Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (163 page)

Presently the narrator meets an elderly court chamberlain who tells him nonchalantly: “Now, if you go over there, their majesties the emperor and empress are being killed.” He proceeds as instructed, and as he looks at the deceased royal couple, he notices the foreign labels “Made in England” on Nagako's skirt and “probably” Hirohito's business suit. The high point of the dream is an exchange with Emperor Meiji's wife—that is, Hirohito's grandmother, who had died in 1914, and whom he confuses with Teimei k
g
, Hirohito's mother.

Later the dowager empress mutters defiantly, “All the people are grateful to us. They do this and they do that for us. Then in the
end they say we were bloodsuckers who squeezed money out of them. But who wanted war? You, you idiots! What insolence!”

A satirical attack on the institution of the “symbol” monarchy, and on the fabricated myth that Hirohito had heroically saved the nation from destruction, the “Dream” can be seen as revealing a miscellany of thrusts and cuts that say much about the emperor problem when the era of rapid economic growth began. At a time when most Japanese opted to avoid confronting the emperor's responsibility for the war of aggression, the actors in Fukazawa's story, including the narrator, all have a bald spot on the crown of their heads. That common scar, baldness, is Fukazawa's metaphor for the emperor problem buried deep inside the Japanese conscience. The “Dream,” in effect, asserts a mutual relationship of culpability shared by emperor and people, nearly all of whom had enthusiastically identified with him and cooperated in the unjust war of aggression. Fukazawa implies that having made the monarchy a unifying “symbol” for their own purposes, the people have not yet liberated themselves from their emperor. By failing to pursue
his
war responsibility, they avoid pursuing their own.

Fukazawa's fictionalized murder of the nation's “symbolic family” provoked expressions of delight and approval from some readers, but these quickly gave way to cries of outrage from others, and finally to a real homicide. The Imperial Household Agency sought to bring suit against both author and publisher but the Ikeda cabinet refused to take up the issue. Right-wing groups saw the struggle against the Security Treaty and Fukazawa's “Dream” as springing from the same source—a desire for revolution. They were more successful than the government in enforcing sanctions against such an act of “lèse majesté.” The rightists gathered outside the Ch
K
ron Company's Tokyo headquarters to berate and threaten its employees. The furor built until, on February l, 1960, a seventeen-year-old member of a radical right-wing party invaded the residence of the company president, Shimanaka Hoji. Finding him not at
home, the youth killed the family maid with a short sword and severely wounded Shimanaka's wife.

After the murder Fukazawa went into hiding for five years. Apparently he never published again. According to literary historian John W. Treat, he devoted “himself to making bean paste” and later “ran a muffin stall—grandly dubbed the Yumeya or ‘Dream Shop' in a working-class district of Tokyo.”
²⁸
Shimanaka disavowed any association with the writer. Rather than criticize the rightists for the bloodbath at his home, or defend freedom of speech and artistic expression, he repeatedly issued public apologies in the newspapers for having troubled the throne.
²⁹
Then, to further mollify right-wing and respectable opinion alike,
Ch
K
ron
changed its editorial direction and became an outlet for articles that made the behavior of the wartime state appear less condemnable. Other large commercial publishers followed suit, censoring themselves more strictly on subjects concerning the throne. No one (except for a few small, underground presses) thereafter dared publish parodies mocking the authority of emperors.

The “F
ry
mutan” and “Shimanaka incidents” highlighted the limits of free expression in the new, more tolerant Japan. In their wake, the mass media stopped publishing articles that could be construed as critical or demeaning of Hirohito and the imperial house. The scope of this “chrysanthemum taboo” widened in 1963 when the publisher Heibonsha ended its magazine serialization of Koyama It
ko's novel,
Lady Michiko
(
Michikosama
) following its criticism in the Diet as “entertainment” unsuitable for the nation.
³⁰
Such actions did not silence intellectual argument about the monarchy, however, and their overall impact on the mass media was ephemeral. In the middle-class consumer society that had emerged from war and occupation, the constitution had gained a high level of legitimacy. A postwar generation had become the main bearer of democratic, antiauthoritarian values, in conflict with the values of the older generations, educated under the prewar and wartime
regimes, for whom unthinking loyalty and reverence for the throne remained strong. In this conflict Hirohito stood with the older generation but was always very careful never openly to defend their view of the “War of Greater East Asia.”