could not become a democracy under the Emperor System. This was because the people who led the new regime belonged to the old reactionary elite, and there was always a possibility that sooner or later they might return powerful prerogatives to the emperor. Nosaka claimed that sovereignty should be handed to the people through the elected Diet.55 But he, too, did not rule out the possibility that the Japanese democracy might include the emperor. When Ashida’s committee presented its amendments to the Diet, Nosaka spoke again. He acknowledged that the amended draft constituted progress, despite the traces of feudalism which it still contained. He referred to the articles on human rights and to the preamble which declared that sovereignty rested with the people, and that the emperor was part of the people and a symbol due to the people’s will.56 This was a moderate stance which accepted democratic Japan, reflecting the Communist strategy of being both radicals and partners of the new regime.

53 54 55 56

Tokuda Kyūichi, Official Gazette, Extra, 25 June 1946, pp. 16–25. Shiga Yoshio, Official Gazette, Extra, 26 June 1946, pp. 1–3. Nosaka Sanzō, Official Gazette, Extra, 29 June 1946, p. 13. Nosaka Sanzō, Official Gazette, Extra, 26 August 1946, pp. 18–20.

312

sigal ben-rafael galanti Conclusion

The parliamentary deliberations on Japan’s new constitution in the newly-elected House of Representatives of the Imperial Diet in 1946 revealed various attitudes toward the emperor and the imperial institution. Yet, no political group opposed Emperor Hirohito’s remaining on the throne or the continued existence of the imperial institution in a democratic Japan. The parliamentary debate reflected a wide readiness to accept the new regime as described in the constitutional draft—a parliamentary democracy with the emperor as the nation’s symbol. While the rightists explained that the emperor—inseparable from the people—remained part of the sovereign nation, the leftists accepted the emperor as a national symbol. Even the Communists, opposed to the new constitution, showed a willingness to comply with the new order and to accept the imperial institution if it was subordinate to the people’s will. In the constitutional debates in the Diet, no political group accused the emperor of war crimes and all parties accepted the conservative model of a parliamentary democracy that included the imperial institution. Although outside the Diet, the opposition parties criticized the constitution that the American-led occupation had imposed on Japan, at the critical moment of ratifying the constitution in the Diet, all political parties showed a sense of public and political responsibility. They found a way to compromise their beliefs with the necessity to establish a new democracy on the ruins of defeated Japan. The Japanese lawmakers in 1946 met the challenge of democratization while remaining faithful to their heritages and ideologies. Through this reconciliation, they sought to achieve rehabilitation. At one of its most crucial hours of national self-examination, Japan’s politicians proved that they were able to endorse realistic solutions for Japan’s existential problems, in spite of the deep differences that existed among them.

AKIHITO AND THE PROBLEM OF SUCCESSION Takahashi Hiroshi The Problem of Succession On 6 September 2006 a baby boy, Prince Hisahito, the first son of Prince Akishino, younger brother of Crown Prince Naruhito, was born into the Japanese imperial family. He immediately became third in succession to the imperial throne. Never before had the birth of a child into the imperial family been the cause of so much excitement in Japan and abroad. ‘It’s a boy!’ announced the female newscaster of CNN, her voice brimming with excitement, while the BBC made the first birth of a baby boy into the Japanese royal family in over four decades a top news item of the day.1 It was also the first birth of a boy in the imperial family in the Heisei era, which started in 1989 with the reign of Akihito. I spent the entire day of 6 September 2006 in a TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting Service) studio in Tokyo, commentating as a guest panelist on matters to do with the imperial family. Scenes of the joyous celebrations throughout the nation were streamed through to us on the studio monitors: people putting up colorful carp-shaped flags, traditionally used to mark Boys’ Day, in front of Tokyo’s Mejiro Station, the station that serves Gakushūin University (formerly the Peers School), where Prince Akishino met his wife; and shopkeepers handing out cups of sake to passers-by in the street. The whole nation seemed to be sharing in the festive mood. The Imperial Household Law restricts succession to the imperial throne of Japan to ‘male descendents in the male line’ (dankei danshi )—that is to say, males born to male members of male lineage.2 Unfortunately however, for more than forty years—ever since the birth in 1965 of the father of this latest baby prince—the Japanese imperial As reported by Kyodo News, 6 September 2006. The Imperial Household Law was originally enacted in 1889, at the same time as the Meiji Constitution. It was revised in the wake of defeat in 1945, but no change was made to the stipulation that succession should be limited to male descendents in the male line. 1 2

314

takahashi hiroshi

family had not been blessed with a single male child. To find a solution to this problem, Prime Minster Koizumi Jun’ichirō in December 2004 set up a panel of experts, the kōshitsu tempan ni kansuru yūshikisha kaigi (Advisory Council on Imperial Household Law), to put together recommendations for amendments in the succession law in order to ensure the stability of the imperial throne. The panel submitted its report in November 2005, recommending that imperial succession should take place on the basis of primogeniture, regardless of sex. This would widen the scope of imperial candidates, opening the way to both female emperors and emperors born of female lineage. I served as an expert witness for this council, and my views were reflected in the final recommendations. The question of whether imperial succession should be restricted to males or expanded to females has been a topic of general debate in Japan for well over two years. But with the birth of the first imperial prince in over four decades, the Japanese media went into a frenzy of excitement, producing a mood of celebration that has prevailed ever since. It is as if the problem of ensuring the stability of imperial succession has been resolved. All of a sudden, politicians and the media started advocating caution about the amendment. Generally speaking, in Japan, any issue to do with the imperial family is extremely sensitive, and any mishandling of such issues can cause considerable loss of prestige for the government. Following the birth of Hisahito, Prime Minister Koizumi shelved the planned revision of the Imperial Household Law, even though his party enjoyed an overwhelming majority in the Diet. He bowed to the pressure from right-wing Diet members, who argued that Japan should respect the ‘tradition’ of the imperial family. The cabinet of his successor, Abe Shinzō, formed in September 2006, hardly discussed this matter and if anything, avoided it. Nevertheless, if no revision is made to the Imperial Household Law, the future of the imperial family will continue to remain in jeopardy. All that the recent birth of the imperial prince has done is to increase the number of heirs to the Chrysanthemum Throne by one. Director of the Imperial Household Agency Hakeda Shingo expressed his concern about the precarious situation when he cautioned against the overly festive mood in the country. At a press conference on 12 September 2006, soon after the prince’s birth, he said:

akihito and the problem of succession

Fig. 1. Above: Emperor Akihito. On the right: Empress Michiko.

315

316

takahashi hiroshi I do not think that the problem of imperial succession has gone away. The cabinet should discuss the pros and cons of Imperial Household Law revision. The issue has not yet been resolved.3

Article 12 of the 1947 Imperial Household Law states that if an imperial princess marries a commoner she will lose her status as a member of the imperial family and become a commoner. As women do not possess succession rights to the throne, this article seems logical. But let us imagine what may happen in 2040 if these circumstances remain unchanged. By that time, the thirty-four years old Prince Hisahito will probably be married, after experiencing the same sort of trials and tribulations in trying to find a wife that his uncle Crown Prince Naruhito and his grandfather Emperor Akihito experienced. Princess Aiko, the daughter of Crown Prince Naruhito and Crown Princess Masako, at present the youngest imperial princess, will be thirty-nine years old. Princess Mako, Hisahito’s eldest sister, will be forty-nine years old, while Princess Kako, his second elder sister, will be forty-six years old. By then, these three princesses will probably have married commoners and therefore seceded from the imperial family and ceased to be princesses. The other members of the family will be old or their families will have died out because of the absence of heirs. Adoption will not provide a solution, since Article 9 of the Imperial Household Law does not allow members of the imperial family to adopt children.4 In other words, although until now the debate on imperial succession legislation revision has centered on the issue of succession rules, failure to amend the existing Imperial Household Law will also endanger the existence of the princely families within the imperial family, which under current circumstances are likely to be depleted and die out. Furthermore, the same sort of pressure to produce a male heir that was placed on Crown Princess Masako will be placed on Hisahito’s wife. This kind of pressure is not a recent phenomenon. The first four children of Nagako (now known as Empress Kōjun), the wife of the Shōwa Emperor, were all girls, and as a result she was the subject of malicious gossip that spread throughout the court that her ‘belly could only produce girls.’ Makino Nobuaki, who was then lord keeper of the privy seal, mentions in his diary that the Shōwa Emperor asked Yomiuri shimbun, 15 September 2006. Of the three younger brothers of the Shōwa Emperor, Prince Chichibu and Prince Takamatsu had no children, and their families have therefore died out. The Japanese term for such families is zekke (‘extinct families’). 3 4

akihito and the problem of succession

317

elder statesman Saionji Kinmochi whether the Imperial Household Law could be amended in a way that would allow for adoption to be recognized.5 A glance at previous emperors will show us how eager they were to father male children. Emperor Kammu (r. 781–806), the sovereign in whose reign the capital moved to Heian-kyō (present Kyoto), had twentysix official concubines, who altogether bore him thirty-six children. Emperor Saga (r. 809–823), famous for his calligraphy, had twenty-nine official concubines who collectively bore him fifty children.6 In contrast, the Meiji Emperor was blessed with only one surviving son, Yoshihito, born in 1879, and whose mother was the concubine Yanagihara Naruko; Yoshihito eventually became the Taishō Emperor. Emperor Meiji had six concubines, who bore him fifteen children; however, ten of these children died at a tender age, and only the Taishō Emperor and four daughters reached adulthood. The elder statesman Yamagata Aritomo was concerned about a succession crisis and entreated the Meiji Emperor, through the grand chamberlain, to try his best to father one more son.7 The early death of imperial children was a perennial problem. Emperor Kōkaku (r. 1779–1817), the great-grandfather of the Meiji Emperor, had nineteen children, but only two of them reached adulthood. One of them was Emperor Ninkō (r. 1817–1846), who himself was survived by only three children: two daughters and one son. The latter ascended the throne as Emperor Kōmei (r. 1846–1867). Emperor Kōmei’s first son died at birth, and his second son became the Meiji Emperor. It is worth noting that all of the above mentioned emperors were sons of aristocratic concubines; indeed, over half of the emperors of Japan have been the offspring of these unofficial consorts. It has only been possible, in other words, to preserve imperial succession by male descendants in the male line through recourse to a system of imperial concubinage. But while the Imperial Household Law of 1947 limits succession to the throne to ‘male descendents of the male line,’ the Makino nobuaki nikki (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1990), entry for 26 March 1931. Ōya Sōichi, Jitsuroku tennō-ki (Tokyo: Kadokawa Bunko, 1975), p. 14. 7 Meiji tennō-ki (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1973), Vol. 9, entry for 28 April 1896. When peace returned after the Sino-Japanese War, the elder statesmen became worried that the emperor had only one son, Yoshihito, who was sickly. They therefore urged him to take a new concubine who would be able to bear him one more son, but the emperor did not listen to their entreaties. 5 6

318

takahashi hiroshi

modern state requires that marriage be strictly monogamous. How are we realistically going to be able to ensure that every crown princess in the future gives birth to a boy? Today, the number of potential candidates to the throne is seven: Crown Prince Naruhito, his younger brother Prince Akishino, Akishino’s new-born son Prince Hisahito, the emperor’s old uncle Prince Mikasa, and Mikasa’s two sons Prince Tomohito and Prince Katsura. If succession rights were extended to daughters, the number of potential heirs would immediately rise to fifteen. Another reason that Prime Minister Koizumi set up the advisory council was the question of teiōgaku, or the imperial training of the future emperor. The role of emperor in Japan requires a particular kind of education, which should begin at an early age. The Meiji Emperor started his training at the age of four. Special rooms were set up in the precincts of the Kyoto Palace where he studied with selected schoolmates such as Iwakura Tomosada (the son of Iwakura Tomomi). 8 The Taishō Emperor likewise started at age four. On the recommendation of Sanjō Sanetomi, a kindergarten was set up in the precincts of the Akasaka Detached Palace, and Viscount Kadenokōji Sukeyori provided the little crown prince with training in the ‘three disciplines,’ the moral, intellectual and physical fields.9 Hirohito was entrusted to the care of a respected ex-naval officer, Count Kawamura Sumiyoshi, and his wife, a mere seventy days after his birth, and was brought up according to a five-point educational program designed to “promote his physical and mental health, and not distort his true character.”10 At the age of four, the boy was moved to the residence of imperial grandsons, where he was looked after by specially appointed officials. The current emperor, Akihito, was looked after from the age of three by his tutor Yamada Yasuhiko. The ‘symbol emperor’ (shōchō tennō) is like the center of a circle, that is at the same distance from any point on it. He should be trained to eschew any personal preference for one side or another and bear the entire nation in mind. There is a well-known anecdote that one day in the rainy season a court official suggested to Hirohito that since the skies had cleared he might take some exercise, to which the emperor replied, as if in reprimand: “There are farmers in the Tōhoku region Kōshitu kōzoku seikan meiji-hen (Tokyo: Kōshitsu Kōzoku Seikan Kankōkai, 1933), chapter on Emperor Meiji, p. 2. 9 Meiji tennō-ki, Vol. 6, entry for 28 March 1885. 10 Kanroji Osanaga, Sebiro no tennō (Tokyo: Tōzai Bummeisha, 1957), p. 18. 8

akihito and the problem of succession

319

who are longing for rain.” The story illustrates how the emperor, rather than caring about himself, thought about the entire nation. This kind of disposition is not something learned from ordinary schooling, and needs to be implanted from a tender age. In just a few years time, Prince Hisahito will start to receive this kind of imperial training. Under current Imperial Household Law, he is the only imperial family member who needs to receive this education. But what about the recommendation of the advisory council that women be allowed to succeed to the throne? What will happen if it is actually put into realization? In a NHK opinion poll conducted shortly after the birth of Prince Hisahito, 56 percent of the respondents replied that they still thought that a revision of the Imperial Household Law was necessary, and that it ought to be acceptable for a woman, even of female lineage, to ascend the throne.11 Is it right, therefore, to ignore the issue of the education of Princess Aiko, the daughter of Crown Prince Naruhito and Princess Masako? The question of whether succession to the throne should continue through male lineage only, or be broadened to allow for female lineage, is still an open one in the minds of the Japanese people. Japanese politicians must bring the matter of the Imperial Household Law revision, which has generated so much discussion throughout the country, to a suitable conclusion. So long as there is a disparity between the constitution, which states that ‘The Imperial Throne shall be dynastic,’ and the Imperial Household Law, which fails to ensure dynastic heirs, the imperial institution will continue to remain unstable and in jeopardy. The Case of the Collateral Families Conservative and nationalist groups have claimed that the advisory council’s recommendation, made after a short period of deliberations, to replace the traditional system of male emperors in a male line with a new system which would also allow female emperors in a female line harms the dignity of the imperial institution. The solution they offer for the problem of imperial succession is the restoration of the eleven

The NHK survey was conducted on 8, 9 and 10 September 2006. The Mainichi shimbun conducted its survey on 26 and 27 September. Sixty-three percent of respondents replied that ‘a revision of the Imperial Household Law is necessary’; 65 percent replied that ‘empresses should be allowed in Japan.’ 11

320

takahashi hiroshi

collateral houses (miyake), which were headed by imperial princes and which they claim were forcefully disbanded during the allied occupation. In November 1945, shortly after the end of the war, GHQ froze imperial family assets, which prevented the imperial household from providing financial support to the collateral houses (a blow from which these houses did not recover), and was one reason for their demise. The allied occupation regarded the imperial family as a sort of zaibatsu, or financial concern, and the huge property tax that it consequently imposed on the family practically eradicated its 3.7 billion yen worth of assets. The occupation authorities also took other measures to suppress what they considered the harmful vestiges of the Emperor System. These included the Shinto Directive, which outlawed state sponsorship of Shinto, and the abolition of the gengō system of counting years by imperial reigns. The greatest reform was, of course, the change of the emperor’s status from ‘sovereign’ to ‘the symbol of the nation and the unity of the people.’ But there were also people on the Japanese side who, eager to preserve kokutai, or the imperial system, were ready to make concessions. The trump card of such people was the collateral houses. Former Imperial Household Vice Minister Katō Susumu once admitted to me that he and other palace officials had actually taken the initiative in broaching the idea of abolishing the collateral houses. “We regarded this,” he said, “as restoring an old tree to life by lopping off its redundant branches and leaves.” He told me that former Prime Minister Suzuki Kantarō had opposed the idea, claiming that of the emperor’s three brothers, only Prince Mikasa had any offspring, and that therefore there may be a need for the collateral houses in the future. “But we dismissed these concerns as being far-fetched and took the decision in full knowledge of what we were doing.” Kakei Motohiko, who was at that time director of the general affairs bureau in the imperial household ministry, likewise wrote in 1987: “We pre-empted the other side by proposing that all members of the imperial family, except for first-degree relatives, become commoners.”12 This reform was one of many that took place after the war, but the officials of the imperial household would never have dared to propose what amounted to an eradication of members of the imperial family,

12 Kakei Motohiko, Kinjō heika to hahamiya teimei kōgō (Tokyo: Kyōbunsha, 1987), p. 239.

akihito and the problem of succession

321

had such a move not been considered before. In fact, this idea had already been entertained in the Meiji period, and it had simply been waiting for an opportunity to be realized. The eleven collateral families were descended from the Fushimi house, founded in the mid-fourteenth century by Prince Yoshihito, the first son of Emperor Sukō (r. 1348–1351), the third emperor of the Northern Court, during the period of the Southern and Northern Courts.13 The purpose of the Fushimi house was to provide successors to the throne in the event that the imperial family failed to produce an heir—and indeed, Emperor Go-Hanazono hailed from the Fushimi house in the fifteenth century. Later, some families branched off from the Fushimi house and formed separate collateral houses (miyake). These were the Katsura house, which originated with Prince Tomohito, the grandson of Emperor Ōgimachi (r. 1557–1586) who constructed the Katsura Detached Palace in Kyoto; the Arisugawa house, founded in 1625; and the Kan’in house, founded in 1710 on the initiative of Arai Hakuseki, chief advisor to the shogun, out of concern for the scarcity of successors to the throne. Emperor Kōkaku (r. 1779–1817), the originator of the current branch of the imperial family, came from the Kan’in House. The heads of all four of these collateral houses carried the title of imperial prince (shinnō) and could inherit the throne when needed. In the bakumatsu period, that is the fifteen years before the Meiji Restoration, these four princely houses, in cooperation with Shimazu Hisamitsu, the daimyō of the Satsuma domain, and the last shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu (Keiki), established two additional collateral houses to promote their cause of kōbu gattai—the strengthening of Japan by a united leadership of the imperial court and the shogunate. These new families, the Nakagawa (later renamed Kaya) and the Yamashina, were headed by sons of Prince Kuniie, the sixteenth head of the Fushimi House. These two sons had in fact already retired to monzeki temples

13 The name of this period in Japanese history—Nambokuchō, or the era of ‘the Southern and Northern Courts’—derives from the fact that there were two courts at that time. Emperor Go-Daigō attempted to overthrow the Kamakura bakufu and restore power to the imperial court in what later became known as the Kemmu Restoration. However, his new government was short-lived, lasting only about two and a half years. In the face of opposition from Ashikaga Takauji, Go-Daigō fled Kyoto for the mountains of Yoshino (present Nara Prefecture) and set up the Southern Court. Meanwhile, in Kyoto, a Northern Court, headed by Emperor Kōmyō (r. 1336–1348) was established. The rival courts continued for sixty years until the dissolution of the Southern Court in 1392.

322

takahashi hiroshi

(temples to which certain princes had to retire to limit the size of the imperial family), but they were restored to their princely status in order to ‘serve the cause of the imperial family.’ In subsequent years, other sons of Prince Kuniie were made heads of new collateral families, while some existing collateral houses, like Katsura, became extinct because of a lack of heirs.”14 The proliferation of the imperial family required considerable financial expenses, and the Meiji government was naturally interested in setting limits on the numbers. In 1870, it devised a plan that would limit membership in the imperial family to the heads of the collateral houses. The other members of those houses, after one generation, would receive a family name and join the aristocracy. However, this plan was not carried out due to opposition from the family members. The Imperial Household Law of 1889 institutionalized permanent imperial family membership.15 In the following years, five more collateral houses, such as the Higashikuni House and the Takeda House, were established to provide princely husbands for the daughters of Emperor Meiji. At the end of the Pacific War, eleven collateral houses were in existence: Higashifushimi, Fushimi, Yamashina, Kaya, Kuni, Nashimoto, Asaka, Higashikuni, Kita Shirakawa, Takeda, and Kan’in. In 1898, Itō Hirobumi noted in his diary that in order to assure the future of the imperial family, it was urgent, for budgetary reasons, to restrict its size.16 Nine years later, in 1907, the Supplementary Rules to

Takaku Reinosuke, Kindai kōzoku no ken’i shūdanka katei (Kyoto: Dōshisha Daigaku, Shakai Kagaku, 1981), vols. 27 and 28. See also Takaku Reinosuke, Tennō no ie (Kyoto: Dōshisha Daigaku Jimbun Kagaku Kenkyūjo, 1981). 15 Article 30 of the Meiji Imperial Household Law stated that membership in the imperial family shall include the grand empress dowager; the empress dowager; the empress; the crown prince and his wife, the elder son of the crown prince and his wife, the imperial princes (shinnō) and their wives, the imperial princesses (naishinnō), the princes (ō) and their wives, and the princesses ( joō). Article 31 specified that male offspring of the emperor and their offspring after them, for four generations, shall be referred to as imperial princes (shinnō), while the female offspring for a similar four generations shall be referred to as imperial princesses (naishinnō). From the fifth generation on, males shall be referred to as princes (ō) and females as princesses ( joō). Together these two articles indicate that once born into the imperial family, a person would be a member in perpetuity. The postwar imperial household law stipulates that first- and second-generation descendants of the emperor shall be referred to as imperial princes (shinnō) or imperial princesses (naishinnō), while descendants from the third generation onwards shall be designated prince (ō) or princess ( joō)—and this too implies a system of imperial membership in perpetuity. This system is also included in the proposals of the Advisory Council on the Imperial Household Law. 16 Itō hirobumi den (Tokyo: Tōseisha, 1940), vol. 1, p. 336. 14

akihito and the problem of succession

323

the Imperial Household Law (kōshitsu tempan zōho) were enacted. Article 1 of these rules stated that after the fifth generation, only the elder sons of princes (ō) could keep their princely status. The younger sons, when they reached the age of twenty, would leave the imperial family, receive a family name and join the aristocracy as counts or marquises. Between 1910 and 1943, this rule was applied to thirteen individuals. One of them was Yamashina Yoshimaro, the second son of Prince Yamashina Kikumaro. He founded the Yamashina Institute of Ornithology, where Princess Sayako, daughter of the present emperor, later worked until her marriage in 2005.17 Another of these people was Tsukuba Fujimaro, the third son of Prince Yamashina Kikumaro, who became chief priest of the Yasukuni Shrine after the war. Article 6 of the Supplementary Rules stipulated that if a member of the imperial family left the family, he could not be reinstated as an imperial family member. This was in keeping with the long-established rule that, in order to preserve the dignity of the imperial family, any member of the family who had once been demoted to the status of subject could not return to the status of imperial prince, eligible to succeed the throne.18 Such a return has taken place only once, more than a thousand years ago, when Prince Sadayoshi, who had been stripped of his imperial status for three years, ascended the throne in 887 as Emperor Uda. One reason behind the perceived redundancy of the collateral houses in the twentieth century was the fact that the Taishō Emperor had four healthy sons. The eldest, Hirohito, was born in 1901; Prince Chichibu was born in 1902; Prince Takamatsu was born in 1905, and Prince Mikasa, was born in 1915. In 1920, the Provisions on the Demotion of Imperial Family Members (kōzoku no kōka ni kansuru shikō junsoku) were promulgated. These provisions stated that princely houses could exist for only eight generations, and after that they had to secede from the imperial family. This could mean the end of the princely status of the Fushimi family. Since Prince Kuniie, father of the modern collateral houses, was the sixteenth-generation head of his family at the time of the Meiji Restoration, all the collateral houses that stemmed from him

17 Princess Nori (Sayako), the daughter of Emperor Akihito, worked in that institute. On 5 November 2005, upon marrying the commoner Kuroda Yoshiki, she had to renounce her imperial family status and take the name Kuroda Sayako. 18 Kōshitu tempan zōho gikai, included in the documents distributed to the Advisory Council on Imperial Household Law.

324

takahashi hiroshi

had to be eliminated. To prevent that, an extraordinary measure was adopted, according to which Prince Kuniie’s son, the seventeenth head of the Fushimi House, was proclaimed as the ‘fifth’ generation. This allowed Kuniie’s grandson, great-grandson, and great-great-grandson (the ‘sixth,’ ‘seventh’ and ‘eighth’ generations) to retain the title of prince (ō). The ‘ninth’ generation, however, would have to leave the imperial family.19 At the end of the Pacific War, the heads of all the existing collateral houses were in the ‘eighth,’ and therefore, last, generation. This meant that even without the intervention of the allied occupation, their heirs would, within a short time, have lost their princely status, and only the families of Hirohito’s three brothers would have remained as new collateral houses. When Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko was appointed prime minister in August 1945 to carry out the surrender, he declared that he was ready to give up his imperial status in order to assume responsibility for the defeat. He made this offer because he was well aware of the fact that his family would soon be stripped of imperial family status. Thus, the abolition of the eleven collateral houses was not a unilateral intervention by the allied occupation. Hirohito’s chamberlain (later grand chamberlain) Irie Sukemasa, a scion of a noble family, an uncle of Princess Yuriko (the wife of Hirohito’s brother Prince Mikasa), and son of Irie Tamemori, who had served as Hirohito’s chamberlain when he was crown prince, wrote in his diary in 1947: It has been decided that as of next spring, only the three families of the emperor’s brothers will remain in the imperial family, and all the other princely families will become commoners. It is sad that such a thing is going to happen, but it cannot be avoided. These families have lived too comfortably until now. Hardly anyone in them has enhanced the name of the imperial court, while some of them have actually tarnished it. So the present outcome is quite fair.20

Empress Dowager Sadako, who had borne the four imperial princes and made the collateral houses redundant, was sympathetic to the idea of their dissolution. As Katō Susumu later revealed to me, she told him at that time:

19 20

Ibid. Irie sukemasa nikki (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1990), Vol. 2, p. 100.

akihito and the problem of succession

325

This [the enforced secession of the collateral houses] is fine. Those people have been all much too fortunate up till now. All it will mean is that things will now return to the way they were before the Meiji Restoration.

One can detect in her words a sense of satisfaction. This woman, who was married to the sickly and unfortunate Taishō Emperor, could now rest assured that her offspring, rather than some far-related imperial relatives, would succeed the throne. Irie was quite correct in saying that certain members of the collateral families had tarnished the name of the imperial family. Prince Kitashirakawa Naruhisa was killed in 1927 in a car crash while studying in France, and his wife and Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, who were with him in his car, were seriously injured. In 1920, Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko (the later prime minister) left his wife Toshiko, the daughter of Emperor Meiji, at home and went to study in Paris for seven years, ignoring an order to return home on the death of the Taishō Emperor. He finally returned in 1927 when threatened with expulsion from the imperial family if he did not do so. The voluminous diary of Kuratomi Yūzaburō, president of the Privy Council from 1926 to 1934, now stored in the National Diet Library, includes little-known stories of misdemeanors by imperial family members, such as that about Prince Kuni Asaakira, the brother of Hirohito’s wife Nagako, who canceled an engagement for marriage, and at another time impregnated a lady-in-waiting.21 Before the war, such incidents were kept secret from the general public, but as we can see from the remarks of Empress Sadako and Irie, they were known in palace circles and were considered thoroughly shameful. Regardless of such misdemeanors, the collateral families were only remotely related to the imperial family: they stemmed from the Fushimi house, which had branched off from the main imperial line more than six hundred years ago. To have these houses reinstated into the imperial family now would require a considerable leap of faith on the part of the Japanese public. In the past, there were cases of distant princes succeeding the throne. Emperor Keitai, the man who succeeded Emperor Buretsu in 507, was said to have belonged to a family that had branched off from the imperial house some two hundred years earlier. But the more than six hundred-year period that has elapsed since the Fushimi house was established is three times longer than this.

21 Itō Yukio, Shōwa tennō to rikken kunshusei no hōkai (Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 2005), p. 127.

326

takahashi hiroshi

I strongly doubt that the Japanese people would accept the reinstatement of the collateral families whose relationship with the imperial family is so far removed. The Question of a Female Monarchy The people who drafted the Imperial Household Law of 1947 had no intention of changing the principle of a male monarchy. One of them, Takao Ryōichi, an imperial household ministry official who participated in that drafting, later admitted: “It is often argued that we were determined from the beginning to uphold the tradition of male heirs in a male line. I can confirm that this claim is correct.”22 State Minister Shidehara Kijūrō declared in December 1946 in the Upper House that considering the fact that there were three young boys in the imperial family—Crown Prince Akihito (the present emperor), his younger brother Prince Hitachi, and their cousin Tomohito (the eldest son of Prince Mikasa)—who could inherit the throne, “there is no pressing need to establish a female monarchy.”23 Kanamori Tokujirō, the state minister in charge of constitutional reform, was even more forthright: The question of whether women should be allowed to succeed the throne has been raised, but there are still many doubts surrounding this issue. I firmly believe that the Japanese people prefer a male monarchy.24

From these remarks it is clear that from the beginning there was no intention to stray from the Meiji principle of a male monarchy. A change did take place, however, on the constitutional level. Whereas Article 2 of the Meiji Constitution stated: “The Imperial Throne shall be succeeded to by Imperial male descendants, according to the provisions of the Imperial House Law,” the same article in the postwar constitution states: “The Imperial Throne shall be dynastic and succeeded to in accordance with the Imperial House Law passed by the Diet.” The new constitution thus does not rule out female emperors. However, Article 1 of the new Imperial Household Law 22 Minutes of the third committee meeting of the Constitution Research Council, 20 May 1959. 23 First reading of the draft of the Imperial Household Law at the House of Peers plenary session, 16 December 1946. 24 Ibid.

akihito and the problem of succession

327

of 1947 clearly states: “The Imperial throne shall be succeeded to by male descendants in the male line belonging to the Imperial lineage.” When State Minister Kanamori was questioned on this matter in the House of Peers in 1946, he admitted that the law might be changed at some time. He said: “As for the question of whether women may be allowed to succeed the throne, you may reconsider it in the future.”25 It seems that the time has now arrived to do so. As for the claim that we should respect and uphold tradition, let us remember that up until the end of the Tokugawa period, all matters concerning the imperial palace, including succession, were decided by a small group of courtiers and powerful people in government. Certain emperors had maintained some relations with the populace. For example, the abdicated Empress Go-Sakuramachi during the Temmei Famine of the eighteenth century is said to have donated apples to tens of thousands of hungry Kyoto residents who had gathered around the palace to complain of their plight.26 But in general, the people were hardly aware of the emperor. They regarded the daimyō, the lords of the domains, or the shogun as their rulers. It was only after the Meiji Restoration, when the idea of bansei ikkei (‘a line of emperors unbroken for ages eternal’) began to be propagated and a nation-state around the emperor was constructed, that the general populace became aware of the emperor. The continuity of the imperial family is now in grave danger. Rather than caring about traditional practices, Japan should devise new succession rules that would fit the modern symbol emperor. Let us not forget that the 1959 marriage of Akihito already broke a longstanding tradition. Previously, imperial consorts could be taken only from the imperial family, from the Five Regent Houses ( go-sekke) such as the Konoe and Kujō, or from certain other noble families such as the Saionji or Koga. This custom was codified in Article 39 of the Meiji Imperial Household Law.27 Nevertheless, Akihito dared to flout that tradition when he married Shōda Michiko, who was not related by either blood or marriage to the imperial house. As Japan’s first ‘commoner crown

Ibid. Fujita Satoru, Bakumatsu no tennō (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1994), p. 60. Empress GoSakuramachi was the last of the eight female emperors of Japan. 27 Article 39 of the Meiji Imperial Household Law stated: “Marriages of members of the Imperial Family shall be restricted to the circle of the Family, or to certain noble families specially approved by Imperial Order.” 25 26

328

takahashi hiroshi

princess,’ Michiko suffered insidious harassment from certain members of the imperial family.28 But in retrospect, there can be no doubt as to the appropriateness of Akihito’s decision. In any case, what we know as ‘traditions’ are sometimes discontinued and later revived. For example, the daijōsai, the most important enthronement ceremony, was interrupted for a period of 220 years in 1466, as a result of the ceaseless civil wars of those years.29 At around the same time, the rebuilding of the Ise Shrine, which now takes place every twenty years, was likewise suspended for about 120 years.30 The fact that these two traditions were later revived and survive even today proves that the Japanese people support the institution of the emperor as a symbol of the nation and regard these traditions as befitting that institution. In the same way, traditions can also be entirely invented. Counting the years in accordance with the imperial reigns, for example, only started in the Meiji era; before that, era names ( gengō) were changed for various reasons, such as good or bad omens. Emperor Kōmei changed the era name six times during his reign of twenty-one years (1846–1867), a reflection of the difficult crises which confronted Japan at that time. The custom of making the whole reign into one era, and calling the emperors posthumously by the names of their eras, is new, and it provides a meaning to such terms as Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa. The emperors of Japan have always adapted themselves to changing circumstances. This is surely one reason why the institution of the symbol emperor has been able to continue for such a long time. Emperors in other countries have flaunted their power, exploited the people, and lived lives of wealth and luxury protected behind tall walls, oblivious of their subjects. Not surprisingly, they were eventually overthrown by

Irie sukemasa nikki, Vol. 3, entry for 11 Oct. 1953. The daijōsai is the first niinamesai to be performed by a new emperor. In the niinamesai ceremony, performed every autumn, the emperor makes an offering of rice and sake produced from the first fruits of the year’s harvest to Amaterasu Ōmikami, the mythical progenitor of the imperial line, and partakes of the offering himself. The daijōsai is the most important enthronement rite. An emperor who has not performed it is referred to as hantei, or ‘half-emperor.’ 30 The Ise Shrine is dedicated to the worship of Amaterasu Ōmikami. Every twenty years the shrine is entirely rebuilt. The buildings of the Outer and Inner Shrines, the Uji bridge, the torii gateway, the surrounding walls, the attached smaller shrines, as well as the apparel of the deity, the votive sword, and other treasures, are all destroyed and created anew. In 1993, the budget for this reconstruction amounted to 35 billion yen (about $350 million). 28

29

akihito and the problem of succession

329

revolutions. But no Japanese emperor has ever been overthrown by a coup d’état. The Japanese emperors lived for many centuries without fear of the outside world in the modest surroundings of their Kyoto palace. Although the people might not have been aware of them, they cared for the people, prayed for the people, and felt themselves as being one with the people.31 Changing the rules of succession from a system based exclusively on male heirs to a system based on primogeniture, by which the firstborn child, regardless of sex, inherits the throne, is in my view the best way to ensure the continuation of the ‘symbol emperor’ system.32 Such a change would also enjoy the support of the Japanese people. There are signs that new winds are now blowing in Japan. We should not forget that the imperial family has survived throughout the centuries because at every period it remained flexible and benefited from accumulated wisdom, without being burdened by the precedents and customs of the past. (Translated by Lucy North)

31 At the ceremony of his accession to the throne, on 11 November 1990, Emperor Akihito used certain key words in his speech, stressing the unity of the people and denoting his role as a symbol emperor. He said: I pledge that I will at all times fulfill my duties as the symbol of the unity of the Japanese people, observing the Constitution of Japan, constantly bearing in mind the wellbeing of the people, following in the same august determination as [my father the Shōwa Emperor] to share in joys and sorrows together with the people. It is my earnest hope, that by tireless efforts and the accumulated wisdom of the people, Japan may achieve even greater developments in the future, contributing to the peace and fraternity of the international community and to the welfare and prosperity of all mankind. 32 The Advisory Council on Imperial Household Law concluded that imperial succession should follow the principle of accession by ‘the eldest child’, regardless of sex. It pointed out that the principle of male precedence among siblings (as practiced in the United Kingdom) would not be in the best interests of the stability of the throne.

CONTRIBUTORS Sigal Ben-Rafael Galanti is a political scientist. She is Chair of the Social Sciences Department at the Beit Berl Academic College in Israel and also teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She obtained her Master degree from Tel-Aviv University, and her Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of Tokyo University, and a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Political Science of Waseda University. She has written “The Remilitarization Debate and the Democratization of Japan,” in Politika (Davis Institute, 2007, in Hebrew). Rosemarie Bernard is Assistant Professor at the School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University in Tokyo, where she teaches Anthropology and Japanese Studies. She has carried out extensive fieldwork and archival research in Ise, and was employed as information officer in the Public Relations Section of Jingū Shichō, the administrative bureaucracy of the Grand Shrines, in 1993–4. She is at work on a book about Ise Shrine and the modern politics of culture in Japan. Her article “Mirror Image: Layered Narratives in Photographic and Televised Mediations of Ise’s Shikinen Sengū” appeared in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Christopher Goto-Jones is Professor of Modern Japan Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and Director of the Modern East Asia Research Centre there. Having studied at Cambridge and Keiō Universities, he received his Ph.D. from Oxford University. He has written on themes in the intellectual history of modern Japan, with a focus on the history of political and ethical philosophy. His publications include Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School and Co-Prosperity (London: Routledge, 2005); (ed.) Re-Politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2007); and Warrior Ethics in Japan: Bushidō as Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

332

contributors

Hara Takeshi is Professor at the Faculty of International Studies of Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo. He received his Master degree from the University of Tokyo in 1991. His publications include: Minto ōsaka tai teito tōkyō [ Popular Capital Osaka vs. Imperial Capital Tokyo] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1997), which was awarded the Suntory Academic Prize; Taishō tennō [Emperor Taishō] (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 2000), which was awarded the Mainichi Publishing Culture Prize; Kōkyomae hiroba [ The Imperial Palace Plaza] (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 2003); and Iwanami tennō kōshitsu jiten [ Iwanami Dictionary of the Emperor and the Imperial House] edited by Hara Takeshi and Yoshida Hiroshi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2005). Sally A. Hastings is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Asian Studies Program at Purdue University. She teaches undergraduate courses on Japan and East Asia, and graduate courses on global history. Her publications include Neighborhood and Nation in Tokyo, 1905–1937 (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995) as well as book chapters and articles on women in modern Japan. Her current research is on women legislators in postwar Japan. She has held visiting faculty positions at Iowa, Michigan, Tokyo Denki University, and Tokyo International University, and visiting scholar positions at Harvard and Tokyo Woman’s Christian University. She is editor of the U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal. Imatani Akira is Professor at the Research Department of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto. He specializes in medieval Japanese history. His books include: Muromachi bakufu kaitai katei no kenkyū [ Research of the Dissolution Process of the Muromachi Shogunate] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1985); Muromachi no ōken [ The Muromachi Monarchy] (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1990); Buke to tennō [ The Warriors and the Emperor] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1993); Nobunaga to tennō [ Nobunaga and the Emperor] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2002); and Sengoku daimyō [ The Daimyo of the Warring States] (Tokyo: PHP, 2006). Rikki Kersten is Research Professor in Modern Japanese Political History at the Australian National University. She is a graduate of the universities of Adelaide and Oxford, and specializes in modern Japanese political history. Her publications include: Democracy in Postwar Japan: Maruyama Masao and the Search for Autonomy (London: Routledge,

contributors

333

1996); R. Kersten and D. Williams eds., The Left in the Shaping of Japanese Democracy (London: Routledge, 2006); and ‘Japan’ in R. Bosworth ed., Oxford Handbook on Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Her current interests include war responsibility discourse in Japan, revisionism, and ‘restorationism’ in modern Japanese history. Ben-Ami Shillony is Professor Emeritus of Japanese History and Culture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1971 and until his retirement in 2006 taught Japanese history and culture at the Hebrew University. He was a visiting professor at the universities of Harvard and Colorado, and a research fellow at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Berkeley, and Tokyo. His books include Revolt in Japan: The Young Officers and the February 26, 1936 Incident (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), The Jews and the Japanese: The Successful Outsiders (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1992), Collected Writings of Ben-Ami Shillony (Richmond, Surrey: Japan Library, 2000), Enigma of the Emperors: Sacred Subservience in Japanese History (Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 2005), and two books in Hebrew on the history and culture of Japan. In 2000 he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold and Silver Star (kun-nitō zuihōshō). Shimazono Susumu is Professor at the Department of Religious Studies of the University of Tokyo. He has published widely on modern and contemporary religious movemnts as well as on modern Japanese religions in general. His books in English include: From Salvation to Spirituality: Popular Religious Movements in Modern Japan (Trans Pacific Press, 2004), and Religion and Society in Modern Japan, edited with Mark Mullins and Paul Swanson (Asian Humanities Press, 1993). He was a visiting professor at the universities of Chicago, Cairo, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and Eberhardt Karls Universitaet in Tuebingen. Takahashi Hiroshi is Professor at Shizuoka University of Welfare and lecturer at Kokugakuin University and Rikkyō University Graduate School. He graduated from the School of Law of Waseda University, and was director of Kyodo News and director of the news bureau of Tokyo Metropolitan Television. Since his assignment to the Imperial Household Agency Press Club in 1974 for two-and-a-half years, he has been commentating on imperial court affairs. His works include: Gendai tennōke no kenkyū [A Study of the Modern Imperial Family] (Tokyo:

334

contributors

Kōdansha, 1978); Shōchō tennō [The Symbol Emperor] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1987); Tennō-ke no shigoto [The Work of the Emperor] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 1993); and Heisei no tennō to kōshitu [The Heisei Emperor and the Imperial Family] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 2003). Julia Adeney Thomas is Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. Her first book, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (University of California Press, 2002), won the John K. Fairbank Award from the American Historical Association. One of her articles, “Photography, National Identity, and the Cataract of Times: Wartime Images and the Case of Japan,” published in the American Historical Review, won the Best Article of the Year Award from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. Her current research concerns Japanese photography during World War II and after. Before coming to Notre Dame, she taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and was a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institut fuer Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi is Professor of History at York University in Toronto, Canada. His research interests lie in Japanese political thought and in World War II in East Asia. His latest work is an edited volume, The Nanking Atrocity 1937–8: Complicating the Picture (New York and London: Berghahn Books, 2007).

CHRONOLOGY OF THE JAPANESE EMPERORS SINCE THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY K}mei (Osahito) Birth and death: 1831–1867 Reign: 1846–1867 Father: Emperor Ninkō Mother: Ōgimachi Naoko (concubine) Wife: Kujō Asako (Empress Dowager Eishō) Important events during his reign: 1853: Commodore Matthew Perry and his ‘Black Ships’ arrive at Uraga 1854: Kanagawa treaty is signed, Japan starts to open its gates 1858: Commercial treaty with the U.S. and other western powers is signed 1860: Ii Naosuke, chief minister of the shogun, is assassinated 1863: British warships bombard Kagoshima 1864: Western warships bombard Shimonoseki 1866: Chōshū-Satsuma alliance is formed Meiji (Mutsuhito) Birth and death: 1852–1912 Reign: 1867–1912 Father: Emperor Kōmei Mother: Nakayama Yoshiko (concubine) Wife: Ichijō Haruko (Empress Dowager Shōken) Important events during his reign: 1868: Restoration of imperial rule (Meiji Restoration) is declared 1869: The capital is moved to Tokyo (Edo) 1872: Compulsory education is decreed 1873: Military draft is established 1877: The Satsuma rebellion is suppressed 1885: The cabinet system is adopted

336

chronology of the japanese emperors

1889: 1890:

The Meiji Constitution is promulgated The First Diet convenes; Imperial Rescript on Education is proclaimed 1894–5: The First Sino-Japanese War 1902: The Anglo-Japanese Alliance is signed 1904–5: The Russo-Japanese War 1911: Anarchists are executed for plotting to murder the emperor Taish} (Yoshihito) Birth and death: 1879–1926 Reign: 1912–1926 Father: Emperor Meiji Mother: Yanagihara Naruko (concubine) Wife: Kujō Sadako (Empress Teimei) Important 1914: 1915: 1918: 1919: 1921: 1923: 1925:

events during his reign: Japan joins the First World War on the side of the allies The Twenty-One Demands are submitted to China Rice riots erupt; Japan joins the Siberian Intervention The Paris Peace Conference is convened, Japan is one of the Big Five Crown Prince Hirohito tours Europe; he is appointed regent for his ailing father; Prime Minister Hara is assassinated The Great Kantō earthquake destroys Tokyo and Yokohama Universal male suffrage and the Peace Preservation Law are enacted

Sh}wa (Hirohito) Birth and death: 1901–1989 Regent: 1921–1926 Reign: 1926–1989 Father: Emperor Taishō Mother: Kujō Sadako (empress) Wife: Kuni Nagako (Empress Kōjun) Important events during his reign: 1928: Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin is assassinated by the Japanese

chronology of the japanese emperors 1931: 1932: 1933: 1936: 1937: 1940: 1941: 1945: 1946: 1947: 1948: 1950: 1951: 1952: 1954: 1955: 1959: 1960: 1964: 1970: 1971: 1972: 1973: 1975: 1985:

337

Japan seizes Manchuria Prime Minister Inukai is assassinated in the May 15 Incident Japan leaves the League of Nations The February 26 rebellion breaks out and is suppressed War with China starts following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident Japan joins the Axis Japan declares war on the U.S. and Britain, attacks Pearl Harbor Atomic bombs dropped on Japan, the Soviet Union declares war on Japan, Japan surrenders, the allied occupation begins The emperor renounces divinity; women are given the right to vote The new constitution comes into effect The Tokyo trial ends, wartime leaders are executed The Korean War breaks out; the ‘Reverse Course’ starts The San Francisco Peace Treaty and the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty are signed The allied occupation ends The Self Defense Forces are established The LDP is formed Crown Prince Akihito marries a commoner, Shōda Michiko Mass demonstrations erupt against the renewal of the Security Treaty with the U.S. The Summer Olympic Games are held in Tokyo Mishima Yukio commits seppuku, calling to restore the emperor’s status The emperor and empress visit Europe Okinawa is returned to Japan; relations with mainland China are restored The first ‘oil shock’ hits Japan The emperor and empress visit the U.S. Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro visits Yasukuni Shrine in his official capacity

Heisei (Akihito) Birth: 1933 Reign: 1989– Father: Emperor Shōwa

338

chronology of the japanese emperors

Mother: Kuni Nagako (empress) Wife: Shōda Michiko (commoner) Important events during his reign: 1989: The Cold War ends 1991: The ‘bubble’ bursts, a long-term recession starts 1992: The emperor and empress visit China 1993: Crown Prince Naruhito marries a career woman, Owada Masako 1995: A disastrous earthquake hits Kobe and its vicinity 2001: Crown Princess Masako gives birth to a girl, Aiko 2004: Japan dispatches noncombatant troops to Iraq 2006: Princess Kiko, wife of Akihito’s younger son Akishino, gives birth to a boy, Hisahito, temporarily ensuring the male lineage Crown Prince Naruhito Birth: 1960 Father: Emperor Akihito Mother: Shōda Michiko (empress) Wife: Owada Masako (commoner)

RECOMMENDED BOOKS IN ENGLISH Baelz, Erwin, Awakening Japan: The Diary of a German Doctor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974). Bix, Herbert P., Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: Harper Collins, 2000). Brownlee, John S., Japanese Historians and the National Myths, 1600–1945 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997). Cortazzi, Hugh, ed., Mitford’s Japan: The Memoirs and Recollections, 1866–1906, of Algernon Bertram Mitford, the First Lord Redesdale (London: Athlone Press, 1985). Creemers, Wilhelmus, Shrine Shinto after World War II (Leiden: Brill, 1968). Crump, Thomas, The Death of an Emperor: Japan at the Crossroads (London: Oxford University Press, 1991). Doak, Kevin, A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan: Placing the People (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007). Dower, John W., Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton, 1999). Earl, David M., Emperor and Nation in Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964). Field, Norma, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991). Fujitani, T., Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Fukuzawa Yukichi, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization (tr. D.A. Dilworth & G. Cameron Hurst. Tokyo: Sophia University, 1973). Futara, Yoshinori and Setsuzo Sawada, The Crown Prince’s European Tour (Osaka: The Osaka Mainichi Publishing Co., 1926). Gluck, Carol, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Goto-Jones, Christopher, Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School and CoProsperity (London: Routledge, 2005). Griffis, William E., The Mikado: Institution and Person (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1915). Hall, Robert K. & John O. Gauntlett, eds., Kokutai no Hongi: Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949). Hall, Robert K., Shushin: The Ethics of a Defeated Nation (New York: Columbia University, 1949). Hata, Ikuhiko, Hirohito: The Shōwa Emperor in War and Peace (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007). Hardacre, Helen, Shintō and the State, 1868–1988 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Harris, Townsend, The Complete Journal of Townsend Harris (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1959). Hills, Ben, Princess Masako: Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2006). Holtom, D.C., The Japanese Enthronement Ceremonies (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1972). ——, The National Faith of Japan (London: Kegan Paul, 1995). Hoyt, Edwin P., Hirohito: The Emperor and the Man (London: Praeger, 1992). Honjo Shigeru, Emperor Hirohito and his Chief Aide-de-Camp, The Honjo Diary, 1933–36 (tr. Mikiso Hane. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1982).

340

recommended books in english

Irokawa, Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period (tr. and ed. Marius B. Jansen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). ——, The Age of Hirohito: In Search of Modern Japan (tr. Mikiso Hane & John Urda. New York: Free Press, 1995). Itō Hirobumi, Commentaries on the Constitution of the Empire of Japan (tr. Baron Miyoji Ito. Tokyo: Chūō Daigaku, 1906). Izumoi Aki, Emperor Showa (Tokyo: Sankei Shimbun, 2007). Kanroji, Osanaga, Hirohito: An Intimate Portrait of the Japanese Emperor (Los Angeles: Gateway, 1975). Kawahara, Toshiaki, Hirohito and his Times (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1990). Keene, Donald, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852–1912 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Kido Koichi, Diary of Marquis Kido, 1931–1945 (Maryland: University Publications of America, 1984). Kido Takayoshi, The Diary of Kido Takayoshi (tr. Sidney Brown and Akiko Hirota. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1983), 3 vols. Koschmann, J. Victor, The Mito Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Koyama, Itoko, Nagako, Empress of Japan (New York: John Day, 1958). Large, Stephen S., Emperor Hirohito and Shōwa Japan (London: Routledge, 1992). ——, Emperors of the Rising Sun: Three Biographies (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1997). Lebra, Takie S., Above the Clouds: Status Culture of the Modern Japanese Nobility (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Low, Morris, Japan on Display: Photography and the Emperor (London: Routeledge, 2006). MacArthur, Douglas, Reminiscences (London: Heinemann, 1964). Martin, Peter, The Chrysanthemum Throne: A History of the Emperors of Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998). Maruyama, Masao, Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics (ed. Ivan Morris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963). Meiji Japan Through Contemporary Sources (Tokyo: The Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1970), 2 vols. Miller, Frank O., Minobe Tatsukichi: Interpreter of Constitutionalism in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965). Minear, Richard H., Japanese Tradition and Western Law: Emperor, State and Law in the Thought of Hozumi Yatsuka (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, Shōwa: An Inside History of Hirohito`s Japan (New York: Schocken Books, 1984). Nakai, Kate Wildman, Shogunal Politics, Arai Hakuseki and the Premises of Tokugawa Rule (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1988). Nakamura, Masanori, The Japanese Monarchy: Ambassador Joseph Grew and the Making of the “Symbol Emperor System”, 1931–1991 (tr. Herbert P. Bix, Jonathan Baker-Bates and Derek Bowen. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1992). Napier, Susan J., Escape from Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1991). Naruhito, Crown Prince, The Thames and I: A Memoir of Two Years at Oxford (tr. Sir Hugh Cortazzi. Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 2006). Nathan, John, Mishima: A Biography (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1975). Okubo, Genji, The Problem of the Emperor System in Postwar Japan (Tokyo: Japan Institute of Pacific Studies, 1948). Philomène, Marie and Masako Saito, eds., Tomoshibi—Light, Collected Poetry by Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko (Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1991). Picken, Stuart, Essentials of Shinto (London: Greenwood Press, 1994).

recommended books in english

341

Ponsonby-Fane, Richard, Misasagi: The Imperial Mausolea of Japan (London: The Transactions of the Japan Society, vol. XVIII, 1921). ——, The Imperial House of Japan (Kyoto: Ponsonby Memorial Society, 1959). Ruoff, Kenneth J., The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945–1995 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001). Sakamoto, Taro, The Japanese Emperor Through History (Tokyo: International Society for Educational Information, 1984). Satow, Ernest, A Diplomat in Japan (London: Oxford University Press, 1968. Reprint from the 1921 edition). Scott Stokes, Henry, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (Tokyo: Charles E. Tutle, 1975). Seagrave, Sterling, The Yamato Dynasty: The Secret History of Japan’s Imperial Family (London: Bantam Press, 1999). Shillony, Ben-Ami, Revolt in Japan: The Young Officers and the February 26, 1936 Incident (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). ——, Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). ——, Enigma of the Emperors: Sacred Subservience in Japanese History (Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 2005). Shillony, Ben-Ami and Anthony Best, Japanese Monarchy: Past and Present (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, STICERD, 2006). Shimazaki Toson, Before the Dawn (tr. William Naff. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987). Silberman, Bernard S. and H.D. Harootunian, eds., Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taishō Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974). Smith, Warren, Confucianism in Modern Japan (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1973). Takeda, Kiyoko, The Dual Image of the Japanese Emperor (New York: New York University Press, 1988). Terasaki, Gwen, Bridge to the Sun (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1973). Titus, David A., Palace & Politics in Prewar Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974). Van Straelen, H., Yoshida Shōin: Forerunner of the Meiji Restoration (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1952). Vining, Elizabeth G., Windows for the Crown Prince: Akihito of Japan (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1952). ——, Return to Japan (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960). ——, Quiet Pilgrimage (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970). Waka Poetry of the Emperor Meiji (tr. Meiji Jingu Office. Tokyo: Meiji Jingu Office, 1982). Waka Poetry of the Empress Shōken (tr. Meiji Jingu Office. Tokyo: Meiji Jingu Office, 1984). Wakabayashi, Bob T., Japanese Loyalism Reconstrued (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995). Watanabe Midori, Talking About the Imperial Family, Q & A (tr. Alan Campbell. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2000). Webb, Herschel, The Japanese Imperial Institution in the Tokugawa Period (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968). Wetzler, Peter, Hirohito and War: Imperial Tradition and Military Decision Making in Prewar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998). Whitney, Clara, Clara’s Diary: An American Girl in Meiji Japan (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1979). Williams, David, Reporting the Death of the Emperor Shōwa (Oxford: Nissan Occasional Papers Series, No. 14. 1990). Woodard, William, The Allied Occupation of Japan 1945–1952 and Japanese Religions (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1972). Yoshida, Shigeru, The Yoshida Memoirs (tr. Kenichi Yoshida. London: Heinemann, 1961). Young, A. Morgan, Japan Under Taisho Tenno, 1912–1926 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1928).

INDEX Abe Yoshishige 170, 177, 272 Aiko 316, 319, 338 Aizawa Seishisai 27, 61–62 Akihito, Emperor 3, 6–8, 99, 104, 146, 151–155, 160–161, 177–180, 182–183, 208, 210, 260, 262–263, 268–269, 274, 285, 294, 313, 316, 318, 323, 326–329 Akishino 157, 161, 313, 318, 338 Amaterasu Ōmikami 18, 53, 56, 60, 65, 67, 79, 81, 83, 86–87, 90–91, 94, 97–98, 101, 103, 163, 170, 222, 238, 328 Anderson, Benedict 268 Aoki Taisuke 306 Arai Hakuseki 321 Arai Naoyuki 285 Arisugawa 230, 321 Asaka Yasuhiko 175, 325 Asako 213, 244, 335 Asami Keisai 40, 44 Ashida Hitoshi 304 Aso Nobuko 180 atomic bomb 145, 171, 176, 199, 241, 276, 337 Atsuta Shrine 85, 92–93, 97–99 Bellah, Robert 193, 241 Benedict XV 169 Bisson, T.A. 301 Bix, Herbert 194, 197 Buretsu, Emperor 15–16, 325 Bushidō 4, 23, 25–28, 31, 33–35, 38–52, 165 Charter Oath 214 Chichibu 169, 175, 218, 227, 231, 268, 316, 323 Chinda Sutemi 169 Chiossone, Edoardo 186, 190, 219 collateral houses 320–325 Confucius 71, 140, 217 Constitution of 1889 219–220, 289 Constitution of 1947 22, 155, 281, 285, 292, 337 Daigō, Emperor 146 daijōsai 74, 98, 104, 167, 183, 233, 328

de los Reyes, Marie Philomène 183 Diet 10, 64, 147, 172, 219–220, 227, 233, 276, 279, 287, 294, 299, 301–302, 304, 308, 310–312, 314, 326, 336 Doi Takako 183 Dower, John 269 Dōkyō 18 Ebina Danjō 166 Edward, Prince of Wales 246 Eishō, Empress Dowager see Asako Emperor System 6, 17, 21, 95, 107–111, 113–115, 117–118, 120–125, 127, 130, 132–136, 147, 271, 274–275, 277–278, 281, 283–286, 288, 295–296, 311, 320, 329 Five Regent Houses 327 Flaujac, Joseph 176 Forrestal, James 172 Fujio Masayuki 295 Fujita Shōzō 285 Fujita Tōko 28 Fujita Yūkoku 27 Fujitake Akira 155 Fujitani, Takashi 192–193, 196 Fujiwara 1, 17–18, 227, 274–275 Fujiwara no Motozane 275 Fujiwara no Yoshifusa 17 Fujiwara Seika 65 Fukuba Bisei 70 Fukuda Kazuya 158, 161 Fukumoto Kazuo 120 Fukuoka Takachika 75 Fukuzawa Yukichi 33, 139 Fushimi 213, 225, 321–325 Gakushūin 155, 177–178, 221, 228, 313 Gekū 81, 83, 92 George V, King 246 Go-Daigō, Emperor 137, 321 Go-Hanazono, Emperor 321 Go-Komatsu, Emperor 4, 19–20 Go-Sakuramachi, Empress 327 Go-Toba, Emperor 18

344

index

Graham, Billy 173 Great Britain 22, 171, 220 Grew, Joseph 169, 260 Gunther, John 171 Hada Takao 45 Hagakure 5, 42, 45–47, 49 Hakeda Shingo 314 Hamaguchi Osachi 142 Hamao (Stephan) Fumio 178, 183 Hamao Minoru 152–153, 178, 180, 182 Hani Gorō 127 Hara Fujirō 306 Hara Kei 234 Harada Kumao 142 Haruko 213, 227–228, 243–244 Hasegawa Akimichi 68, 69–70, 72 Hattori Shisō 127 Hayashi Heima 307 Hayashi Kentarō 287, 291, 294–295 Hayashi Razan 32, 65 Heiji Disturbance 18 Heizei, Emperor 17 Hepburn, James 163 Higashifushimi 322 Higashikuni Naruhiko 173, 197, 271, 275, 300, 324–325 Himiko 15 Hiraizumi Kiyoshi 158 Hirano Yoshitarō 127 Hirata Atsutane 57 Hirohito, Emperor 3, 5–10, 37, 141–153, 157, 159–160, 168–169, 172–173, 175–177, 180, 182, 185–186, 192–194, 197, 199, 206, 208, 221, 227–228, 231, 234–239, 245–247, 249, 252, 256, 261–262, 265, 267–269, 271–272, 274–284, 286–293, 295–300, 303, 307, 309–312, 318, 323–325, 336 Hisahito 10, 161, 313–314, 316, 318–319, 338 Hitachi 177–178, 199, 326 Homma Masaharu 281 Honjō Shigeru 143 Horigome Yōzō 20 Horiuchi Bunjirō 45 Hosaka Masayasu 152 Hoyt, Edwin P. 301 Hōgen Disturbance 18 Hōjō Yoshitoki 18 Ichijō Masako 213 Ichikawa Shōichi 127

Ienaga Saburō 269, 282 Ikeda Hayato 100 Ikeda Suguru 283 Ikegami Shirō 185–186, 190–192, 196, 206, 208 Imperial Diet 219, 227, 233, 299, 301–302, 312 Imperial House Law 93, 97, 147, 151, 233, 326 Imperial Rescript on Education 4, 31, 33, 71–72, 76, 114, 165–166, 336 imperial tours 216 Inomata Tsunao 110, 124, 127–132, 134–135 Inoue Enryô 32, 33 Inoue Kaoru 164 Inoue Kiyoshi 148 Inoue Tetsujirō 4, 26–27, 32–33, 38, 47, 51 Inukai Ken 306 Irie Sukemasa 324 Irie Tamemori 324 Ise Shrine 5, 54, 74, 79, 81–82, 84–86, 90, 94, 102–103, 143, 160, 170, 223–224, 244, 280, 300, 328 Ishihara Hōki 150, 156, 158 Ishihara Shintarō 154 Itō Hirobumi 8, 30–31, 164, 217, 220, 322 Itō Takashi 122, 288, 290 n. 76, 294–295, 297 Iwakura Tomomi 8, 72, 144, 217, 318 Iwakura Tomosada 318 Iwao Sumiko 160 Janes, Leroy Lancing 163 Japan Communist Party 6, 108, 134, 284, 310 Jien 20, 275 Jimmu, Emperor 4, 15, 41, 60, 76, 84, 140, 170, 180, 222, 309 Jingishō 84 Jingū 79–81, 83–106, 213, 331 Jitō, Empress 16, 81 John Paul II 183 Jōkyū Disturbance 18 Kadenokōji Sukeyori 318 Kagawa Toyohiko 171, 173, 176–177 Kakei Katsuhiko 236 Kakei Motohiko 320 Kako 316 Kamei Korekane 70

index Kamijō Shin’ichi 151 kamikaze 6, 138, 148, 170, 241 Kamiya Mieko 182 Kammu, Emperor 17, 317 Kamo no Mabuchi 57 Kan’in 321–322 kan’name-sai 222 Kanamori Tokujirō 302–304, 326–327 Kanda Fumito 282 Kanto Earthquake 237, 247, 336 Kanō Mikiyo 193 Kase Hideaki 150, 275, 289 Kase Toshikazu 155 Kashihara Shrine 74 Kashikodokoro 99, 222 Katayama Tetsu 172, 308 Katsura 318, 321–322 Katō, Eileen 183 Katō Kanjū 310 Katō Shūichi 274 Katō Susumu 320, 324 Kawahara Toshiaki 178, 252, 274 Kawamura Sumiyoshi 318 Kawasaki Takukichi 267 Kawauchi Masaomi 275 Kaya 321–322 Keitai, Emperor 15–16, 325 Kido Kōichi 146, 238–239, 260, 272, 275, 300 Kiko 157, 161, 338 Kikuchi Takeo 36 Kikuchi Yōnosuke 310 Kikuko 238 Kimura Atsutarō 304 kinensai 84 Kira Yoshinaka 46 Kishi Nobusuke 181, 282 Kita Ikki 34–35, 37, 140, 143, 305 Kitaura Keitarō 306 Kiyohara Sadao 75 Kiyomori 18–19 Kiyozawa Manshi 32 Kobe earthquake 153, 338 Kodama Yoshio 274 kōdō 32, 66–74, 76–77 kōgaku 66–67, 72, 77 Koizumi Jun’ichirō 159–161, 314, 318 Koizumi Shinzō 149, 178, 180 Kojima Noboru 252, 297 Kōjun, Empress see Nagako Kōkaku, Emperor 145, 222, 317, 321 Kōken 17 kokutai 4–5, 9–10, 24, 27, 29–32,

345

35–44, 47, 49, 51–66, 69, 71–78, 197, 271, 275, 279–280, 297, 303, 320 Kokutai no hongi 4, 37–44, 47, 51 Kōmei, Emperor 6, 137–139, 144, 146, 213–214, 221, 244, 317, 328, 335 Kōnin, Emperor 17 Kōno Shōzō 66 Konoe Fumimaro 146, 239, 272, 275, 280, 300 kōreiden 222 Kōtoku, Emperor 69 Kōtoku Shūsui 34, 36, 114, 140 Kōza 6, 107–113, 115–121, 123–127, 129, 133–135, 166 Kozaki Hiromichi 166 Kudō Yukie 156 Kujō Hisatada 138 Kujō Michitaka 227 Kumagaya Tatsuo 206, 208, 210 Kumamoto Band 164, 166 Kumazawa Banzan 32, 65 Kuni Asaakira 325 Kuni Kuniyoshi 246 Kuniie 321–324 Kuratomi Yūzaburō 237, 325 Kuriyama Sempō 65, 67 Kusuko Disturbance 17 Kyōbushō 84 Kyoto School of Philosophy 27, 39, 47 Large, Stephen 193, 299–300 Leo XIII 164 Liberal Democratic Party 99, 150, 274 MacArthur, Douglas 7, 80, 103, 171–173, 175, 178, 197, 199, 206, 271, 277, 284, 291, 300–301 Maeda Tamon 166, 172, 182 Makino Nobuaki 141, 237, 316 Mako 316 Manabe Hajime 150 Maruki Toshiaki 190 Maruyama Masao 34, 274–275, 281 Masaki Hiroshi 277, 281, 283, 287 Masako 155–157, 161, 183–184, 213, 236, 316, 319, 338 Masuda Tomoko 143 Matsubara Kazuhiko 306–307 Matsudaira Nagayoshi 151 Matsudaira Setsuko 169 Matsudaira Yoshitami 151 Matsumiya Kanzan 42 Matsumoto Jōji 301 Matsuyama Tsunejirō 170

346

index

Meiji Emperor 2–3, 5–8, 24, 34, 43, 75, 79–81, 90, 98, 103, 139–140, 142–145, 163–164, 166–167, 176, 186, 213–214, 217–218, 220–225, 227–228, 230–233, 244, 268, 317–318, 322, 325, 336 Meiji Restoration 2, 4–6, 21, 23, 28, 37, 41, 43, 48–50, 54–55, 61–62, 66, 69, 72–76, 79–80, 82, 87–88, 95, 108, 116, 120, 125–126, 129–132, 134, 139, 159, 214, 216, 230, 309, 321, 323, 325, 327, 335 Meiji Shrine 74, 185–186, 190, 208, 213, 225, 252, 261 Mikasa 150, 160, 180, 227, 262, 268, 272, 275, 318, 320, 323–324, 326 Miki Kiyoshi 271 Ming 19 Minobe Tatsukichi 35, 36–37, 142–143, 289, 305 mirror 5, 79, 80, 82, 85–87, 92, 96–101 Mishima Yukio 6, 45, 147–149, 204, 337 Mitani Takamasa 178 Mitani Takanobu 177–178 Mito School 27, 32, 57, 61–62, 65, 67 Miura Hirokichi 185–186 Miyake Kanran 67 Miyoshi Tatsuji 150 Moore, Ray A. 301 Morito Tatsuo 309–310 Motoda Nagazane 8, 75–76, 216–218, 220, 228 Motoori Norinaga 57, 60 Motoshima Hitoshi 149–150 Murakami Hyōe 278, 283 Murakami Shigeyoshi 53–55, 77, 165 Muramatsu Gō 276–277, 282, 294–295 Muramatsu Takeshi see Muramatsu Gō Mure Hitoshi 72 Mutsuhito see Meiji Emperor Nagai Takashi 176 Nagako 9, 153, 160, 237, 241, 243, 245–247, 249, 252, 256, 261, 267–268, 316, 325, 336, 338 Nagao Ryūichi 56–57, 60, 63, 71, 298 Nagayoshi Jirō 45 Naikū 79, 81, 83, 86, 91–92 Nakabayashi Narimasa 68 Nakagawa Kenzō 265

Nakagawa Yatsuhiro 161 Nakano Jirō 108, 121 Nakano Shigeharu 284 Nakasone Yasuhiro 100, 147, 290, 337 Nakayama Tadayasu 138, 213, 228 Nakayama Yasuko 213 Namba Daisuke 141 Nambara Shigeru 150, 166, 177, 272, 300 Nara Takeji 141, 169 Naruhito 6, 155–157, 161, 182, 184, 272, 313, 316, 318–319, 338 Nashimoto 103, 322 Nezu Masashi 283, 287 Nichiren 8, 20, 236 niinamesai 60, 84, 91, 222–223, 328 Ninkō, Emperor 145, 222, 317, 335 Nishi Yoshiyuki 156 Nishida Kitarō 29, 32–33, 37, 39, 47 Nishikawa Shigenori 183 Nishimura Shigeki 75–76 Nishio Kanji 159–160 Nitobe Inazō 25–26, 34, 165–167, 172, 178 Nogi Maresuke 43, 221 Noguchi Yoshiko 262 Nori see Sayako Noro Eitarō 110, 127, 129–134 Northern and Southern Courts 19 Nosaka Sanzō 311 Oda Nobunaga 20 Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko 165 Okita Yukuji 69 Okuno Seisuke 276 Onoda Hirō 283 Osouf, Pierre Marie 164 Ozaki Yukio 307–308 Ōe Kenzaburō 148, 204 Ōgimachi, Emperor 20, 321, 335 Ōhara Yasuo 287 Ōhira Masayoshi 183 Ōkuma Shigenobu 233, 308 Ōkuni Takamasa 70, 73 Ōnishi Hajime 32–33 ōsei fukkō 131 Ōshima Tazō 307 Ōsugi Sakae 244 Ōuchi Hyōe 127 Ōuchi Tadasu 153 Ōyama Ikuo 98, 272 Pacific War 4–5, 25, 53, 55, 64, 71, 144, 213, 221, 223, 238, 278, 280, 322, 324

index Perry, Alice 169 photographs 7, 190–194, 196, 199, 201, 204, 206, 208, 219, 241–242, 247, 252, 256, 262–263, 267, 269 Pius XII 176 Ponsonby-Fane, Richard 145 Port Arthur 223 portrait of the emperor 32, 148, 219 Pu Yi, Henry 265 Rai Sanyō 275 regalia 5, 9, 41, 65, 79, 85, 92, 94, 96–99, 102, 104 Reischauer, Edwin O. 180, 276 Rhodes, Esther 179–180 Riddell, Hannah 168 Robert Tōgasaki 179 Robinson, Donald L. 301 Russo-Japanese War 34, 91, 144, 223, 231, 336 Rōnō 6, 107–113, 115–121, 123–127, 133–136 Sadako 8, 167–169, 173, 194, 227–228, 230–231, 235–239, 244, 256, 268, 324–325, 336 Sadayoshi 323 Saeki Riichirō 144 Saionji Kimmochi 141, 237 saishu 102–103 Saitō Makoto 267 Saitō Takeshi 176 Sakai Saburō 278, 290 Sakisaka Itsurō 121, 127 Sakuma Shōzan 68 Sanjō Sanetomi 318 Sano Manabu 117, 120 Satow, Ernest 138 Satō Moichi 75 Sawamura Sadako 194 Sayako 152, 182, 323 Schmidt, Karl 57 Schonberger, Howard B. 301 Seagrave, Sterling 168 Seiwa, Emperor 17 Sekiya Teizaburō 168 Senke Takatomi 75 Setsuko 169, 268 Shidehara Kijūrō 272, 301, 326 Shiga Yoshio 311 Shigeko 252, 256 shikinen sengū 85–90, 95–96, 98–101, 103–104

347

Shillony, Ben-Ami 11, 163, 185, 193, 204, 299 Shimanaka Hōji 147 Shimazu Hisamitsu 321 Shinagawa Yajirō 220 Shinto Directive 80, 93, 320 Shirakawa, Emperor 17–18 Shrine Shinto 54–55, 80 Shōda Fumiko 180 Shōda Hidesaburō 180 Shōda Michiko 152, 180, 285, 327, 337–338 Shōken, Empress Dowager see Haruko Shōtoku, Emperor 18 Shōwa Emperor see Hirohito, Emperor Sienkiewicz, Joseph-Adam 164 Sino-Japanese War 218, 220, 222–223, 232, 317, 336 Soeki Tetsujirō 75 Soga 16 sokui no rei 98, 233 sonnō jōi 28, 131 State Shinto 5, 8, 53–58, 62, 64, 66, 73–74, 76–79, 82, 84, 87–88, 90, 95, 104, 106, 172, 277 Steichen, Edward 199 Sugiyama Hajime 275 Sujin, Emperor 15–16 Sukō, Emperor 321 Suzuki Kantarō 320 Suzuki Yoshio 309 Sweeney, Charles (‘Chunk’) 171 Taishō Emperor 3, 6–8, 91, 98, 139–142, 167–168, 213, 221, 224–225, 227–228, 231–233, 235–337, 252, 256, 258, 317–318, 323, 325, 328, 336 Tajima Michiharu 272, 328, 336 Tajima Michiji 166, 178 Takagi Yuri 268 Takahashi Korekiyo 267 Takahashi Sadaki 127 Takamado 180 Takamatsu 150, 175, 227, 231, 238–239, 269, 300, 316, 323 Takano Iwasaburō 274–275, 277 Takao Ryōichi 326 Takeda House 322 Takeshita Noboru 290 Takie Lebra 153 Tanaka Giichi 141 Tanaka Kakuei 151, 294

348 Tanaka Kōtarō 170, 178 Teimei, Empress see Sadako Temmu, Emperor 16–17 tenchōsetsu 244–245 Tenji, Emperor 16–17 Tokuda Kyūichi 271, 301, 310–311 Tokugawa Ieyasu 20 Tokugawa Nariaki 28 Tokugawa Yoshihiro 146, 175 Tokugawa Yoshinobu 321 Tokutomi Roka 224 Tokutomi Sohō 71, 145, 221 Tomita Mitsuru 170–171 Tomita Tomohiko 150–151 Tomohito 160, 180, 318, 321, 326 Tomonō Naoko 156 Tottori Hisako 180 Toyotomi Hideyoshi 20 Tsuchiya Takao 127 Tsuda Umeko 164 Tsukuba Fujimaro 323 Tsurumi Yūsuke 166 Tōgū Palace 182, 221, 231 Tōjō Hideki 44, 150–151 Tōyama Shigeki 284 Uchida Jōkichi 108, 121 Uchimura Kanzō 32, 34, 165–166, 168 Uda, Emperor 146, 323 Uemura Masahisa 166–167 Uemura Tamaki 176 Ueno Chizuko 204, 242 Uesugi Shinkichi 36, 278 Ueyama Shumpei 133 Ugaki Kazushige 268 Urata Nagatami 85 Ushijima Hidehiko 151 Utsumi Aiko 282 Victor Emmanuel, King 246 Vining, Elizabeth G. 149, 178–180 waka poetry 8, 142, 183, 213–214, 223, 228, 232, 235, 239 Wang Ching-wei 265 Watanabe Kiyoshi 282 Watanabe Masanosuke 120, 127 Watanabe Michio 293, 295

index Watanabe Midori 178 Watanabe Shōichi 296 Watsuji Tetsurō 4, 27, 34, 37, 39, 44–45, 47–49, 51 Woodard, William 173, 179 Yagi Hidetsugu 154–155, 161 Yamada Moritarō 127 Yamada Yasuhiko 318 Yamaga Sokō 26, 32, 38, 40, 42–45, 51, 65 Yamagata Aritomo 232–234, 246, 317 Yamaguchi Osamu 165 Yamahata Yōsuke 199 Yamakawa Hitoshi 109, 112, 115, 119–127, 135 Yamamoto Shinjirō 168–169 Yamamoto Tsunetomo 45–46, 51 Yamashina Kikumaro 323 Yamashina Yoshimaro 323 Yamashita Kazuo 184 Yamashita Tomoyuki 281 Yamazaki Ansai 65, 67 Yamazaki Iwao 197 Yanagihara Naruko 227, 317, 336 Yanaibara Tadao 166 Yano Harumichi 62, 72 Yasukuni Shrine 74, 94, 150–151, 160, 262, 265, 268, 323, 337 Yokoi Tokiō 165 Yokota Kisaburō 272 Yokota Kōichi 284 Yonenaga Kunio 154 Yoritomo 18, 41 Yoshida Shigeru 172, 180, 302–303 Yoshida Shōin 28, 40, 42–43 Yoshida Yasuji 306–307 Yoshihito see Taishō Emperor Yoshikawa Hiroyuki 159 Yoshimi Yoshiaki 121 Yoshimitsu 4, 19–20 Yoshimochi 19 Yoshino Sakuzō 140 Yoshitsugu 19 Yuasa Kurahei 142 Yuki Hideo 165 Yūryaku, Emperor 16 Zhu Xi

61