Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (139 page)

What MacArthur did not report to the American public, and what the American press also slighted, was Emperor Hirohito's false linkage of the Meiji past with the current postwar democracy. In effect Emperor Meiji, dead since 1912, was made the founding father of the political system about to be born in 1946. Far from the progressive and liberating statement MacArthur called it, the Declaration of Humanity was one more attempt by Hirohito and his advisers to limit, not to lead, the “democratization of his people,” something he had been doing all his adult life.

Hirohito's attempt to integrate the concept of democracy with Japanese history, thus avoiding a break with the past that the Japanese enemies of democracy could seize on and later use to argue that democracy was a foreign importation, was not the problem. Rather the issue was
which past
should prevail in the context of the Declaration of Humanity and the political situation at the time. The articulate Left wanted to ground democracy in the post-World War I era of “Taish
democracy.” Some were even seeking to link the notion of democracy to the thirteenth-century Buddhist saint Shinran. Hirohito deliberately sought to undercut these more radical notions of democracy. And three decades later he revealed in a press interview that he had “adopted democracy” not because the people were sovereign but “because [democracy] was the will of the Meiji emperor.”
⁶¹

The leading Japanese dailies gave front-page coverage to the rescript and ran special sections on the imperial family. Banner headlines across the front page of the
Mainichi
declared,
WE
BESTOW AN IMPERIAL RESCRIPT FOR THE NEW YEAR, TIES OF TRUST AND AFFECTION, WE ARE WITH THE NATION
.”
⁶²
The
Asahi shinbun
carried Prime Minister Shidehara's “Respectful Remarks,” written in simple language:

The prime minister chose his words carefully. “Development of democracy in our country” contrasted, implicitly but effectively, Japanese imperial democracy with American-style democracy. It also made the adoption of democracy a matter of respecting “the imperial will” instead of the will of the people. In this way, Hirohito and Shidehara had indirectly checked MacArthur, who had hoped to make 1945 represent the decisive break in Japanese political culture.
⁶⁴

Nevertheless, a way now opened for the Japanese people to see their relationship with their sovereign in a different light. The New Year's rescript made a deep impact and contributed to reshaping the emperor's image. By emphasizing his qualities as a human being and
asserting that the basis of his relationship with the people had always been one of trust and affection, the emperor, in effect, had inaugurated his own “adoration.” Interestingly, the issue of the
Asahi
that carried the New Year's rescript and the prime minister's comments also featured an interview with Hirohito's brother Prince Takamatsu that related concrete episodes illustrative of the emperor's character and contained themes that would figure in his re-presentation over the next few years.
⁶⁵

Popular books and news articles followed during 1946–47, giving the Japanese public what had been denied them by the “military” and other evil types around the throne: a full view of the private life of the “human emperor” and his family. These writings, and the photographic image-manipulations that accompanied them, typically described the emperor as an extraordinary natural scientist, a “sage,” a “personality of great stature,” and, above all, a “peace-loving, highly cultured intellectual” who was “always with the people.”
⁶⁶

Scholarly writers also joined the campaign for the new “symbol” emperor. Right after Hirohito had disavowed his divinity, an article by the historian Tsuda S
kichi appeared in the April 1946 issue of the new postwar intellectual journal
Sekai
and quickly came to be recognized as the earliest full-blown defense of the new monarchy. Tsuda argued that emperors are compatible with democracy, and that throughout most of Japanese recorded history, power and authority had always been divided between emperor and ruling class. In his view, state and people had been fused from the very onset of Japanese history, or, as he put it, “The Japanese imperial house was generated from within the Japanese people and unified them.” Tsuda's conflation of imperial house–state–nation was an expression of romantic nationalism that captured nicely the sensibility of the political class in the aftermath of defeat. Yoshida Shigeru echoed Tsuda's outlook when he asserted in his autobiography: “According to our historical concepts and traditional spirit
ever since antiquity, the imperial house is the progenitor of our race.”
⁶⁷

Tsuda went on to argue that “the great majority of the people” were mainly to blame for having led Japan astray. While the imperial house “always accommodated itself to change and adapted to the politics of every period,” the people did not; they “trusted statesmen who ultimately led the country into its present predicament” and they should “accept responsibility for this” rather than blame the Sh
wa emperor. He ended his article with a ringing exhortation to “love” and “embrace” the imperial house and to make it “beautiful, secure, and permanent” by their love. For “love is the most thoroughgoing form of democracy.”
⁶⁸

Tsuda's widely read and discussed article awakened memories of Prime Minister Higashikuni's argument for the “repentance of the one hundred million” for Japan's defeat. His polemic on unilateral emperor love also reminded his readers that the lexicon of Japanese monarchy is rich with concepts and phrases that can easily accommodate a peaceful, demilitarized “nation of culture.” Many of Tsuda's arguments became pillars of postwar orthodoxy concerning the throne. Defenders of the imperial house generally agreed with him that vertical “love,” directed upward to the emperor, was the key to saving “our emperor.” But for critics of the emperor system the real problem was the degree to which the imperial house could be “humanized,” given the Japanese people's difficulty in loving the emperor “within the limits of [mere] human propriety.”
⁶⁹

To grasp the conflict between the postwar defenders of the monarchy and its critics—those who sympathized with the emperor and those who found him repugnant—Tsuda's response to the Declaration of Humanity should be balanced against the response of
Shins
, a highly popular, left-wing muckraking magazine that first appeared on March 1, 1946. Its “Statement of Purpose” captured nicely the new spirit of irreverence toward the throne:

Stressing the need to “liberate the people from this feudal political idea,” the essay expressed a desire to “expose every lie from ancient times to the present” and to examine “the true nature of government under the emperor system” so as to determine whether Japan had really fought a “holy war.” “From such a viewpoint, basing ourselves on facts not excuses, we shall thoroughly examine the emperor system [
tenn
sei
] and the structure of capitalism with a view to making some contribution to the democratic education of our fellow Japanese.”
⁷⁰

One of
Shins
's contributions to undermining emperor worship was its cartoon strips treating the transmogrified Sh
wa emperor as a butt for humor—a comic victim of his palace guardians, the politicians in the Diet, and even ordinary people.
Shins
's running gags on the “human” and “great” emperor highlighted many controversies of the occupation years: the calls for his abdication, the phenomenon of pretenders to the throne (such as the fifty-six-year-old shopkeeper Kumazawa Hiromichi, whom the press referred to as the “Kumazawa emperor”), the imperial portrait, and the imperial visitations, which
Shins
ridiculed by depicting the emperor in a drawing as a “broom.”
⁷¹
Ironically, despite their debunking aim, these irreverent, leftist depictions of the emperor “humanized,” whether in a frock coat or a business suit, unintentionally reinforced the official government position that he had always been only a normal constitutional monarch, never one who made important decisions on his own.