Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (16 page)

In the third term of their academic year—the winter months of January through March—staff and students moved to the imperial mansion in Numazu, where the climate was warmer. There classroom instruction was carried out in somewhat less formal surroundings. During the summer months of June through September, when his classmates returned to their families, Hirohito spent only a short period of time with his parents. His summers were mostly given to pursuing a busy schedule of tours of the main army camps, naval bases, and military arsenals in the country.
⁷⁸
He also toured the military academies, paid regular visits to the General Staff Headquarters of the army and navy, acquired experience in seamanship during training cruises aboard frigates and cruisers, inspected artillery tests, and observed divisional and regimental maneuvers.
⁷⁹

Hirohito's teachers, seeking to prepare him for the different roles he was to play as an emperor in the Meiji mold, taught him the official interpretation of the nation's history, which combined elements of nationalism and racism in the myth of his descent from the gods. Although as crown prince he inhabited a moral sphere in which questions of personal accountability for the exercise of power and authority would not arise, he was indoctrinated in the same myths that were put forth in the nation's primary and military schools. The “imperial family” (
k
zoku
), at the apex of the national hierarchy of hereditary houses, and the titled peers (
kazoku
), directly below them, may not all have agreed that Crown Prince Hirohito was descended from the gods, but he understood the utility of that tenet. Eventually it became a working part of his identity.

Hirohito was born to be the leader of a highly militarized imperial family (
k
zoku
), whose adult male and female members played unique public roles in Japanese life. The
k
zoku
was a self-
governing, homogeneous group composed of nine ranks of royalty, extending through cousins, of which there were many. The upper ranks consisted of the reigning empress, the emperor's eldest son, or crown prince, the dowager empress, the princes and princesses of the blood, and their children. Hirohito's brothers, called
jiki miya
, consituted a separate order within the
k
zoku
. Unaffected by seniority, they were expected to behave differently from other
k
zoku
. The emperor, as head of the eternal imperial house,
k
shitsu
, was not, technically speaking, a “member” of his imperial family but stood above it as a chieftain, closely supervising and unifying its members. The second and third sons of
k
zoku
, upon reaching adulthood, automatically became hereditary peers (
kazoku)
and most were granted the title of “count.”
⁸⁰
Enjoying ownership of land, stocks, bonds, multiple residences, servants, and generous stipends administered by the Imperial Household Ministry, some
k
zoku
traveled abroad and lived far freer lives than did most ordinary Japanese. Some also tended to express “liberal” views, though that certainly cannot be said of Hirohito's mother, his brothers Chichibu and Takamatsu, or of his uncles, Field Marshal Kan'in Kotohito and Fleet Admiral Fushimi, who were later used by the central command of the army and navy as levers for influencing the throne.

Adult male princes of the blood were eligible for direct appointment by the emperor to the House of Peers, an upper branch of the Imperial Diet that had equal authority with the lower house. Some of them also participated—together with the lord keeper of the privy seal, the president of the privy council, the imperial household minister, the justice minister, and the president of the Court of Cassation (the highest court of appeals)—in an Imperial Family Council, established under the Imperial Household Law.
⁸¹
The infrequently convened family council addressed questions pertaining solely to the imperial house. Since
k
zoku
were prevented by law from formally assisting the emperor as political advisers, their real influence lay in
holding strategic positions of command within the armed forces and in their frequent access to the emperor.

An affluent, landed class that participated in state activities as military officers, the
k
zoku
may be compared to the Prussian “Junker” nobility, though without that class's narrow-mindedness and pietism, and with a much stronger bourgeois rather than professional military character. Having become militarized in the course of strengthening the imperial state, however, the male members of the imperial family, regardless of their wishes or their suitability for military life, received military instruction, starting at the Peers' School. On becoming professional officers, they were incorporated into the armed forces at the highest levels of command and given opportunities to pursue military studies abroad. Their importance as a service elite, diffusing within the armed forces the consciousness of being directly subordinate to the emperor, cannot be overestimated.
⁸²