Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (104 page)

Also omitted was any reference to the “Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere” as an official war aim. The “Essentials for Implementing Administration in the Occupied Southern Area,” a document prepared by the Foreign Ministry and adopted at the liaison conference of November 20 (that is, prior to the “Hull note” and the final imperial decision for war), stated that if Japan were to advocate “the liberation of the peoples of East Asia” from white supremacy and colonial rule, its war aims would “become altruistic and have little persuasive force on the nation…the world might regard it as a racial struggle. However, it might be all right to advocate this unofficially.”
¹⁰⁷

The emperor's active role in composing and fussily checking the war rescript at all stages was in keeping with his character. Foreign Ministry officials, assisted by cabinet secretary Inada Sh
ichi, journalist Tokutomi Soh
, and court official Yoshida Masuz
, a scholar of the Chinese classics, did the actual drafting.
¹⁰⁸
Officers in the Military Affairs Bureaus of both branches, as well as civilian bureaucrats in the prime minister's office, participated in polishing it. The emperor and Kido then read through the various drafts. The analysis by the historian Okabe Makio of three surviving versions—one
unnumbered, another numbered 4, and a third numbered 6—suggests that the rescript may have gone through as many as ten or eleven different versions.
¹⁰⁹
Kido, T
j
, T
g
, and the emperor played active roles throughout this process; and at Hirohito's insistence several significant changes were inserted into the text.

The desire for peace had been a consistent element in the public personas of his father and grandfather, and had also been embodied in important instructional texts of his youth. Hirohito now carefully reiterated the peace theme in his only declaration of war. Thus, before the words “Our empire has been brought to cross swords with America and Britain,” he ordered the insertion of formulaic expressions stating that the emperor did not want war (“It has been truly unavoidable and far from our wishes that…”). Such phrases underscored his supposed desire for peace—in the sense of global peace among the world's great regional spheres rather than among particular nations.

Second, the last line of the war rescript originally contained the phrase “Advocate the principles of the Imperial Way throughout the world [
k
d
no taigi o ch
gai ni seny
sen koto o kisu
].” To the emperor it was unobjectionable for the Field Service Code (
senjinkun
) of the Imperial Army to use the amuletic term “Imperial Way” (
k
d
); virtually every act of Japanese territorial aggrandizement since 1931 had been done under that name. But he did not want ideas of imperial expansion in his war rescript, crafted for everyone in Japan and the world to see.
¹¹⁰
On his instruction, therefore, Kido had this line changed to “preserve the glory of our empire” [
teikoku no k
ei o hozen semu koto o kisu
]. Needless to say, none of these changes detracted from the overall message that Japan, “for its existence and self-defense,” was setting out to eliminate the hand of Anglo-American imperialism in Asia.