Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (164 page)

Some 233 organized crime and rightist groups were disbanded during the early occupation years. Between 1958 and 1961 right-wing terrorism returned briefly to the Japanese political scene. There is no clear evidence that Kishi and his “mainstream” faction of the LDP directly ordered terrorism against political opponents. Nevertheless, their hard-line policies probably did foster a climate in which such incidents could occur while the police, passive if not complicit, looked the other way. Right-wing hit men struck at leftist Diet members and intimidated opponents of the Security Treaty. Asanuma Inejir
, chairman of the Socialist Party, was assassinated while giving a speech on live television. Radical rightists also ventured into the cultural arena. For the first time in the postwar era, they targeted for intimidation and death writers like Fukuzawa who were effective in expressing the need for continued reform of the monarchy.

IV

Drawing a lesson from Kishi's downfall, his successor, Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato, abandoned constitutional revision and hoisted the slogan “Tolerance and Patience.” Ikeda is mainly remembered for his plan to “double” the nation's income within a decade by increasing its GNP by 9 percent annually. During his years in power—June 1960 to November 1964—Japan entered a period of extraordinary economic growth that continued until the first “oil shock” in 1973. Though it slowed at that time, the rate of growth still remained well above that of all Western nations. The decline in the Japanese farm population also accelerated, going from almost a third of the total employed in 1960 to under a fifth in 1970 and less than a tenth in
1980. When Hirohito turned sixty-seven in 1968, Japan had achieved the second largest GNP in the capitalist world; by the time he reached eighty in 1981, few of the agricultural communities that years earlier had been important mainstays of the monarchy still even existed.
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In 1963 Ikeda succeeded in making surrender day, August 15, the anniversary for memorializing the nation's war dead in a purely secular, non-Shinto ceremony of condolence. Avoiding all historical evaluation of the war itself, Ikeda, like Yoshida before him, declared the war dead to be “the foundation of the remarkable development of our economy and culture.” Henceforth War Memorial Day would be an occasion for other prime ministers to evoke that Yoshida-Ikeda memorial mantra: From the sacrifices of the war dead had come, in time, postwar economic prosperity.
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In such ways were small steps taken in the direction of legitimizing the war and reconstituting an inclusive national community. Also in 1963, the Ikeda government passed a new law on textbooks designed to “normalize education.” The new law quickly led to the production of history texts and teaching guides that completely skirted the issue of Japan's culpability for aggression and Hirohito's role in the war.

Ikeda also revived the practice, originally stipulated in the Meiji constitution and abandoned during the occupation, of having the emperor bestow imperial awards on distinguished citizens who had made important contributions to the nation in the arts and sciences. The award ceremonies, held at the palace, affirmed a cultural hierarchy based on excellence and political conformity, and at the same time strengthened the societal hierarchy atop which was Hirohito on the imperial throne. From 1963, awards for battlefield survivors were included, and from April 1964, posthumous awards to servicemen killed in combat. The leader of the LDP drew up the awards lists twice annually from 1963 onward and transmitted them to the emperor. Conferring these imperial accolades always just before election days served not only to honor deserving artists, intellectu
als, and war veterans, but also gave popular support to the LDP, which was precisely their purpose.
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Spreading imperial accolades in order to strengthen a ruling party's electoral support base was certainly “a new use of the imperial institution,” though it had well established counterparts overseas.
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By middle and later Sh
wa, the 1960s into the 1970s, Japan was transforming rapidly into an intensely urbanized society, oriented to meet the infrastructural, financial, technical, and social requirements of huge capitalist enterprises. Above all, postwar Japan was politically dedicated to supporting big business, big manufacturing, and big trade, no matter what the human and environmental costs. And as big business expanded and consolidated, the Japanese middle class also expanded. During the occupation, large enterprises joined together in business federations. Representing corporate and financial interests with their ever changing requirements, these federations essentially mediated between corporate interests and key ministries of the state, such as Finance, Post and Telecommunications, and International Trade and Industry and the Bank of Japan, and the ruling party establishment.
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Prosperity and affluence unified this new Japanese society, and the role constitutionally assigned to the “symbol” was now merely supplementary.

Unlike most of the wartime generation who had identified with the emperor or paid lip service to (if they did not actually believe in) the ideological principles of the state, the “younger generation” of the 1970s, for example, had been brought up in the emerging enterprise society. They identified with the company, tended to be distrustful of the state, and affirmed the values of economic growth and democracy. Stated differently: The series of ideological changes that had gone from pre-Meiji samurai loyalty to feudal lords and post-Meiji loyalty of all “subjects” to the emperor had shifted to employee loyalty to the firm in a company-centered society. With Japan fast becoming a major economic power, but not yet having regained its status as a great political power, the monarchy was no longer needed
to actively mold the nation as in Meiji, or to prevent and constrain democratic change as in Taish
and early Sh
wa. Nevertheless, because the constitution preserved the monarchy, and the monarchy contravened the principle of equality and nondiscrimination under the law, it remained a constraint on the freedom of the individual. This was not because the conservative political establishment of the 1960s and 1970s ordered it to perform as such: the enterprise society itself generated hierarchy and discrimination, and the monarchy, situated at its apex, served to validate those principles.
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After Kishi no LDP government could ignore the division in values between liberals and progressives on one side, and conservatives on the other, especially when the division was expressed at the polls. Accordingly, divisive issues of constitutional revision and remilitarization remained off the agenda of Ikeda's successor, Sato Eisaku (Kishi's half brother). Prime Minister Sato's goal was one of economic growth and national unity based on material affluence. By pursuing “consensus politics,” and encouraging forgetfulness of Japan's militarist and colonialist past, he was able to stay in office for eight years, 1964 to 1972, longer than any other prime minister. Like his predecessor Ikeda, Sato idolized Yoshida Shigeru, and from the start of his tenure he sought to please the old emperor, as Yoshida had, by his pro-American policy and also by keeping Hirohito fully abreast of political developments.

On December 26, approximately six weeks after forming his cabinet, Sato visited the palace to brief the emperor for the first time.
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They soon developed a warm personal relationship. Thereafter (except when campaigning or traveling abroad) Sato went out of his way to report to Hirohito on international affairs, national politics, education and defense issues, the economy, and agricultural policy. He reported frequently and at length, sometimes even while visiting the palace for investiture ceremonies and imperial awards. Eager to follow, and be part of, state affairs, Hirohito plied Sato with questions.

In the mid-and late 1960s President Lyndon Johnson was beginning to escalate the war in Vietnam, and protesting Japanese students were focusing on the American bases in Okinawa from which B-52s were taking off to bomb North Vietnam. Sato fully supported the American aggression against North Vietnam. As the war intensified, the importance of both Japan and Okinawa to the United States increased. In October 1964 China tested its first atomic bomb. Exactly two years later China, which was descending into the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, test-fired a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to any target in East Asia. It soon became clear to some in Washington that in due time continental-size China would acquire a nuclear arsenal. This meant Okinawa would be more important to the United States. A rethinking of U.S.–China relations was clearly necessary.

Hirohito's personal thoughts about the first Chinese bomb and the later missile launch are not known. It is likely, however, that neither he nor Sato questioned the usefulness of the American “nuclear umbrella” even though China was now embarked on nuclear missile development. Hirohito's questions, according to Sato, focused on the increasingly troubled economic relationship with the United States. At such times Sato would try to keep him abreast of the progress he was making in the textile dispute. They also talked about the course of the Vietnam War, how the prime minister was dealing with student protests, and the policies of President Johnson and those of the even more inscrutable Nixon. While Hirohito appreciated Sato's handling of foreign and domestic affairs, he would occasionally express anger at the corruption of LDP Diet members and cabinet officials.
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During Sato's tenure in office, Hirohito moved into a new, scaled-down palace (1964), participated in the hosting of the Olympic Games in Tokyo (also in 1964), the staging of the “Meiji Centennial” ceremonies (1968), which celebrated a century of “successful modernization,” and the World Exposition in Osaka, where he and the empress twice made appearances (1970). These events
strengthened pride in Japan's economic achievements and asserted the dignity of the nation. National pride and dignity were further enhanced when Sato negotiated the retrocession of Okinawa to Japan's control (1972). A large continuing American military presence was allowed, however, because both sides wanted the island to remain America's “Gibraltar of the Pacific.” On the occasion of the final return ceremony in Tokyo, Hirohito met visiting foreign dignitaries and gave a short speech expressing his condolences for the sacrifices made by the people of Okinawa both during and following the war.
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