Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Read online

  When Hirohito turned eleven in 1912, he became crown prince and was given the ranks of second lieutenant in the army and ensign in the navy.53 That year the long reign of his illustrious grandfather finally ended, and the circumstances of his own life changed as well. Ever since Emperor Meiji had come of age politically, in the 1880s, he had been a power wielder, centralizing the organs of the state, protecting the oligarchs from their critics, and mediating disputes among them as they aged and became known as the genr. His crowning achievement had been the glorification and sanctification of the empire that the hated oligarchs had actually created. In so doing, Meiji became the living symbol of Japan’s nationalism and its empire, as well as the symbol of the legitimacy of imperial rule itself. His death at the age of sixty-one, on July 30, 1912, marked the loss of that dual symbol and precipitated questioning of the modus operandi of the throne.54

  Hirohito’s father, Crown Prince Yoshihito, made emperor at thirty-three, was unable to continue Meiji’s legacy. Physically weak, indolent, and incapable of making political decisions, he was utterly lacking in knowledge of military matters, even though he was now the commander in chief. Less than one month after Yoshihito’s accession to the throne, at the start of the new Taish era (1912–26), the press reported the appointment of extra doctors to the court. In December 1912 Adm. Yamamoto Gonbei told genr Matsukata Masayoshi that when it came to recommending a successor prime minister, Emperor Yoshihito “is not [of the same caliber] as the previous emperor. In my view it is loyal not to obey the [Taish] emperor’s word if we deem it to be disadvantageous to the state.”55

  Thus, without any institutional change having occurred, the accession in 1912 of Hirohito’s father became an important turning point in the conduct of state affairs. The genr, especially Yamagata, began to exert stronger control over the court, checking the will of the impetuous, always unpredictable new emperor. Imperial rescripts, which until recently had carried the force of law, and which the oligarchs had long relied on to curb recalcitrant Diets and ministers of state, suddenly became an object of fierce dispute and lost some of their authority.56 A new interpretation of the constitution emerged: Professor Minobe’s “organ theory,” in which the state was viewed as supreme and even the monarch was subordinated to it as one of several “organs.” Among Diet politicians a new movement arose to “protect the constitution” from the arbitrary rule of the “Satsuma-Chsh cliques” that had dominated Japan under Meiji’s protection. Because the franchise had doubled after the Russo-Japanese War, many politicians also began to press for passage of a universal male suffrage law.57

  Historians mark the post–Russo–Japanese War period, culminating in the 1912 political change, as the start of Japan’s “Taish democracy” movement. By the use of this American-English term they mean a series of public campaigns, waged mainly by politicians, journalists, and intellectuals, to demand universal male suffrage, cabinet governments organized by the head of the leading political party, and politics conducted by parties in the Diet rather than by the older fief-based political cliques, which functioned apart from the Diet. After World War I, “Taish democracy” also came to denote the transmission to Japan of American cultural and political products, lifestyles, and such ideologies as individualism.58 The latter especially challenged the premise that the Meiji state rather than the individual had the capacity and was responsible for defining and enforcing the proper moral life.

  III

  The death of their grandfather was a major turning point in the lives of Hirohito and his young brothers. For Hirohito it marked the start of a new stage in his training. In order to prepare him to succeed to the position of supreme commander, he was assigned a new chamberlain and a military aide-de-camp, the latter supervised by a high-ranking official of the Imperial Household Ministry.59 This man, former minister of education and longtime president of Tokyo Imperial University, Hamao Arata, was now known as the lord steward of the crown prince and was charged with overseeing Hirohito’s education, and instructing him in the extraordinary complexities of court and social etiquette.

  In addition the daily contact among the brothers declined, their educational paths separated, and their mentor paid them his last visit. On September 10, 1912, three days prior to Meiji’s funeral, sixty-four-year-old General Nogi came to Hirohito’s residence, already renamed the Crown Prince’s Detached Palace. After informing Hirohito that he would “not be here when school starts,” Nogi urged him to be vigilant and study hard. He then presented the prince with his two favorite history books, one by the seventeenth-century Confucian scholar and military strategist, Yamaga Soko, the other by Miyake Kanran, a founder and leading representative of the early Mito school of nationalist learning.60

  At the beginning of the Taish period, on the day of Emperor Meiji’s funeral, General Nogi and his wife closed the door to their second-floor living room and prepared to end their lives. He had removed his uniform and was clad in white undergarments; she wore black funeral attire. They bowed to portraits of Meiji and of their two sons, killed in the Russo-Japanese War. While the funeral bells tolled, they proceeded to commit ritual suicide. Mrs. Nogi acted first; he assisted, plunging a dagger into her neck, and then he disemboweled himself with a sword. The departed hero of the Russo-Japanese War left behind ten private notes and a single death poem. (The writing of waka death poems was another practice from Japanese antiquity that was revived in the nineteenth century.) In one note he apologized for his action to four family members, including his wife, and acknowledged having contemplated suicide ever since losing his regimental flag in the war of 1877; he also mentioned his aging and the loss of his sons. In another note, to a military doctor, he bequeathed his body to medical use.61 Nogi also left notes for Capt. Ogasawara Naganari and Gen. Tanaka Giichi.62

  Nogi’s death poem, intended for public consumption, told the nation that he was following his lord into death—a practice known as junshi that even the Tokugawa shogunate had considered barbaric and outlawed “as antiquated in 1663.”63 Conservative intellectuals Nitobe Inaz and Miyake Setsurei, both given to decrying the collapse of traditional Japanese morality, interpreted Nogi’s suicide as a signal act of samurai loyalty, pregnant with positive lessons for the nation, and for its armed forces. Nantenb, Nogi’s Zen master, was so enthralled by the majesty of his pupil’s action that he sent a three-word congratulatory telegram to the funeral: “Banzai, banzai, banzai.”64 The Asahi shinbun, however, editorially criticized those who called for the establishment of a new morality by reviving bushid, and asserted that Nogi’s harmful action could teach the nation nothing.65 Kiry Yy, a writer for the Shinano Mainichi shinbun, went further, not only decrying Nogi’s death as “thoughtless” and “meaningless” but warning presciently that “to comprehend death as loyalty” was a mistaken ethical idea that could only “end up encouraging great crimes in international relations.”66

  When informed of “Schoolmaster” Nogi’s death by the chamberlain in charge of supervising his education, Hirohito alone of his three brothers was reportedly overcome with emotion: Tears welled up in his eyes, and he could hardly speak.67 Doubtless he was too young really to understand the general’s action, let alone the harmful effect that his anachronistic morality of bushid might have had on the nation. But as Hirohito remarked late in life to an American reporter, Nogi had a lasting influence on him,68 instilling precepts of frugality and stoic virtues of endurance and dignity to which Hirohito never failed to adhere. The brave Nogi was to Hirohito a giver of orders who meant what he said and was willing to lay down his life for his master. Hirohito not only identified with Nogi, he also derived from him the conviction that strong resolve could compensate to some extent for physical deficiencies. In Hirohito’s imaginings, Nogi was to be emulated almost as much as his other hero, Meiji.

  Hirohito still had two more years of primary school ahead of him. Then his education would be directed largely by two new figures in his life: Fleet Adm. Tg Heihachir and naval Capt. Viscoun
t Ogasawara Naganari, eldest son of the last lord of the tiny domain of Karatsu, and a prolific author of war stories and semifictionalized military histories. Later both men were to figure as major opponents of the first national defense policy embraced by Hirohito.

  IV

  Between the ages of thirteen and nineteen—in a decade when most Japanese students still received no military instruction in school, and normal “middle school” lasted for only five years—Hirohito and five of his classmates, specially selected from the Peers’ School by Captain Ogasawara, were given a two-sided (military and liberal arts) education at the Tg-Ogakumonjo.69

  The Ogakumonjo was a white-painted, Western-style, wooden school building that had been specially constructed for Hirohito within the precincts of the Takanawa Palace.70 Nogi and Ogasawara had drawn up the plans for the school; the Meiji emperor had approved them shortly before his death. Fleet Admiral Tg presided over the Ogakumonjo as president, while Ogasawara recruited and supervised the entire teaching staff. The rationale behind Ogasawara’s, the genr’s, and the court’s choice of pedagogues was apparently quite simple: They all thought that the best way to educate a future monarch was to select the nation’s most outstanding military officers and leading scholars from Tokyo Imperial University. Because Ogasawara chose (with only one exception) from the top of the academic hierarchy, his instructors were not agents of fanatic emperor worship, which may be one reason why Hirohito, in a later era of dictatorship and war, was usually uncomfortable with those who did hold such views.

  The Ogakumonjo’s strong suit was its military foundation. Besides training in horsemanship and military drills by junior army officers, Hirohito and his classmates studied map reading and did map exercises; military history; the principles of military leadership, tactics, and strategy; and chess.

  Their regular military teachers included the president of the Peers’ School, Gen. sako Naoharu, an expert on the Russo-Japanese War; two navy rear admirals; and four active-duty lieutenant generals, most of whom had served as naval attachés abroad and taught at the Naval War College. Starting in 1919 the naval theorist Capt. Sat Tetsutar delivered lectures to Hirohito on the American admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan’s theories of sea power, which emphasized that control of the sea lanes of communication by large battleship fleets was the key to a successful expansionist foreign policy. Mahan had posited Japan’s navy as a direct threat to future U.S. interests in the Pacific, though whether Sat noted this in lectures to Hirohito is not known.71 Sat also lectured on Western and Japanese military history (including the Battle of the Sea of Japan, in which the combined fleet under Admiral Tg destroyed the Russian Baltic squadron).

  Another naval officer who lectured at the Ogakumonjo was Hirohito’s own uncle, Adm. Prince Fushimi Hiroyasu, an expert on German military theory. Prince Fushimi had spent his impressionable late teens studying in Imperial Germany, and had graduated from the Kiel Naval School in 1895. To Captain Ogasawara, supervising the Ogakumonjo, Prince Fushimi was a useful conduit to the imperial house, and thus a friend who should always be accommodated when the prince requested personal favors on behalf of his son’s naval career. To Hirohito, Fushimi was merely the relative supervising the first stage of his naval training, which started in July 1916, and a familiar face since childhood.72 What Fushimi taught and what, if anything, Hirohito learned from him is not known.

  Hirohito’s army lecturers were two generals who had recently commanded troops in China during World War I and Gens. Ugaki Kazushige and Nara Takeji. With the exception of Nara (who had come out of the Artillery Section of the Bureau of Military Affairs) they had previously served as superintendent of the War College. General Ugaki had graduated in the first class of the reformed (German-style) Military Academy (1890) and from the War College in 1900. In 1917 he participated in planning the Siberian Expedition to stop the spread of the Russian Revolution and establish a buffer state in eastern Siberia. When Ugaki began his lectures at the Ogakumonjo, in April 1919, he was fifty-one years old and just starting to rise in party politics under the patronage of Gen. Tanaka Giichi.73

  Most important in influencing Hirohito on military issues was General Nara, an officer with a reputation for diplomatic skill. Nara, fifty-two, was appointed Hirohito’s guide and adviser on military affairs on July 18, 1920, and stayed with him as chief military aide-de-camp until 1933. Nara had fought in the Russo-Japanese War, served in Germany, commanded the Japanese garrison at Tientsin, and worked in the Bureau of Military Affairs. He had also attended conferences of the League of Nations and in 1920 had chaired the committee to investigate the massacre, by Russian partisans, of more than six hundred Japanese civilian and military personnel at Nikolaevsk, on the Amur River.

  Nara participated in the Ogakumonjo military lectures only during the prince’s last term there, which began in September 1920. Acting on the request of genr Yamagata Aritomo, he drafted a seven-point guideline for the prince’s future education, stressing that Hirohito should place emphasis on military affairs and take a deep interest in actually commanding the army and navy. “To achieve this goal,” wrote Nara, “he should practice commanding company-size units of the Imperial Guard. Genr Field Marshal Yamagata, citing the situation at the time of Emperor Meiji’s youth, laid particular emphasis on this point.” Mastering horsemanship, cultivating the prince’s interest in weapons, and giving him experience in firing them were some of Nara’s other educational goals. In early October 1920 Nara had a trench dug inside the crown prince’s compound so that Hirohito could practice firing machine guns. “I guided Lieutenant Kat and was able to carry out most of this plan,” Nara wrote after World War II. “However, there was a view at court that the killing of living creatures would harm the moral sensibility of an emperor. Clearly the chamberlains did not like [the prince’s] firing-line practice.”74

  The curriculum of the Ogakumonjo was modeled on the War and Naval Colleges, where military instructors taught lessons drawn mainly from the Russo-Japanese War. One lesson for all officers, and for the future commander in chief in particular, was the primacy of tactics over strategy. Thus military decisions taken to fight and win battles were stressed. The study of war as “an element of statecraft”—that is, decisions concerning whether to go to war and about the mobilization and allocation of forces, taken to attain the ultimate goals of war—was slighted by comparison.75 Hirohito’s naval instructors impressed on him the notion that in war the purpose of a naval engagement was to win by hurling a large, powerful fleet into a single decisive battle such as the Battle of the Sea of Japan, considered the perfect model of a naval encounter. His army instructors taught him that infantry units were the core of the army. Hand-to-hand combat rather than firepower determined victory or defeat in battle. Artillery and cavalry (later tanks and aircraft) were to be developed and used mainly to support bayonet charges by the infantry.76

  The daily routine of the school was highly regimented by Captain Ogasawara and Admiral Tg. From Monday to Friday and half a day on Saturday, the routine seldom changed. The five aristocratic boys who were his classmates were awakened by their servants at 6:00 A.M. and breakfasted together. When the crown prince, whose private quarters were on the second floor, above theirs, finished his morning preparations, he walked into a large, carpeted Western-style study (called the “class preparation room”), whereupon a bell rang, signaling the other boys to go upstairs and greet him. Filing into the study, where each boy had his assigned desk and attached bookcases, they lined up and bowed to the prince (who alone in all Japan wore the chrysanthemum crest on his cap). Then they all took seats for a short period of reading in preparation for class that lasted until around 7:45. At that point they excused themselves to Hirohito, returning to their separate rooms to put on their shoes and gather up their school equipment. Afterward they assembled with their teachers at the entrance to the Ogakumonjo classroom to await the prince’s arrival, just as they had done when Hirohito attended the Peers’ School.

  Usually the
re were four morning hours of classroom instruction, followed by recess for lunch. In the back of the room, seats were set aside for guests who visited at different times. These were usually Captain Ogasawara, Admiral Tg, various military aides, members of the imperial family, and officials of the Imperial Household Ministry.77 The tension generated by this constant monitoring of Hirohito’s performance, which went on both inside and outside the classroom, can easily be imagined. At noon the prince took his classmates’ bows and departed to eat alone or in the presence of a military aide. While he usually ate a Western-style meal, often topped off by a glass of milk, the other boys went off together to their dining hall for a Japanese-style meal. Only on occasional Saturdays were one or two members of the class allowed to lunch with him.

  In the afternoons there would be one hour of formal classroom instruction, followed by physical exercises and military instruction. Then the boys would have an activity such as riding, tennis, Japanese fencing, or target practice with pistols. Although Hirohito was clumsy and certainly did not excel in any sport (including sum; kend; swimming, which he had practiced since kindergarten; and golf, which he took up later in life), he persisted in athletics, fiercely determined not to be outdone. Nagazumi Torahiko, his classmate through thirteen years of primary and middle school, remembers the seriousness and extreme diligence with which he pursued them all. When the afternoon session ended, the boys lined up again and bowed before Hirohito, whom they addressed, even at play, as denka (prince), while he called them by their surnames. A short period of free time was set aside for unsupervised play in the imperial garden after school hours. In the evenings there was more study and private visits to the prince by his military aides-de-camp, who taught him how to read maps and played war-strategy games with him. As Hirohito grew older, his naval aide-de-camp had him read secret military plans and ask questions about them. By 9:30 P.M. the school day ended and all the boys retired to bed.