Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Read online

  Another key theme emerges from this biography’s triangular structure. Here the emperor is understood in three intersecting ways. He was an individual who wielded real power at the center of an elaborate, hierarchical, and consensual system of decision-making. He denoted a bureaucratic institution with its own teleology and unique modes of legitimation, which were transformed under wartime conditions. Concurrently he embodied, articulated, and sanctioned an ideological discourse justifying wars of aggression in the 1930s and early ‘40s, and checking democratic trends among the Japanese people in every single decade of his reign.

  Ironically, the fear that Japan’s ruling elites had about the continuation of the monarchy under Hirohito’s father, the chronically-ill Taisho emperor who ascended the throne in 1912, influenced how Hirohito was reared and educated. Parts I and II focus on his education and show how he became the dynamic emperor he was.

  This discussion sets the stage for examining, in Part III, oligarchic decision-making and motivations for war in a context of secrecy and unaccountability. Seven crucial war chapters reveal the emperor as an opportunist, lacking in clear moral principles that might have put him at odds with the forces in Japanese society supporting aggression. They deal, as well, with many issues that have implications of profound importance for Chinese readers. Among them are the cult of reverence for the throne and its occupant; Japan’s unilateral takeover of Manchuria which Tokyo justified in the name of “self-defense;” Japanese violations of wartime international law during the Japan-China War; and the still controversial Nanking massacre, concerning which, to this day, no public documentary trace exists of the emperor ever having set an investigation in motion.

  Part III also addresses the Japanese navy’s policy of advancing toward the south, which, after the imperial navy’s occupation of Hainan island in the South China Sea in early 1939, led directly to Pearl Harbor and the last phase of Japan’s Asia-Pacific War.

  Taken as a whole, this book challenges readers to confront how wars are justified and how the history of heads of state and their close advisers is falsified. In writing it I sought to encourage more than a reevaluation of Hirohito as a special kind of war leader. I addressed as well the origins of the Asia-Pacific War and the nature of Japanese imperialism, as well as the myths that were constructed by both Japanese and American officials about its termination. Hirohito’s continued presence on the throne after Japan’s defeat and military occupation in 1945, allowed him to go on exerting influence in ways that have proved harmful to Japanese democracy.

  In Part IV, I again grapple with the mind of Hirohito and describe the changes that occurred in his relationship with the Japanese people following the Asia-Pacific War and U.S. occupation. I question the responsibility that accompanied Hirohito’s exercise of supreme command, and explain how (with American aid) he avoided all legal, political, and moral responsibility for the consequences of his political leadership as head of state and supreme commander.

  There are implications of this study which reach beyond the past and deserve attention today especially from those who believe that international order should not be based on quests for hegemony and denial of the principle of formal equality to all nations. Great powers court their own ruination when they act alone, relying on raw power and embarking on preventive wars in defiance of world public opinion, not to mention the “world community.”

  The so called “humanitarian” wars and military interventions of the 1990s gave new prominence to institutions and practices of public non-accountability which exist today in many nations, including those that vaunt their democratic cultures. Such wars allow politicians to drive their nations and their nationalisms to extremes, and be immune from the consequences. When that happens the wars of the past cannot be forgotten or “normalized.” That Japan had a classic system of irresponsibility is both a reason to return to its past for insight into the present, and a reminder that without the emperor its past cannot be adequately studied.

  I hope this Chinese edition will contribute to a better understanding of a tragic period in Sino-Japanese relations.

  Lastly, Wang Liping, a Ph.D. student at Hitotsubashi University and an active journalist, and Sun Shengping of Harbin Industrial University did the hard work of producing this translation. I thank them for their enormous efforts, and the New China News Agency for making this Chinese edition possible.

  Herbert P. Bix

  INTRODUCTION

  By the late winter of 1946, pressure had mounted both at home and abroad for forty-five-year-old Emperor Hirohito to be indicted as a war criminal. If indicted, he would face trial for appointing General Tj as prime minister in 1941 and later declaring war on the United States and Great Britain. Questioning under oath as to when he had learned of the planned attack on Pearl Harbor and about his role in various imperial conferences and in the treatment of prisoners of war loomed ahead, as did disgrace, and punishment in some form if his innocence could not be established. Members of his own imperial family were calling for him to abdicate as a way of avoiding political responsibility and protecting the monarchy. His country’s leading liberal intellectuals were publicly asking him to leave the throne in order to set a good moral example for the nation.

  The American occupiers of his country, meanwhile, had just finished drafting their model for a new constitution that would preserve the monarchy but strip the monarch of all political powers. Parliamentary debate on the new constitution and his own emasculated status under it was about to begin.1 Hoping to continue to use him for occupation purposes but recognizing that the burden of proof had fallen on him, Hirohito’s American defenders needed to know how he felt about the lost war that had been fought in his name. They especially wanted him to address the glaring contradiction of why, if he had been strong enough to surrender his empire at the end of the war, he had not been equally strong enough to have prevented war in the first place, thereby saving millions of lives.

  To stave off all these threats to his throne and to himself personally, Hirohito had to furnish an account exculpating his actions as the sovereign head of the Japanese state over the previous twenty years—one that would defend him against charges he might never have to face but could not be sure of escaping. And he had to do so secretly, for his self-defense necessarily entailed assigning responsibility for war and defeat to some of his most loyal subjects. If that had been revealed at the time, the already weakened spiritual ties that bound him and the Japanese nation would have shattered, and with them his usefulness to Gen. Douglas MacArthur.2

  So at 10:30 on March 18, 1946, a chilly Sunday morning, Hirohito, though ill with a cold, summoned five of his most trusted aides to his office in the concrete bunker on the palace grounds, where he had lived during and since the Pacific War. They were to listen to his recollections of the extraordinary events of his reign. Upon entering the office, the aides found him propped up in a Western-style single bed that had just been moved into his study for the occasion. Seats had been placed for them at its foot. The emperor was wearing pajamas made of bright white silk, and his pillow and quilted blankets were also of finely woven soft white habutae silk. In the Shinto religion, of which he was the highest priest, such garments signified ritual purity, not penitence. The aides seated themselves and began to ask pre-scripted questions, suggested to them in part by General MacArthur's military secretary. They listened as Hirohito dictated his responses and Inada Shuichi took down the emperor's words. Later Inada wrote in his notebook: "People might ask why at such a moment we were hastily requested to listen to the emperor's account. Around that time, however, some people were questioning his responsibility in connection with the war crimes trials, and there was a need to record the emperor's candid feelings quickly."3

  A summary of what the emperor said that morning, and at five other dictation sessions over the next three weeks, was later given by one of the emperor’s aides to MacArthur’s military secretary. Nothing came of the summary, however, perhaps because the to
p American officials at General Headquarters (GHQ) were already among the emperor’s greatest protectors and mythologizers. In the original Japanese text of his “Monologue” the emperor sought to convey the impression that, except on two special occasions after 1928—a military rebellion in 1936 and the ending of the war in 1945—he had stood aloof from politics and refrained from direct intervention in decision making. The war with the United States and Great Britain, he implied, had been inevitable. Although he had personally opposed it until the very last minute, he had been unable to use his influence to prevent war—partly for fear of a domestic uprising but primarily for constitutional reasons. “As a constitutional monarch under a constitutional government, I could not avoid approving the decision of the Tj cabinet at the time of the opening of hostilities.”4

  Approximately ten days after completing his “Monologue,” Hirohito had the same aide draw up another document, in English, summarizing key points of his defense but emphasizing that “Actually I was virtually a prisoner and powerless.”5 The longer “Monologue” remained unknown to the public until after Hirohito’s death in 1989. The greatly abbreviated English version, depicting him as a helpless puppet of “the militarists,” was not discovered and publicized in Japan until 1997. Both were apt symbols of the secrecy, myth, and gross misrepresentation that surrounded his entire life.

  One of the most fascinating and complex political figures in twentieth-century Japanese history, Hirohito began his reign in late 1926, on the eve of renewed conflict in Japan’s relations with China. It continued for sixty-two years of war, defeat, American occupation, and Cold War peace and prosperity. During the first twenty years he was at the center of his nation’s political, military, and spiritual life in the broadest and deepest sense, exerting authority in ways that proved disastrous for his people and those of the countries they invaded. Though the time span of his great Asian empire was brief, its potential was enormous. He had presided over its expansion and had led his nation in a war that cost (according to the official estimates published by governments after 1945) nearly 20 million Asian lives, more than 3.1 million Japanese lives, and more than sixty thousand Western Allied lives.6

  Events had not turned out as he had anticipated and hoped. Yet when his turn came to provide explanations of the role he had played in those events, and to set the record straight, he and his aides were far from candid. They skillfully crafted a text designed to lead to the conclusion that he had always been a British-style constitutional monarch and a pacifist. Hirohito omitted mention of how he and his aides had helped the military to become an enormously powerful political force pushing for arms expansion. He ignored the many times he and his entourage had made use of the Meiji system of government by consensus to stifle a more democratic, less militarized political process. He intentionally fudged the details about his role as both a military leader and a head of state, blurred his motives, and obfuscated the timing of his actions and the logic that informed them. He was silent too about how he had encouraged the belligerency of his people by serving as an active ideological focus of a new emperor-centered nationalism that had grown up around him.

  The aide who wrote the introduction to the “Monologue” claimed that the emperor had limited himself to describing briefly “the background causes and the immediate causes of the Greater East Asia War, its development, and how it came to an end.” That too was untrue. Not included in Hirohito’s explanation were the many ways he and his court entourage had destabilized the party cabinet system that had developed during the middle and late 1920s by insisting on selecting the next prime minister and forcing on him their own national-policy agenda. He omitted discussing how the war in China had begun, his direct leadership role in its expansion, and the conduct of Japanese forces on the ground and in the air. Hirohito also remained silent about the many experiences and circumstances that had most strongly affected his life, the values he placed on them, and the ideas that had shaped his actions and made him the person he was. In his single-minded dedication to preserving his position, no matter what the cost to others, he was one of the most disingenuous persons ever to occupy the modern throne.

  This work attempts to study precisely those formative events and ideologies that underlay, deeply or near the surface, Hirohito as a monarch and a man. It focuses on the forces that shaped his thoughts and actions, as well as those of his close palace aides before, during, and long after the Asia-Pacific War (1931–45). It seeks to describe his actual role in policy making when he was at the center of events; and it is necessarily complex, for my concern embraces not only the modern, divinely legitimized monarchy that was constructed under Hirohito’s grandfather, the emperor Meiji, and used to convert the Japanese people to militarism, war, and the values of subjecthood. It embraces also the reformed monarchy, which was artfully disconnected from the war and its official remembrance, and which has continued its existence down to the present day. It traces the impact of both the sacred and the secular monarchy on Hirohito, his interaction with the various organs of the state, and the monarchy’s continuous transformation under him. Ultimately I am concerned with the whole of Hirohito’s long life, for he illuminates, more than any other Japanese figure, the broader world of Japanese politics and government-military relations. His life has much to tell us about the changing political attitudes of the Japanese people over the past century.

  This is not, however, an orthodox political biography. Hirohito was not a gregarious, outgoing person with a wide assortment of friends fond of writing candidly about him. He was a reticent person who spoke most eloquently sometimes by not speaking at all. Socialized to public opacity, he was trained also to private wariness. He left behind no abundance of texts with his signature on them, revealing his thoughts and enabling us to capture his responses to the major events that he lived through. On ceremonial occasions, it is true, he wrote waka poems in the style of his grandfather Meiji, of which so far more than 860, most of them written after 1945, have been printed.7 But he published no reminiscences and usually expressed his ideas or intentions only through others, who found it disrespectful and inappropriate for a Japanese subject to write critically about him.

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

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

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

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