Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (165 page)

While Sat
and the LDP conservatives governed, the elderly Hirohito once again could dream of becoming more active, even again the head of state. He did continue meeting foreign dignitaries and royals. As during the early, youthful years of his reign, he hosted palace receptions and elegant garden parties—though they were of course quite different gatherings. He attended national sports events and helped the LDP convey to the world the Japanese idea of peace and prosperity. In 1970 Sat
suggested Hirohito travel to Europe again. Hirohito agreed and the next year, after he had turned seventy, he and Empress Nagako departed. Fifty-five years earlier, rightists had protested his grand tour. This time the protests came from the Left, and made his journey literally a rude awakening, both for him and the Japanese nation. In the seven countries he visited, but especially in the Netherlands, West Germany, and Britain, angry demonstrators hurled objects and insults at his motorcade. They clearly did not see him as a symbol of peace or regard the Japanese people as only or primarily victims of war—at that time, a view still widely held in Japan. Hirohito and Nagako returned home but the protests in Europe reminded many that “war responsibility” was not just an issue of the past.

After Hirohito's European tour Japan turned to normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China, which was achieved by Sato's successor, Tanaka Kakuei (1972–74). Under
Tanaka, Japanese politicians continued the “double standard” in public comments on the lost war. When, on February 2, 1973, Prime Minister Tanaka was asked by a Communist Diet member whether he thought the Japan-China war had been a war of aggression, he replied blandly and blankly: “It is true that Japan once sent troops to the Chinese continent; this is a historical fact. But when you ask me straightforwardly whether that constituted, as you say, a war of aggression, it is very hard for me to answer. This is a question for future historians to evaluate.” Few Japanese found Tanaka's evasion objectionable.
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Fewer still saw any connection between his nonreply and a need to protect Hirohito.

Hirohito had continued to receive—as a courtesy, though one in violation of the constitution—secret informal briefings on international and military affairs. These opportunities for him to convey his views to the leaders of government did not become known to the Japanese public until May 1973, when Masuhara Keikichi, the head of the Self-Defense Agency under the Tanaka cabinet, disclosed to a journalist that the emperor had counseled him to “firmly incorporate [into the expansion plan for the Self-Defense Forces] the good points of the old army and avoid the bad ones.”
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Public criticism resulted: Why had the seventy-two-year-old “symbol” emperor been secretly briefed? Hirohito's reference to “the good points of the old army,” forced Tanaka to dismiss Masuhara and led the emperor to lament, “If something like this can become an issue, then I am nothing more than a papier-mâché doll.”
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Following this incident Tanaka and his immediate successors (Miki Takeo, Fukuda Takeo, and
hira Masayoshi) ended the emperor's military briefings by the head of the Self-Defense Forces, which had been going on since the early 1960s. Yet Hirohito's passionate interest in all matters military, political, and diplomatic never waned. During the late 1970s, when Japanese companies were expanding their activities throughout Southeast Asia and China, helping to make Japan an economic “superpower,” high govern
ment officials continued reporting to their elderly monarch on military and diplomatic matters, and professors from different universities continued lecturing to him on foreign affairs.

By mid-1975 approximately one half the Japanese population had been born after World War II.
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The “heroic war dead” view of the lost war, which had reaffirmed the values of imperial Japan, was no longer so popular as it had been during the first two decades after independence. Whether as sightseeing tourists, or as serious pilgrims traveling to old World War II battlefields, as if to religious shrines, to collect bones, Japanese were going abroad in ever-growing numbers. In China, Southeast Asia, and the islands of the Pacific, they gradually discovered how foreigners had suffered at the hands of the Japanese military, and how many in Asia still viewed Japan as inherently militaristic and aggressive. They were starting to overcome a narrow concentration on their own war sacrifices.

In September 1975 Emperor Hirohito and Empress Nagako paid their only state visit to the United States. Five years earlier Prime Minister Sato Eisaku and the emperor had discussed the idea of a trip to assuage economic frictions. The actual planning for the trip did not begin until 1973. On the eve of his departure, seventy-four-year-old Hirohito gave an exclusive interview to
Newsweek
journalist Bernard Krisher. As reported in the evening
Asahi
of September 22, 1975, one of Krisher's eleven questions was: “It is well known that at the time of the ending of the war you took an important role. How then do you answer those who claim that you participated also in the policy process leading to the decision to open hostilities?” Hirohito replied:

Nearly seven years after the Japanese publication of the Kido diaries, which showed that the emperor had never blindly followed the will of anyone, either cabinet or military, and the
Sugiyama memo
, which had revealed how highly active and interventionist a monarch he had been, Hirohito still mechanically reiterated the false litany that had helped to sustain him and conservative politics through three postwar decades: He had been a faithful constitutional monarch, who bore no responsibility for having started the war but deserved all the credit for having ended it; the Meiji constitution had required him to accept the advice of the cabinet when exercising his power of supreme command and his right to declare war and make peace. And so on.

On September 22 foreign journalists who resided in Tokyo asked Hirohito more questions. “[M]any Americans expect your majesty to say something about the Japan-U.S. war of the 1940s. How do you intend to answer this question?” Hirohito replied, “I am examining this question. Right now I prefer not to express my views.” In short, no comment. Further into the interview, he was asked: “Your Majesty, do you think the values of the Japanese people have changed over the past thirty years?” Hirohito replied, “I know various people have stated many different views since the end of the war, but seen broadly I don't think there has been any change [of values] from prewar to postwar.”
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Hirohito's strong emphasis on continuity could be taken as a denial that foreign occupation and reform had changed the essentials in the Japanese value-structure. Yet it could also be heard as an expression of his resolve to assert the old nonsense of the monarchy's unchanged nature.

At the end of this interview, Hirohito was asked again about his role in starting and ending the war. “You said that you had acted in accord with the stipulations of the [Meiji] constitution. That statement seems to imply that you did not oppose the military at that time. Consequently I would like to ask your majesty whether you, personally, ever felt that Japan's military leaders led it into a fruit
less and wrong adventure?” Hirohito replied: “The facts may have been as you have stated, but as the people involved are still living, if I comment now I will be criticizing persons who were leaders of that time. I do not care to do so.”
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It was unclear as to which leaders he was referring, though clearly not to himself, for throughout the occupation Hirohito had criticized everyone around him, except for T
j
and Kido, for having lost the war.

A few weeks after this series of interviews, while on his first formal state visit to Washington, Hirohito expressed his “profound sadness” over World War II to President Gerald Ford, who had visited Japan the previous year. There followed a whirlwind tour of the United States. The climax was at Disneyland, in California, where the smiling emperor made a walkabout with Mickey Mouse. Later he petted a koala bear at the San Diego Zoo.
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Photographs of the elderly emperor delighted many Americans, and seemed to confirm the false stereotype of him as a monarch who had always been peaceminded but helpless.

On returning to Tokyo, Hirohito was interviewed on television (October 31). Alerted to the war responsibility issue by the emperor's interviews with the foreign press corps and his remark to President Ford, a Japanese newsman pounced, asking the “improper” and embarrassing question: “Your majesty, at your White House banquet you said, ‘I deeply deplore that unfortunate war.' Does your majesty feel responsibility for the war itself, including the opening of hostilities [that is, not just for the defeat]? Also, what does your majesty think about so-called war responsibility?”