Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (138 page)

“Now It Can Be Told” spread the message that Japan had fought a war of aggression rather than of self-defense; its leaders had deceived the nation. Directly contradicting familiar wartime propaganda about the “War of Greater East Asia,” the program hit its Japanese listeners hard, infuriating many. Hundreds of letters poured into NHK protesting the punitive spirit of the program and the dogmatic style of presentation by its unidentified Japanese performers.
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Japan's political elites could not recognize the lost war as one of aggression, for then they would have had to discuss where responsibility for starting and losing it lay. They would have been unable to push the entire blame onto the military. Yet they had to prevent GHQ from driving too deep a wedge between the military and the people, or it would affect the emperor. Ever since the emperor's surrender broadcast, they had tried to counteract the Allied information on the war by sedulously avoiding issues of accountability while emphasizing “the emperor's gracious consideration and benevolence for the people.” Prime Minister Higashikuni set the tone at his first press conference, on August 28:

Later, at a press conference on September 4, Higashikuni repeated the message: Imperial initiative had ended the war, national repentance was now in order, and “protection of the national polity” was called for. The war had ended thanks to “the gracious benevolence of His Majesty, who paved the way to an eternal peace in order to save the people from suffering. Never before had we been so profoundly moved by the deep sympathy of His Majesty. We deeply regret having caused Him so much concern.”
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Higashikuni's plea for general repentance and national unity had mixed consequences. Some Japanese were immediately persuaded, but the reaction of most was bafflement or anger. Hard economic times, combined with the recent experience of vast inequalities in the sacrifices that had been demanded of the people during the war, undercut Higashikuni's message and contributed to growing distrust of the national leadership. His admission that a major cause of Japan's defeat had been the enormous discrepancy between its war power and the national strength of its enemies made many feel that their leaders had acted recklessly in waging war against the United States and Britain.
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After Higashikuni resigned, Prime Minister Shidehara went further in rewriting history. On November 5, 1945, the Shidehara cabinet adopted a document on war responsibility that eventually became a major prop in the postwar conservative politicians' view of the war. Entitled “Matters Concerning War Responsibility and Other Issues,” the document showed that the conservatives believed that “the empire was compelled to embark on the Greater East Asian War in view of the surrounding circumstances.” This was tantamount to saying that the T
j
cabinet's surprise attack on the United States and Britain had been in self-defense. The document also laid down the egregiously false, official line that the emperor had always been a peace-minded constitutionalist, kept in the dark about the actual details of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
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If CIE's “History of the Pacific War” slighted Japan's war against the peoples of Asia, Shidehara's dishonest policy document simply ignored Japanese aggression in China since 1931, and in Southeast Asia starting in 1940. Inverting cause and effect, the November 5 policy decision on war responsibility began the lost war from the commencement of “ABCD encirclement,” a term that denoted the military and economic pressure the United States, Britain, China, and the Netherlands had placed on Japan during the very last stage of its pre–Pearl Harbor aggression.
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At the end of 1945, men in the emperor's entourage, and former members of the wartime cabinets, were acting independently to protect Hirohito and the
kokutai
. The
Asahi shinbun
, for example, published a serialized account of Hirohito's heroic role in the surrender process. Authored by Sakomizu Hisatsune and titled, in Japanese, “In the Time of Surrender,” it ran concurrently with the publication of CIE's “History of the Pacific War” series, reflecting the basic consensual agreement between GHQ and Japan's “moderate” leaders on the matter of protecting the emperor.

Thus, in defending the emperor, GHQ and the conservative ruling elites were also promoting their respective versions of Japan's lost war. GHQ succeeded in establishing only the militarists as aggressors, not the emperor who had commanded them. The Japanese conservatives were unable to negate openly the American version of the “Pacific War.” Nevertheless they wished at least to keep alive the position that the war had been fought for self-defense, just as the imperial rescript said, and that Japan had been forced into it. Eventually, both sides were successful in implanting their views. Japan never pursued war crimes on its own with a view to seeking punishment of those who had committed them, and its government paid reparations only to other governments, never to individuals.

V

While the battle to shape historical consciousness unfolded, GHQ resumed arrests of suspected war criminals, extended its investigations to include the imperial family, and continued to await the Japanese government's plans for revision of the constitution that would inaugurate the new era of democracy. Japanese public opinion surveys showed a strong desire to have the imperial system reformed. According to one such survey, 15.9 percent “wanted the prewar system to remain”; 45.3 percent wanted “the center of morality placed outside of politics; and 28.4 percent wanted a British-style emperor system.”
⁵⁵
But the Shidehara cabinet was deliberately procrastinating while crafting a plan for only token revision of the Meiji constitution that would leave the
kokutai
virtually unchanged. Watching these developments, and desiring to encourage “spontaneous” popular organizational efforts, the reformers in GHQ turned their attention to the “emperor system.”

On December 15 a GHQ directive ended state support of Shinto shrines and eliminated Shinto from the education system by banning militaristic and ultranationalistic teachings connected with Shinto. The “Shinto Directive” introduced the principle of the separation of state and religion, thereby effectively ending the “unity of rites and politics” (
saisei itchi
) that all governments had professed to uphold since early Meiji. It also banned the use in official documents of terms such as “War of Greater East Asia” and “eight corners of the world under one roof.”

On January 1, 1946, the Japanese press printed the entire text of Emperor Hirohito's first-ever New Year's rescript to the nation, formally titled “Rescript to Promote the National Destiny” but popularly known as the “Declaration of Humanity” (
ningen sengen
).
⁵⁶
Couched in obscure, classical language, it quoted in its entirety Emperor Meiji's egalitarian-sounding imperial oath of five articles, starting with: “We shall determine all matters of state by public discussion, after assemblies have been convoked far and wide;” and
ending: “We shall seek knowledge throughout the world and thus invigorate the foundations of this imperial nation.”
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Buried in the text was a denial that the emperor's ties with his people was based on “the false conception” of him as “a living deity” (
akitsumikami
).

Drafted earlier at GHQ, the rescript had undergone translation and revision by the Shidehara cabinet and the court. The draft-translation-revision process had imaged the interplay between the court, intent on defending the
kokutai
, and American policy makers, who were ambivalent about the monarchy but believed that its reform was best approached indirectly. Both sides intended to use the rescript to open a new phase in their campaigns to rehabilitate Hirohito's image.

Hirohito's failure to deny his reputed descent from the sun goddess, Amaterasu
mikami, stands out. To emphasize the union of monarchy and democracy since the Meiji period, he inserted the oath Meiji had sworn not to the Japanese people but to Amaterasu
mikami. In so doing, he pushed into the background the message that his relationship with the people was not based on his supposed divinity. Certainly the thinking of the Japanese leadership, including the emperor, was changing at this time. By putting forth the view that “mutual trust and reverent affection” (
shin'ai to keiai
) between the emperor and the people were the basis of the imperial system, they could downplay, without ever explicitly repudiating, the Shinto foundation myths that, in any event, few Japanese still believed.
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GHQ and Western journalists chose to deemphasize the New Year's rescript's primary focus on political continuity and instead gave importance to its repudiation of false doctrine. Western press coverage of the rescript also ignored the emperor's failure to refer to the doctrine that his sovereign powers of state derived from the sun goddess, thereby leaving undenied the myth that was the basis of his renounced divinity in the first place. Hirohito's omissions did not stop the
New York Times
from saying, in its lead editorial, that by
issuing the rescript, the emperor had become “one of the great reformers in Japanese history.”
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Nor did they prevent MacArthur from promptly declaring that: “The emperor's New Year's statement pleases me very much. By it he undertakes a leading part in democratization of his people. He squarely takes his stand for the future along liberal lines. His action reflects the irresistible influence of a sound idea. A sound idea cannot be stopped.”
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