Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (161 page)

In June 1952, Hirohito visited Ise Shrine, and in July the shrine of the Meiji emperor. In August he had honored the war dead. Now, on October 16, he resumed worshiping at Yasukuni Shrine. Thereafter, down to 1975, Hirohito visited the shrine on eight occasions. It was as if there had been no occupation, or at least no reforms. He was completely indifferent to Yasukuni's disestablishment from the state for its role in channeling religious energy into war.
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II

Conservatives and progressives divided in the early 1950s not only over their characterization of the Asia-Pacific war, but also about the highly subordinate military relationship that the United States had forced upon Japan. The Security Treaty, which was presented to the Yoshida cabinet as a precondition for ending the occupation, brought Japan under the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” and ceded to American military forces many special rights and prerogatives. Militarily, diplomatically, and psychologically, Japan remained dominated by its former conqueror—a kingpin state in America's Asian-Pacific network of alliances and military bases.

Many Japanese perceived their military entanglement with the United States as both highly dangerous and a flagrant negation of the peace ideals inscribed in their new constitution; others, including Hirohito, saw things differently. They took a “realist” view and recognized only the favorable international conditions for economic growth created by subordination to the strongest Western power. The security alliance with the United States relieved Japan of the costs of providing for its own defense, freed its industries to profit enormously from the war in Korea, and insured access to U.S.–controlled markets, technology, and raw materials. The other side was that the American-Soviet rivalry was turning into a world-endangering arms race, and Japan was being drawn into it just as it was developing a culture of pacifism and anti-militarism.

Lacking confidence in their ability to govern in a democracy torn by fierce social conflicts between unions and business firms, Japan's political elites felt a deep uncertainty. Conservatives (including the very small but significant minority who had spent the occupation years behind bars), drafted plans to revise the “peace constitution” and strengthen the emperor's powers by changing his status from a vague “symbol” to a “head of state” who once again could have the power to declare national emergencies and promulgate emergency decrees. Their aim was not to revive the prewar or
wartime “emperor system.” Neither was it to educate future generations in the old imperial-nation view of history rooted in mythology. Rather, conservatives sought to bolster the emperor's authority so they could use it for their own purposes. They hoped to restrict the human rights provisions of the constitution for the sake of “public welfare.” They also wanted to insert new clauses to protect rights of inheritance, thereby strengthening the family system, while containing most of the women's rights so dramatically expanded under the occupation.
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Extremely concerned about his people's preoccupation with their rights rather than their obligations, Hirohito welcomed these restorationist efforts. He was happy to once again sanction official documents and to have the credentials of foreign diplomats presented to him. His years of active participation in politics and decision making had been personally fulfilling and he longed to resume meaningful political activity. But his constitutional status was now merely that of a “symbol.” Intervention in military, diplomatic, and political affairs was denied him. When established in June 1954, the “Self-Defense Forces” and “Self-Defense Force Agency” were placed under the command of the prime minister with the principle of civilian control written into their enabling legislation. Being severed from the new Japan's military was painful for Hirohito. His growing irrelevance to Japanese politics and policy making was even more painful.

What remained to him? Only the secret briefings he received from cabinet ministers, and the year-end reports on law and order from the head of the Metropolitan Police and the governor of Tokyo. Neither briefings nor reports were provided for by constitutional law, however, and either could be ended at any time.
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As the political battles of the mid-and late 1950s unfolded, Hirohito could only hope that influential politicians would seek out his political counsel, continue the briefings he received, and refrain from insisting he be hobbled by his constitutional “symbol” status.

The political turmoil began during the government of Yoshida's successor, seventy-two-year-old Hatoyama Ichiro, who was committed (prematurely as it turned out) to a policy of economic
and
political independence for Japan. On the day Hatoyama formed his first cabinet, December 10, 1954, Foreign Minister and ex-convicted-felon Shigemitsu Mamoru came to the Palace to brief Hirohito. An innately conservative, yet also intellectually innovative and ambitious person, Shigemitsu during the late 1930s had been an advocate of the “new order” and direct imperial rule. Five years in prison had not changed his fondness for abstract plans to devise new orders. Neither had prison dulled his lively sense of himself as the emperor's loyal servant, or his belief that the emperor lay at the interstices of power and could still be used to serve the purposes of his ministers just as under the old constitution.

Throughout 1955 Shigemitsu and Hirohito discussed important diplomatic issues about twice a month. After the Socialists had gained strength in the Diet and achieved party unity, the conservatives joined to form the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), with Hatoyama as its first president. In 1955, also, the Japanese economy finally surpassed its prewar and even wartime peak output in virtually all areas except one—trade.
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While Hatoyama sought revision of the constitution to eliminate Article 9, and to elevate the status of the emperor, Shigemitsu moved to normalize relations with the Soviet Union and widen trade with China. The latter especially would be difficult to accomplish given that the United States was still under the influence of McCarthyism and refused even to recognize China while that country was pursuing a Stalinist model of autarchic development.

At his meetings with Shigemitsu, Hirohito worried aloud about Communist infiltration of Japan should relations with Moscow be restored. He cautioned the foreign minister to avoid a situation where Japan could again become a strategic rival of the United States. In late August 1955, with Nikita Khrushchev in power and
seeking a peace treaty with Japan, Hirohito spoke with Shigemitsu at his mansion in Nasu, Tochigi prefecture, and, according to Shigemitsu, stressed “the need to be friendly with the United States and hostile to communism. He said that [American] troops stationed in Japan must not withdraw.”
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Hatoyama and Shigemitsu soon tired of Hirohito's uninvited anti-Communist admonitions and stopped consulting. Their effort to negotiate with Moscow over the normalization of relations failed when they insisted that the Soviets return the southern Kurile Islands, seized at the end of World War II. Hirohito, unhappy with their diplomatic line, was probably pleased to see both of them depart.

By 1956 more and more Japanese were throwing off old authoritarian political attitudes under the influence of the new constitution and improved economic conditions. Nevertheless, the public was not yet ready to accept Japanese veterans who put down myths of wartime innocence and victimization. That year, determined to fill the void of knowledge about Japan's campaigns in China, veterans of those campaigns who had been imprisoned for war crimes in China returned home and began making public confessions to acts of genocide. In 1957 their book entitled, in Japanese,
Sank
(Burn All, Kill All, Steal All)
, became a national bestseller and introduced to the general public the term “
sank
operations.” Reaction was swift. The veterans were accused of “disgracing all Japanese.” They were branded as communist dupes, “brainwashed by the Chinese Communist Party.” Under threat from right-wing thugs, the publisher soon discontinued it.
Kill All, Burn All, Steal All
had no place in Japanese collective memory at a time when the government was supporting the U.S. policy of containing China and commemorating the nation's losses in war.
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Moreover, many still remained attached to the older forms of nationalist belonging centered on the emperor. Hirohito and his brother Prince Takamatsu took a close interest in the restorationist organizations that formed during the first wave of postoccupation
nationalism. Occasionally, the emperor's former military aide, one Hirata Noboru, came to the palace to report on veterans groups such as the Japan Veterans Friendship League, of which he was the vice president, as well as on the Japan War-Bereaved Families Association—an early-occupation-era group that had grown increasingly conservative since its reorganization in 1953.

On August 15, 1958, these two national associations joined with the Association of Shinto Shrines and various right-wing organizations, to carry out a memorial service at the large Kudan Hall, near Yasukuni Shrine. The purpose of the service was to “enshrine the heroic spirits [
eirei
] of all those who died for the country in the War of Greater East Asia.” The term “heroic spirit,” connoting an outstanding person who had made a great achievement in war, had once been associated with the notion of “holy war.” It had come to imply also a positive attitude toward the imperial state and a negative evaluation of the postwar values inscribed in the constitution. Hirohito and Empress Nagako sent flowers and an imperial message for these unofficial August 15 memorial services.
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They did not personally attend the annual ceremony, however, until 1963, when the name of the event was changed to the less ideologically charged “National War Dead Memorial Service.”

Even among veterans and bereaved families, who in remembering the war dead at the same time reaffirmed the moral justness of the “War of Greater East Asia,” there were many who also remembered that Hirohito represented all those leaders who had never admitted responsibility for the war. Such sentiment was usually expressed indirectly, as when the
Shizuoka shinbun
in October 1957 launched a campaign to induce the emperor to visit the “Nation-Protecting Shrine” [
gokoku jinja
], Shizuoka's local branch of Yasukuni Shrine. “Because the emperor is the representative of the nation and the symbol of the state, he expresses the nation's sentiment and so should bow down to the spirits of the war dead by visiting
gokoku jinja….
They died for the Japanese state, for the
nation, and for this emperor. Why should he not bow before them, show them his gratitude, and ask for their forgiveness?” And every request for Hirohito to show his “gratitude” and ask “forgiveness” of the war dead, contained the possibility of rekindling discussion of his war responsibility.
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Partly in response to this renewed nationalist activity by veterans and other conservative groups, a political backlash from the Left developed during the mid-and late 1950s. A small number of historical studies espousing critical views of the lost war gained national attention. On the university campuses, criticism rekindled in certain famous intellectuals who had supported expanding war during the 1930s and early 1940s. Communists, left-wing socialists, and liberals, but also some student groups and many white-and blue-collar workers increasingly condemned the LDP's efforts to revise the constitution. Fueling their opposition were fears of Japan being drawn into war between the United States and the Soviet Union, and fear of rearmament.

The LDP government's reinstitution of state control of education, and its heavy-handed attempt to resuscitate patriotic enthusiasm, also kindled distrust. During the mid-l950s the Ministry of Education checked the influence of the progressive Japan Teachers Union and abolished publicly elected school boards. In place of the latter, it installed the mechanism of school textbook examinations—an ideal device for perpetuating the “double standard.” The system of textbook control implemented between 1956 and 1958 played down Japan's aggressive Asian colonialism and wars. The ministry also attempted to require schools to display the “Rising Sun” flag and to teach the singing of “Kimigayo,” even though neither of them enjoyed legal sanction, both closely associated with the prewar empire. (This was finally achieved in 1999.)