Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (159 page)

In the summer of 1949 national athletic events such as the All-Japan Swimming Champion Tournament helped to heighten nationalism for the first time under the occupation. The emperor and empress attended, and Hirohito afterwards gave words of encouragement to the athletes. When the Japanese swimming champion Furuhashi Hironoshin established three world records at the U.S. national swimming meet in Los Angeles, he and his teammates were later granted an audience at the palace and a tea in their honor.
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National pride was also enriched that year by the award of the Nobel Prize in physics to Professor Yukawa Hideki. Once again Hirohito made a widely reported appearance in the presence of these “symbolic leaders” of the new Japan.
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Early in 1950 Hirohito published poems about his Kyushu visit and his joy at Professor Yukawa's Nobel award, then embarked on another series of tours.
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His nineteen-day journey through Shikoku and Awajishima began on March 13.
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He visited prefectural government offices, public schools and universities, agricultural experimental stations, homes for orphans, paper mills, chemical plants, and textile and machine tool factories. As always, people responded variously. Most often the touring emperor was warmly received as an embodiment of the spirit of love, a person of benevolence, and a celebrity. A minority, however, still believed him to be a sacred presence, a living deity, and a force so powerful as to animate their very gestures and reflexes. Upon seeing him approach, they would shout
banzais
and be moved to tears. Their facial muscles would tighten, their bodies vibrate, and their legs tremble as if struck by a strong electric current. Emotional paralysis would follow, and they might momentarily lose consciousness of where they were. This
phenomemon, the physical expression of an intact sense of subjecthood, has been repeatedly described in the reminiscences of those who experienced it.
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The common theme is the affirmative sense of having worked hard and suffered harshly together with the emperor.

On the other hand no amount of image manipulation could wipe away his war responsibility. Feelings of indifference toward the emperor were also widespread. And for a small minority on the left he remained the butt of jokes and an object of derision elicited by his inarticulateness.

American and Japanese diplomatic preparations were moving ahead swiftly toward a peace treaty that would incorporate Japan in an American-led bloc against the Soviet Union and the new Communist dictatorship in China. Hirohito now secretly interjected himself into this process, making it easier than it might have been for the United States to negotiate a one-sided military alliance with Japan that gave the Truman administration virtually everything it wanted.

As reconstructed by historian Toyoshita Narahiko, Hirohito's diplomatic interventions began right after his tenth meeting with MacArthur, on April 18, 1950. The issue between the two leaders (ever since their fourth meeting on May 6, 1947) was still the war-renouncing constitution and the weight that each man attached to it. According to the emperor's interpreter for their ninth and tenth meetings, Matsui Akira, they had discussed the “peace problem” on November 26, 1949, when debate over the peace treaty was heating up, and at the April 18 meeting the subject was the threat to Japan from the Communist camp. On both occasions MacArthur reportedly preached the “spirit of Article 9.” Hirohito, who had never been pacifistically inclined except for public relations purposes, held that only military power could protect Japan. Perhaps feeling that his differences with the supreme commander on the future security of Japan were unbridgeable, the emperor finally decided to bypass him.

Two background factors may have influenced him. In February 1950 the Soviet Union had reopened the issue of Hirohito's war criminality by demanding that he be brought to trial for having sanctioned biological and chemical warfare during World War II.
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And on April 6 the Republican lawyer John Foster Dulles was appointed a special adviser to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, fueling speculation in Tokyo and Washington that the peace treaty negotiations, stalled ever since Fall 1949 by disagreements between the Pentagon and the State Department, would start moving forward again. Toyoshita conjectures that right after Hirohito's tenth meeting with MacArthur, when Finance Minister Ikeda Hayato went to Washington, he delivered a secret personal message from the emperor to Joseph M. Dodge, MacArthur's financial adviser. The emperor's message to Dodge was “to the effect that the [Yoshida] Government desires the earliest possible treaty. As such a treaty probably would require the maintenance of U.S. forces [on Japanese soil]…if the U.S. Government hesitates to make these conditions, the Japanese Government [itself] will try to find a way to offer them.”
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In short Hirohito, not Yoshida, made the first effort to hurry the peace treaty that would end the occupation, leave American military forces and bases in Japan, and return Japanese independence.

Dulles went to Tokyo in late June to open full-scale negotiations on a peace and security treaty to end the occupation. At his first meeting with Yoshida, he found the prime minister disappointing. Unlike Hirohito, Yoshida appeared unrushed and reluctant to commit on security matters. Three days later, on June 25, the North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung, having secured prior, tacit support from Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, sent his army across the 38th parallel deep into South Korea. The endemic fighting in the divided Korean peninsula had turned into full-scale civil war. The Truman administration, always quick on the trigger, immediately ordered U.S. military intervention, overnight internationalizing the conflict. MacArthur's command in Tokyo, though caught psychologi
cally unprepared, responded with air, ground, and sea operations against North Korea.

Hirohito, meanwhile, had learned of Yoshida's disastrous meeting with Dulles. The next evening, he dispatched an “oral message” to Dulles through Matsudaira Yasumasa of the Imperial Household Agency, registering his loss of confidence in Yoshida. By Dulles's account the “main point” was that when officials from the United States “came to investigate conditions in Japan, they only saw Japanese in the Government of Japan who had been officially approved by SCAP…. SCAP apparently feared contacts with some of the older Japanese because of their alleged former militaristic outlook.” Yet it was precisely these veteran officials, most of whom were purgees, who could “give most valuable advice and assistance to Americans interested in future relations between our two countries.” Hirohito “suggested that before any final action with regard to the…provisions of a peace treaty be taken there should be set up some form of advisory council of Japanese who would be truly representative of the people.”
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Two
Newsweek
journalists, Harry Kern and Compton Packenham, had arranged the dinner at which Matsudaira conveyed this “oral message” to Dulles. Critical of MacArthur's economic reforms and his purge of war criminals, they had organized, two years earlier, an “American Council on Japan,” dedicated to fostering trade between the United States and Japan. Hirohito may have believed that, where the peace treaty and rearmament were concerned, “loyal Shigeru” was no longer “truly representative of the people of Japan.” To him Kern and Packenham represented a new, independent channel by which, circumventing his prime minister, as he had earlier circumvented MacArthur, he could communicate with Washington. It was constitutionally reprehensible; it was characteristically Hirohito. In effect, he was reviving the prewar tradition of “dual diplomacy.”
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On January 25, 1951, Dulles returned to Tokyo to work out
remaining problems. At his first staff meeting, Dulles stated that the crux was “Do we get the right to station as many troops as we want [,] where we want and for as long as we want [,] or do we not?”
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Wanting unlimited military access to all areas of Japan, Dulles worried that the Japanese might try to extract concessions. But Yoshida, rather than make an effort, even a pro forma one, to limit America's special privileges in postoccupation Japan, simply yielded. The United States would have its bases and its extraterritorial privileges; Japan would even establish a fifty-thousand-man “token” national defense force. Yoshida was obviously inept. But his failure in these negotiations—to gain leverage from granting bases, and to counter Dulles's argument that the United States was performing an act of benevolence by leaving its military in Japan—may have had more to do with the influence of Hirohito than with his own blundering.

How often Hirohito and his entourage communicated with key members of the American Council on Japan to facilitate discussions and negotiations cannot be determined. One must not overemphasize their influence. But neither should his role be ignored. On February 10, 1951, Hirohito hosted a banquet for Dulles at the Imperial Palace. He also met him on at least two other occasions that year. The future American secretary of state certainly regarded the Sh
wa emperor as more than a merely ceremonial figure.

The Korean War contributed to a sharp change in the Japanese national mood. The earlier passion to develop democracy cooled. Left-led labor unions came under attack. A climate of political repression of the left ensued and the Yoshida government and the Japanese public showed a growing intolerance of the nascent peace movement and of criticism of the emperor. That summer the satirical magazine
Shins
reported that a young man from Sasebo city in Nagasaki prefecture claimed to be Hirohito's “hidden child.”
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Prime Minister Yoshida, acting on behalf of Hirohito, sued.
Shins
's publisher, Sawa Keitar
, soon found himself locked up for libel.
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Even Hirohito's youngest brother, Prince Mikasa, came in for criti
cism after publicly opposing the revival of “National Foundation Day” (Kigensetsu) and warning of the danger of militarism.
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