Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Read online

  Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

  Herbert P. Bix

  To Toshie, and my grandchildren—

  Maia, Isamu, Lily, and others who may follow

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  E-Book Extras

  Preface for the Japanese Paperback Edition

  Preface for the Japanese Hardcover Edition

  Preface for the Chinese Edition

  Introduction

  Part I

  The Prince’s Education, 1901–1921

  1 The Boy, the Family, and the Meiji Legacies

  2 Cultivating an Emperor

  3 Confronting the Real World

  Part II

  The Politics Of Good Intentions, 1922–1930

  4 The Regency and the Crisis of Taish Democracy

  5 The New Monarchy and the New Nationalism

  6 A Political Monarch Emerges

  Part III

  His Majesty’s Wars, 1931–1945

  7 The Manchurian Transformation

  8 Restoration and Repression

  9 Holy War

  10 Stalemate and Escalation

  11 Prologue to Pearl Harbor

  12 The Ordeal of Supreme Command

  13 Delayed Surrender

  Part IV

  The Unexamined Life, 1945–1989

  14 A Monarchy Reinvented

  15 The Tokyo Trial

  16 Salvaging the Imperial Mystique

  17 The Quiet Years and the Legacies of Shwa

  Notes

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My principal thanks go to my wife, Toshie, to whom this book is dedicated. Her hard work is reflected in the wealth of materials I was able to cover and in insights that found their way into the text.

  Sam Hileman, an artist and former editor who lives in relative solitude in the Shenandoah Valley, in Millboro, Virginia, deserves special credit for brilliantly commenting in detail on the entire manuscript. He not only improved the flow in every single chapter but was a fertile source of ideas, a keen critic, and a good friend as well. I owe him a vast debt for enriching the book. Tim Duggan of HarperCollins was a splendid editor: incisive in his criticisms, patient, and supportive in every way. To him too I am greatly indebted. I particularly want to thank Susan Llewellyn of HarperCollins for her wonderful copyediting of the entire text. My literary agent, Susan Rabiner, made it happen and gave her support throughout.

  John Dower offered wise counsel; he also made valuable comments on early versions of two war chapters. More than a decade ago, while on a visit to Sheffield, England, another old friend, Nakamura Masanori, gave me a copy of his book on the postwar Japanese monarchy; around the same time Glenn Hook, who lives in Sheffield, sent me the emperor’s “Monologue.” These two works started me off. David Swain provided critical feedback during the initial stages of my research and writing. Martin Sherwin commented incisively on an early version of the manuscript, and Mark Selden, who has always been unstinting with his help over the years, commented on the last chapter. I am grateful to all of them, and to Feroz Ahmad, Brian Victoria, Ed Friedman, and Jon Halliday, for leaving their marks on the text. Noam Chomsky kindly made insightful suggestions for improving the countdown to war. Andrew Gordon helped by enabling me to return to Harvard University for a year of teaching

  I extend thanks to Harvard-Yenching Library and Hitotsubashi University Library, where I did my research; to Elly Clay for reading an early draft of chapter 7; to Jonathan Dresner and Christine Kim for responding to numerous requests for materials from the Harvard libraries, and to Kikuchi Nobuteru for his computer skills and helpful participation in my course on the Shwa monarchy.

  A research fellowship from the U.S.–Japan Educational Commission (Fulbright Program) enabled me to launch this project at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo in 1992. There I met Yoshida Yutaka and Watanabe Osamu, both of whom have written extensively and brilliantly on the metamorphosis of the modern monarchy. They discussed their views on Hirohito and shared with me their profound knowledge of the military, political, and constitutional history of modern Japan. Over the years they answered my queries and were always understanding and generous in their help. Awaya Kentar, another old and valued friend, made available materials on the Tokyo trials and was a rich source of ideas and suggestions. Were it not for them, I am sure that this book would be less than it is, and that I would also have overlooked scores of important Japanese sources. Toward the end of the decade, I joined the faculty of the Graduate School of Social Sciences at Hitotsubashi, and in that most ideal environment completed the research and final rewriting of the manuscript.

  Okabe Makio and Yamada Akira also deserve my deepest gratitude for sharing materials and discussing issues. Many other distinguished historians helped me make sense of Hirohito’s life through their extensive writings, but Tanaka Nobumasa and Fujiwara Akira deserve special mention, as does Tanaka Hiromi, who made available the unpublished memoirs of Gen. Nara Takeji. To Akagawa Hiroaki I express thanks for his support and for supplying materials.

  Over the ten years in which I pursued this project, my father-in-law, Shigeaki Watanabe, shared his recollections of early Shwa. Mrs. Yoshida Ryoko also cooperated by sending a constant stream of Japanese-language materials.

  Parts of chapter 13 derive from my essay “Japan’s Delayed Surrender: A Reinterpretation,” in Diplomatic History (1995); many passages in chapters 14 and 16 come from “Inventing the Symbol Monarchy in Japan,” in the Journal of Japanese Studies (1995). I owe thanks to both journals for permission to use my material.

  E-Book Extras

  PREFACE FOR THE JAPANESE PAPERBACK EDITION

  This book encourages readers to reconsider the entire life of the Shwa Emperor and, at the same time, to reflect on universal questions of leadership and accountability that arise in periods of international instability and rampant nationalism.

  For those who believe that international order should be based on respect for the rule of law and the sovereign rights of all nations, rather than on quests for hegemony and control over resources, its implications reach beyond the past. From late Meiji through early Shwa, war and raison d’etat nurtured the Japanese state. Military interventions concealed imperialist aims and strengthened institutions of public non-accountability, which in most nations still exist. Twentieth-century warfare allowed politicians to drive their nations and their nationalisms to extremes, and, if they were powerful enough or the circumstances permitted, to be immune from the consequences. Whenever that happened, the wars of the past could not be forgotten or “normalized” even when their protagonists were long dead. That imperial Japan had a classic system of irresponsibility centered on the imperial throne is both a reason to return to its past for insight into the present, and a reminder that without the Shwa emperor its past cannot be adequately studied.

  From the tragic experience of war, defeat, and occupation, Japan lost the will to dominate and went on to build a peace state. By contrast, the victorious United States strengthened its hegemonic ambitions, built a culture of militarism, and embarked on a long trajectory of endless wars, waged with the same lack of moral and legal constraint that the U.S. government had once accused Japan of displaying. Now the Japanese people are being pressed to reach a consensus on constitutional revision that will tie the imperial house more tightly to the state, and to abandon Article 9 of their peace constitution. These moves could someday legitimate a revival of militarism. They will also reinforce nationalism, though on a new cultural and moral basis.

  It
is with these thoughts in mind that I hope this Kdansha bunkobon edition will contribute to a better understanding of Japan’s problems in the present.

  Finally, I thank Yoshida Yutaka of Hitotsubashi University for again supervising this new edition.

  Herbert P. Bix

  April 5, 2005

  PREFACE FOR THE JAPANESE HARDCOVER EDITION

  In the following pages the reader will encounter a Shwa emperor who differs from his official, though far from accurate portrayal, and a reinterpretation of the entire Shwa era (1926–1989). From the outset I place Emperor Hirohito, the imperial institution, and the beliefs, concepts and values that constituted emperor ideology at the very center of events. Who was he? Why and how was he so carefully schooled for active leadership in Japan's civil and military affairs? What roles did he play in Japanese life and in actual decision-making before and after 1945? How did the emperor/people relationship change over time? Above all, why does a new, critical interpretation of his past help us to better understand and respond to problems in our present, radically different circumstances?

  The Shwa my biography was not a passive “constitutional monarch,” but an active, essential participant in the events that unfolded around him. From the bombing of Chinese cities to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and thereafter through the fighting in the Pacific, he interacted with his governments and his Imperial Headquarters, sometimes preventing his generals and admirals from conducting the war just as they wished. This did not mean, of course, that he called all the shots or was solely responsible for making policy.

  Although not a conqueror by nature, Emperor Hirohito became, in ways that I document, absolutely central to the Japanese war effort. Keeping him on the throne after the defeat, not investigating his role in policy-making, and insulating him from possible trial contributed to a falsification of history. It impeded historical clarification of the decision process leading to war and delayed surrender. It limited the development of Japanese democracy. It made rethinking the lost war and its atrocities difficult, and allowed many people to delay bringing the war to closure by means of effective apology and reparations.

  I wrote this biography of the Shwa Emperor between 1991 and the late winter of 2000, and the timing is important. The emperor's death two years earlier had unlashed a flood of diaries and memoirs by persons who had worked intimately with him, not to mention numerous scholarly studies. By continuing my research until the end of the century I was able to access a great deal of this material, though the emperor's personal documents continue to be deliberately withheld from the public.

  In addition, the Cold War had ended in ways harmful to militarists and militarism but potentially supportive of political reform in the industrially advanced states. Nearly everywhere worldwide interest in democratic thought and practice revived in ways that were both positive and negative. While I worked on Shwa history, Japan's leaders had to preside over the collapse of their bubble economy and the bad debt problems resulting from the collusion between bank executives, Finance Ministry officials, and assorted economic power brokers. Lacking a system of democratic accountability with possible criminal punishment of senior bureaucrats and business executives, the ruling LDP persistently put the protection of vested interests ahead of the general public interest.

  As Japan's economic situation steadily weakened throughout the 1990s, the public's demand for political reform became a major issue. Concurrently, new efforts to promote an assertive nationalism gradually took on a more strident tone. Having expanded their social base and moved into the political mainstream, both old and new nationalists were increasingly able to exert influence in debates over national security and constitutional revision. Although the military was no longer on the scene as a key player, and Japan's international situation and strategic position as an American satellite in East Asia were quite unlike what they had been before World War II, the heavy weight of the past remained. By the time the English edition of this book appeared, Japanese debate was beginning to focus on historical issues of security and independence abroad and democracy at home.

  As I worked on my book, keenly aware of how top American leaders had fought the war in Vietnam, and never taken responsibility for the millions of Vietnamese deaths they caused or paid reparations for the destruction they wrought, I saw opportunities to gain perspectives on policy-making in different periods of twentieth-century Japanese history, and to probe the distinctive Japanese practice of public non-accountability that protects high officials from liabilities under the law. If I had written the Shwa emperor's story just a few years later, against the background of President George W. Bush's proclaimed “war on terrorism,” the parallels with the 1930s and 1940s would stand out more sharply. For that earlier time when Japan was the policeman of Asia was also when its top military and political leaders asserted a right to engage in pre-emptive strikes to protect and expand their empire.

  During the heyday of the late Emperor Hirohito, he ruled and reigned as a “living deity” over a modern state nourished on “ nostalgia” for a past that never existed. Using prime ministers whom he helped select to execute his “ imperial will,” he participated actively in a consensual, pluralistic decision-making process. Down to mid-August 1945, confusion, perpetual intrigue, and elites unable to agree on a unified national policy characterized Japanese policy-making. Strong bureaucracy, weak prime ministerial leadership, “coalition” cabinets that often lacked real power, and elitist political parties with right-wing, underworld ties were this system's hallmarks. At its center stood the enigmatic emperor, nourished on a nationalism that was sometimes celebratory but more often defensive. While not strongly authoritarian or bellicose by nature, he was determined to exercise his Meiji constitutional prerogatives, and to protect his imperial house at all costs.

  After World War II, the American occupation regime, for reasons of expediency, rushed to legalize the Japanese monarchy by framing the new constitution around it. The “model” that GHQ drafted under General Douglas MacArthur's direction largely removed the emperor from the political sphere, committed the nation to pacifism, and shifted power to the cabinet and Diet. A new national politics began. Hirohito, no longer the nation's ultimate power broker, was allowed to remain on the throne, protected from judicial scrutiny by American and Japanese leaders who refused to hold him accountable to any degree for his multiple roles in Japan's wars. The attempt by President Truman and General MacArthur to institute a new principle of sovereignty in Japanese life without ever having condemned the old one, locked Japan into a whole structure of deceitful arguments about its past.

  A major theme of this book is the containment of democratic change by the modern monarchy whenever such change threatened the authority and domination of power by a small number of privileged groups. In pursuing it, I discuss the thoughts and beliefs that bound Japanese society and infused the policies of Emperor Hirohito and his officials: kokutai, kodo, direct imperial rule, Japan as spiritually superior and divinely protected, racially homogeneous and unique. These features, along with emperor worship, faith in the power of the Yamato spirit, various legal practices and linguistic conventions, sustained the wartime exercise of power by unaccountable elites. That not all of these other ideas were fully discredited after August 1945—kokutai, for example, morphed into tennosei—influenced the U.S. government's decision to shield Emperor Hirohito, projecting him as both peace-loving and politically impotent.

  Finally, this is a study of what happens to a nation when its head of state, after having been derelict in the performance of his duties, is granted immunity from punishment and allowed to remain in an honored position of authority. American policy makers bore a heavy share of responsibility for this outcome. Ultimately, not investigating Hirohito's multiples roles and insulating him from criminal trial left intact for the rest of the twentieth century the principle of impunity for heads of state. Today we are more sensitive to the need to combat such sovereign immunity, though our commitment to d
oing it continues to be overridden by our flawed strategic approach to maintaining world order.

  I wish to express my deepest gratitude to the translators — Okabe Makio, Kawashima Takane, and Nagai Hitoshi — for the pains they took to produce an excellent, accurate Japanese version. Yoshida Yutaka carefully supervised the entire text and editor Tabata Norishige and his staff then insured a superb production effort. That Kdansha Publishers is making my book on the Shwa emperor available to Japanese readers pleases me greatly.

  Herbert P. Bix

  June 22, 2002

  PREFACE FOR THE CHINESE EDITION

  Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan focuses on the personality, behavior, and ways of thinking of a unique political leader in order to understand the society and politics of twentieth century Japan. The central concern throughout is to show how the Shwa Emperor, with the help of his advisers, carved out a political space in which to act, and then (from within that space) gradually began to act as an independent force, exercising leadership in policy making. Not only did he perform many of the most important public roles in Japanese life during the first twenty years of his reign, but as a leader operating behind the scenes under fraught circumstances he tended to follow the policy current represented by the military. This was in stark contrast to the pro-Anglo-American line associated with Emperor Meiji, the ancestor who figured at the core of Hirohito’s identity.