Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Read online

  The emperor who emerges from this work was a fallible human being, susceptible to the same desires, drives, instincts, and faults common to all human beings, but with a prolonged educational experience such as probably no one in the entire world, except himself, was given. For much of his life he was at or near the center of power, the active agent of his and the ruling elites’ interests. The knowledge he had of both the public stage and the hidden machinations of government no other individual has shared. When he equated the survival of his own imperial house with that of the nation, he was both proud and selfish, as well as mistaken. To think of him as the one individual whose very existence manifested the deepest political dilemmas of modern Japan would be quite accurate. Neither an arch conspirator nor a dictator, he was rather the leading participant in, and remains a key to understanding, the major political and military events of his nation in the twentieth century. I believe he was also a tense and troubled human being who deceived himself even more than others in struggling to perpetuate hierarchy and order at the expense of the democratic ideals enshrined in Japan’s postwar constitution.

  PART 1

  THE PRINCE’S EDUCATION, 1901–1921

  1

  THE BOY, THE FAMILY, AND THE MEIJI LEGACIES

  Emperor Meiji’s first grandson was born on April 29, 1901, within the Aoyama Palace in Tokyo. The moment was one of national delight, and virtually the entire nation celebrated, especially the court. The spirits of the reigning emperor’s ancestors were duly notified that the blessed event had come to pass, and that the baby seemed hale and vigorous. An heir had been born; the ancient dynasty would continue, “unbroken,” for at least a few more generations. Scholars wise in the complexity of names and titles conferred. The infant, they announced, would be given the title “Prince Michi,” connoting one who cultivates virtue, and given the name “Hirohito,” taken from the terse Chinese aphorism that when a society is affluent, its people are content.1

  The young but chronically ill Crown Prince Yoshihito, next in line to the throne, was twenty-one that spring. The bloomingly fit Princess Sadako was just sixteen. In time she would bear him three more sons: Yasuhito and Nobuhito in 1902 and 1905 respectively, and Takahito (Prince Mikasa) in 1915.2 As for the baby’s grandfather, Emperor Meiji, at forty-eight he had occupied the Chrysanthemum Throne for thirty-four years, and would continue to reign for eleven more.

  According to custom, the children of Japanese royals were raised apart from their parents, under the care of an appropriate surrogate. Yoshihito had been taken while still a very small infant to be raised the time-honored way. Shortly after his birth in 1879, he contracted cerebral meningitis. Meiji insisted that he be treated according to traditional (Chinese herbal) rather than Western medical practice.3 The baby failed to respond quickly and thereafter struggled through a hard, painful, often bedridden childhood. At different periods lasting several years he could seem more or less normal, but there were other times when he was hopelessly afflicted, and he was never robust. He became a royal dropout after managing somehow to graduate from the primary course of the Peers’ School (Gakushin) and to finish one year of middle school.4

  Could the origin of the crown prince’s problems have been in part genetic? Emperor Meiji had fathered fifteen children by five different women, and lost eleven of them. Yoshihito, the third son, was the only male to survive, and his mother was not the empress but one of Meiji’s many concubines. Inevitably the court suspected that hundreds of years of imperial inbreeding had resulted in a genetic defect of some sort that might show itself in the generation that would be sired by Yoshihito.

  Naturally enough Meiji and his advisers took extreme care in choosing the princess who would marry Yoshihito and bear his offspring. Their ultimate choice was Princess Kuj Sadako, a young girl from one of the highest-ranking court families. The Kuj were a branch of the ancient Fujiwara, a lineage that reached back to the late twelfth century, when its founding ancestor had become regent for the then-reigning emperor. Sadako had excellent evaluations at the girls’ division of the Peers’ School. Intelligent, articulate, petite, she was especially admired for her pleasant disposition and natural dignity. In all her attributes she was just the opposite of Yoshihito.5

  The couple, who had met on several chaperoned occasions, were married in early 1900. As the years passed, Sadako grew in self-confidence and maturity, and the wisdom Meiji had shown in choosing her for his son was more and more praised.

  Emperor Meiji, in consultation with Yoshihito and Sadako, had decided that his grandson Hirohito should be reared in the approved modern manner, by a military man. It seemed wise, therefore, that the parental surrogate be a married army or navy officer who could provide the child not only with a good family atmosphere but also a martial influence. His first choice, Gen. yama Iwao, declined to undertake this heavy responsibility. They then turned to the elderly Count Kawamura Sumiyoshi, a retired vice admiral and ex–navy minister from the former Satsuma domain (a feudal fiefdom equivalent to a semisovereign state), and asked him to rear the child just as though he were his own grandson. Kawamura, a student of Confucian learning, could be further trusted because he was a distant relation by marriage of Yoshihito’s mother.6 On July 7, the seventieth day after his birth, Hirohito was removed from the court and placed in the care of the Kawamura family. At the time Kawamura allegedly resolved to raise the child to be unselfish, persevering in the face of difficulties, respectful of the views of others, and immune from fear.7 With the exception of the last, these were characteristics that distinguished Hirohito throughout his life.

  Hirohito was fourteen months old when his first brother—Yasuhito (Prince Chichibu)—joined him at the Kawamura mansion in Tokyo’s hilly, sparsely populated Azabu Ward. The two infants remained with the Kawamuras for the next three and a half years, during which time three doctors, several wet nurses, and a large staff of servants carefully regulated every single aspect of their lives, from the Western-style food they ate to the specially ordered French clothing in which they were often dressed. Then in November 1904, at the height of the Russo-Japanese War, the sixty-nine-year-old Kawamura died. Hirohito, age three, and Chichibu, two, rejoined their parents—first at the imperial mansion in Numazu, Shizuoka prefecture, and later in the newly built Kson Palace within the large (two-hundred-acre) wall-enclosed compound of the crown prince’s Aoyama Palace. In 1905 Nobuhito (Prince Takamatsu) was born, and toward the end of that year joined his brothers at their Kson Palace home. Their care was directed at first by Yoshihito’s newly appointed grand chamberlain, Kido Takamasa; later their own special chamberlain was appointed.

  During this earliest formative phase of Hirohito’s life, one of the chief nurses attending him was twenty-two-year-old Adachi Taka, a graduate of the Tokyo Higher Teacher’s School and later the wife of Hirohito’s last wartime prime minister, Adm. Suzuki Kantar. Taka could well have been called his substitute mother. Remembering this period later in her own life, Taka contrasted Hirohito’s calm, deliberate, sedate nature and body movements as a baby with those of the more energetic, curious, and temperamental Chichibu.8 The brothers were indeed very different emotionally, both as little boys and as adults. But young Hirohito was more assertive than she intimates, while the mature Shwa emperor was the embodiment of energetic monarchism, and much more driven by emotions than nurse Taka ever foresaw.

  Throughout the first decade of Hirohito’s life, Crown Prince Yoshihito lived only a few minutes away, within the same walled compound as the Kson Palace, and had almost daily physical contact with the boys. In his later years Chichibu talked often and freely about his father but not about the emperor Meiji. In Chichibu’s uninhibited recollection Meiji’s withholding of tenderness stifled any sense of devotion. “Never did I receive the warm, unqualified love that an ordinary grandfather gives to his grandchildren,” he wrote. “So I never had any feeling of adoration for my grandfather…. Nor did I ever hear his voice.”9 Hirohito, for the most part, kept his memorie
s of his father and his feelings toward him to himself, but he would always talk admiringly about his grandfather.10 Perhaps he sensed from an early age that emulation of Meiji was expected of him, while emulation of his own father was not.

  Emperor Meiji, according to nurse Taka, was extremely reserved with his grandchildren and seldom saw them except on their birthdays.11 These meetings usually lasted only two or three minutes and were more like imperial audiences than tender encounters between a grandfather and his grandsons. Meiji, in full military uniform, would stand at his desk and nod his head as the small boys bowed and then immediately exited.12 If he ever showed them affection, it was by sending them toys. One has the impression, therefore, that Hirohito probably related more to the idealized emperor, “Meiji, the Great,” than he did to the real grandfather whom, after all, he never really knew. Given the unusual emotional climate in which Hirohito was reared, ambivalence marked his relationship with his own father but less so with Meiji.

  Hirohito was a docile child, fussed over and pampered by nurses and relatives during his kindergarten years. Like other children of his exalted class, he and his brothers grew up enacting in play the Russo-Japanese War.13 As the emperor-to-be, Hirohito—little “Michinomiya”—had to be respected in play and could never be the recipient of anger or ill treatment. Even in make-believe war games, he always had to be the commander in chief, on the winning side. One day Prince Chichibu, according to his own memoir, quarreled with Hirohito over toys, and in anger whacked his older brother with an artillery piece. A horrified servant woman immediately grabbed Chichibu and dragged him off to the prayer room, where she made him apologize before pictures of the sun goddess, Amaterasu mikami, and of their parents, the crown prince and princess. After admonishing the small prince, she made him swear to the deities never again to strike his brother. Chichibu, however, leaves the impression that he did so quite often.14

  Between the ages of four and eight, Hirohito and his brothers were frequently taken by carriage to visit sites in the central part of the capital that were repositories of the nation’s modern history. Occasionally the military leaders of the Russo-Japanese War and the Meiji oligarchs paid visits to them at the Kson Palace. To familiarize Hirohito and his brothers with the world of militarism and war, they were taken to watch military parades and to see the museum where captured weapons from the Russo-Japanese War were displayed. They were also taken to the Yokosuka Naval Base, and in August 1906 Hirohito and Chichibu were both given a special tour of the warship Katori.15

  When Hirohito was six years old, in 1907, Marquis It Hirobumi returned to Tokyo to report on the political situation in Korea, where, as a result of the Russo-Japanese War, Japan had gained the opportunity to establish a protectorate. It had been serving there since December 1905 as the first resident general. In September, Emperor Meiji bestowed upon him the highest hereditary title, “prince.” Just at this time nurse Taka brought Hirohito and his brothers, dressed up in their sailor suits, to the palace to visit their grandfather. Unexpectedly they encountered It, Yamagata Aritomo, and five other oligarchs from the former feudal domains of Satsuma and Chsh. The genr, or “senior statesmen” as they were now called, had come to the palace to thank the emperor for their gifts. When Hirohito saw them in a waiting room, he stared at It’s medals, causing It to approach and ask, “Are you the future crown prince?” Unafraid, Hirohito replied that he was. “And who are you?” It explained who he was and why he was there. To the great delight of all the elderly genr, Hirohito questioned him in detail about his many medals as if he were much older than his age and used to having his questions answered.

  I

  In the year 1901 Tokyo’s population was reaching nearly 1.5 million.16 Though by no means wholly modern any more than the country itself, the city was bursting with energy. Emperor Meiji, for instance, lived not too distant from Hirohito’s birthplace in a still new, sprawling palace consisting of three dozen wooden buildings, joined by a single corridor—which he never allowed to be wired for electricity.17 His huge, stone-wall-enclosed Imperial Palace compound was encircled by a moat and spread over some 240 acres—a green island of emptiness and stillness amid the bustle that surrounded it. On one side were the Marunouchi and Kasumigaseki sections of Tokyo, where the nation’s leading financial, business, and governmental institutions were just beginning to cluster. Between these future core business districts, which included the new Diet building and the office headquarters of the Mitsubishi Company, lay Japan’s first Western-style park—Hibiya Park. To the east of the vast Imperial Palace grounds lay the head of Tokyo Bay, along which, on both sides, light and heavy industry were already concentrating.

  Hirohito was brought up to believe that the entire history of modern Japan centered on his grandfather and the small group of talented officials who had assisted him. Virtually unknown beyond Kyoto when he had succeeded to the throne at age fifteen, by the time of his first grandson’s birth, Meiji was revered all over Japan. In that interim not only had the monarchy evolved and gained political, economic, and military power, but the Japanese people themselves had acquired a new national identity as his “loyal subjects,” or shinmin. The ideology of virtuous subjecthood implied a special type of conduct: absolute loyalty and service to the emperor, conceived ideally as the parent (both father and mother) of an extended family that included the whole nation as his “children.” The entire family of subjects was expected to value hard work and competition, to honor the stories of the origins of the state, to subscribe to state Shinto, and to put service to the state and duty to the emperor ahead of private interests and pleasures. Hirohito was reared within this same imperial ideology, but viewed from the other side, as the one to whom all loyalty and service were owed.

  An official cult of the emperor was also firmly in place at Hirohito’s birth. Repressive laws governing speech and writing critical of the emperor had been enacted in 1893, 1898, and 1900. Restrictive publication and newspaper laws soon followed.18 The mass media reported on the emperor and his family in a uniform way, using special terms of respect. Police regulations also governed the taking of his picture.

  Of the many highly ambiguous legacies of the Meiji era, the constitutional system and the ideology of rule bequeathed by Meiji to Hirohito were by far the most important. Through the constitution Hirohito inherited political traditions of autocratic rule combined with an ethos of restraint in its exercise. Later, when he began to be educated to take over, he learned that no laws or imperial ordinances could be made unless the emperor gave his assent first.19 Court and cabinet had been joined formally by the emperor himself—in whom the two worlds came together. But the structural division of court and government could easily lead to problems of communication. As Hirohito grew older he would experience this division, and be confronted constantly by the confusion that the architects of the constitutional order had institutionalized at the highest level.20

  Although the constitution specified that the emperor was to share the exercise of legislative power with the Imperial Diet, Meiji and his advisers assumed that the Diet would reflect only the “imperial will,” never its own. In case of a conflict between the emperor and the Diet, the emperor possessed a veto power by withholding his sanction. The constitutional order, codified by this great imperial “gift,” was already undergoing change on the eve of Hirohito’s birth. In 1900 It had founded a new political party, the Rikken Seiykai, or “Friends of Constitutional Government,” to build parliamentary support for the oligarchic government and to help make the constitution work.

  The Seiykai—representing mainly the preferences of large landlords and industrialists—came to dominate party politics in the Diet.21 The genr persuaded Emperor Meiji to acknowledge this new reality of party politics, even cabinets in which party men participated. Once again It played the key role in getting Meiji to abandon his opposition. He did so, however, only by promising that his new party would leave the appointment and dismissal of the prime minister and other min
isters of state entirely to the discretion of the emperor.22 By yielding to the emperor’s autocratic prejudices, It denied the key parliamentary principle that cabinets should be organized by the head of the majority party in the elected lower house of the Diet.

  In general Meiji was indeed an autocrat, and the constitution by no means changed his view on that. He continued to support the military in disputes within the cabinet. And the genr continued to admonish him to restrain his exercise of despotic powers and to operate within the confines of a system of consensus. While the emperor could appoint and dismiss prime ministers and other high officials in a way he had been unable to before the constitution, It and the other genr retained their exclusive power to nominate the prime minister.23

  The emperor’s chief advisers had also crafted and handed down to Hirohito, through Meiji, an ideology of rule grounded in the fusion, ever since antiquity, of religious awareness and state consciousness. “[A]ll religions are extremely weak and none furnishes a foundation of the state,” It had asserted. The throne, therefore, had to serve as a substitute, and its occupant had to be the source of authority for all governments. It, in his famous Commentaries on the Constitution of 1889, had furnished the classic rhetoric for the theocratic emperor.