Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (14 page)

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. T
g
Heihachir
and naval Capt. Viscount 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 T
g
-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 T
g
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 T
g
destroyed the Russian Baltic squadron).