Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (141 page)

The next day the Japanese people read in their newspapers an outline of the Japanese government's draft constitution. They learned that sovereignty would be placed in them rather than in the will of the emperor, and that Japan would henceforth renounce war. On March 9 the
Mainichi shinbun
published the view of liberal international law scholar Yokota Kisabur
. Shown an advance draft of the constitution by GHQ officials, Yokota now opined that the clause renouncing war was equivalent to the idealistic Kellogg-Briand Pact, and that it did not make impossible the use of military force for self-defense, or “in cases involving international cooperation.”
⁸⁶

Diet debate and revision of the constitution took place between April and August 1946. There is no evidence that members of the all-important lower-house subcommittee on the constitution, chaired by Ashida, accepted the interpretation of Yokota that the possibility of using armed force for self-defense and for international security was inherent in the wording of Article 9. The prevailing consensus was total, absolute denial of military force in keeping with public opinion at the time.

The new Constitution of Japan was promulgated eight months after Hirohito accepted the MacArthur draft, and went into effect the next year, on May 3, 1947. By then, the Imperial Household Ministry had become the Imperial Household Office (
Kunaifu
), and the number of its employees had been greatly reduced. The peerage had been abolished. The National Treasury had taken over the budget of the Imperial Household Office, and the state had taken title
to the imperial museums, which now became national museums.
⁸⁷

So the end came swiftly for most of the supporting institutions, practices, and powers of monarchy created during Meiji. Pressured by MacArthur and Shidehara, threatened by talk of abdication from his siblings and his uncles, and fearing the Tokyo war crimes trials, Hirohito resisted for two weeks, then gave in. Bleakly he told Shidehara, “As the matter has gone this far, it can't be helped.”
⁸⁸
It was exactly the sort of remark he had made at every other critical juncture of his reign: from his assent to the bombing of Chinchow in south Manchuria in October 1931 and the military alliance with Hitler and Mussolini of September 1940, to his approval of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

Yoshida Shigeru would later claim in his memoirs that it was the emperor himself who made the “sacred decision” to accept the MacArthur draft. Thereupon the divided Shidehara cabinet saw the light, and agreed to accept it.
⁸⁹
The American author of the chapter on “The New Constitution of Japan” in GHQ's official history of the occupation also left the impression that the emperor was an enthusiastic supporter of MacArthur's draft constitution and that he conveyed his enthusiasm to Shidehara, Yoshida, and chief cabinet secretary Narahashi Wataru during an audience on February 22,1946.
⁹⁰

Historian Watanabe Osamu, however, has revealed how the American version of events was based on Narahashi's account of his alleged imperial audience. In fact, there was no audience culminating in a decisive imperial assent on February 22. Ashida did not record one in his diary, and Yoshida himself denied having had an audience with the emperor that day. Years later Yoshida created his own version of the emperor's role in order to strengthen Japanese acceptance of the new constitution at a time when it was under attack from former Class A war criminal suspects and once-purged, subsequently pardoned, politicians. By the mid–1950s the latter (associated with Hatoyama Ichiro of the Democratic Party) had
become the mainstream conservatives in the Diet and were leading a drive to amend the constitution totally. In an informal tape-recorded interview in 1955 with Kanamori Tokujir
, a former minister of state during his first cabinet, Yoshida indicated that the emperor was not an enthusiastic supporter of a constitution that barred him from
any
political role. Referring to Shidehara's audience of March 5, 1946, Yoshida told Kanamori that Emperor Hirohito merely said (referring to his loss of all political functions) “something to the effect of ‘Let it go.'”
⁹¹

Thus, when the constitutional moment arrived, Hirohito did sanction the most progressive reform ever presented to him. By his assent he himself became a symbol of the nation that claimed descent from the “homogeneous” Yamato race, and also a symbol—no longer a wielder—of sovereignty. After clinging tenaciously to the
kokutai
longer than anyone else, he finally acted from fear, at the moment when he felt the whole world was against him: fear he would be pressured into abdication, and, most of all, fear that with prolonged public discussion of his hesitancy would come an uncontrollable debate on republicanism, which would end in the monarchy itself being eliminated. Thereafter, for the rest of his life, he continued at odds with his symbolic status, psychologically unable to adjust to it.
⁹²

Chapter 1, Article 1, of the final Japanese version of the new constitution, redefined the emperor as “the symbol of the state and of the unity of the nation, deriving his position from the will of the nation with whom resides sovereign power.” During subsequent deliberations on the constitution by the Ninetieth (and last) Imperial Diet, the members declared themselves loyal subjects of the emperor and downplayed this new basis of political legitimacy. But they did not try to restore the emperor's powers. The Sh
wa emperor had failed in his most important duty—coordinating the army, the navy, and the government and making the system work. Failure would not be rewarded. More important, the unpurged
politicians did not want to return to the authoritarian prewar system in which even conservative political parties had been unable to exercise the full powers of the state. As for Article 9, until the Korean War changed the circumstances, no politician dared to challenge public opinion by arguing that Japan had retained the right to maintain war power for self-defense.

Up to 1947 the real constitutional quarrel in occupied Japan had pitted supporters of the
kokutai
, centered on the court group and old guard politicians, against a small number of Japanese reformers who wanted a ceremonial monarchy and a genuine civil society but lacked the political power to achieve those goals on their own.
⁹³
Thanks to GHQ, the reformers won, leaving the extremes in the debate isolated: Communists on the left and die-hard protectors of the
kokutai
on the right, plus a few prewar constitutional scholars who were so committed to the Meiji constitution as to be unable to conceptualize a democratic state.

Hirohito's teacher of constitutional law, Shimizu T
ru, and Professor Minobe Tatsukichi represented the latter. Shimizu was so depressed by the new constitution, and by newspaper reports of crowds jostling the emperor in his walkabouts, that he committed suicide.
⁹⁴
Minobe, once the foremost liberal influence on prewar parliamentary politics, argued against the new constitution in newspaper and journal articles during 1946. Still fixated on German theories of constitutional law, Minobe emerged from the war as a staunch opponent of popular sovereignty and majority rule. He insisted that the only way to integrate the nation and realize “true democracy”—as opposed to the “American-style” practice, which easily led to “tyranny”—was for Japan to have a monarch in whom political power was concentrated.
⁹⁵

Nevertheless Emperor Hirohito remained on the throne—unindicted, unrepentant, and protected as well as crippled by the new constitution. And so the monarchy too remained a political issue, and the old constitution continued to exert influence through the
debate on Hirohito's war responsibility. For the Meiji constitution now furnished the theoretical basis for putting all blame for the war on the military. Hereafter both apologists and critics of Hirohito's wartime behavior would repeatedly make use of different interpretations of its articles. The apologists (including of course Hirohito) would use the old constitution to exonerate him of responsibility on the general ground that constitutional monarchs are, by definition, politically passive and nonaccountable for their actions. They would also invoke the specific ground that Articles 3 and 55 immunized him and placed responsibility in the hands of his advisers.

Critics of the emperor would deny the very premise of constitutional monarchy. Arguing that Hirohito had been more akin to an absolute monarch, they would stress the responsibility that accrued to him as supreme commander and sole issuer of military orders, responsible for determining the organization and peacetime standing of the armed forces. The critics would also point to the prewar system of “independence of the right of supreme command,” and to the emperor's unique power to proclaim military orders. Ultimately they claimed that the whole issue had been left unresolved precisely because he had never been indicted.
⁹⁶

The Constitution of Japan stripped the emperor of all political authority, removed him from the system of power, and linked him to the notion of the “peace state.” It thereby foreclosed public discussion on the monarchy before it had really begun. At the same time the new constitution changed the emperor from an absolute value into a relative one, from a “sacred and inviolable” divinity into a mere human being under the law. Henceforth it was the constitution, not the emperor, that articulated the highest ideals, aspirations, and purposes of the Japanese people. And instead of Hirohito having enacted the constitution, the Diet had enacted Hirohito. On paper at least, he possessed none of the prerogatives of power of a British monarch and could be criticized like any other official organ of state. Constitutionally speaking Japan had indeed created a new
variant of the genus “constitutional monarchy”—one that was in step with modernity, quite unlike the archaic institution still perpetuating itself in Great Britain.

Constitutions, however, are living things, put into practice in accordance with existing conventions, precedents, and beliefs. At the deepest levels of national identity, emperorism retained its hold over the minds of many Japanese. Because of what many influential people believed him and the imperial house to be and to stand for, Hirohito still could influence Japanese political evolution. Powerful emotional barriers to questioning his conduct or criticizing his status continued throughout the occupation and for the rest of his life.