Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (17 page)

Young Hirohito pursued his first four years of military training while World War I was being fought, and his last three during the Siberian Expedition. In the first stage, 1914 through early 1918, the European war should have dampened the glory of the Russo-Japanese War, in which military men still basked. Although Japan was allied with Britain and the United States against Germany—the model for its professional military class—the Japanese army failed to learn the lessons of the critical role played by modern weaponry in mass warfare. Officers of the seventeen divisions into which the standing army was then divided preferred the idealized tradition of
bushid
as expressed in the classic text
hagakure
, which glorified death and loyalty unto death as the highest values.
⁸³
Harsh training and frequent punishments, an emphasis on military spirit, and the fostering of regionalism (by keeping together in the same regimental units men who came from the same geographical area, so that they would fight for the honor of their local region) remained the
army's chief characteristics. Indoctrination centered on cultivating
bushid
and the “spirit of Japan” (
Yamato damashii
), which connoted racial superiority and a sense of invincibility.
⁸⁴
Both elements were “indissolubly linked” to Japan's national polity, or
kokutai
, centered on the emperor and expressed in the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors of 1882.
⁸⁵
The severe punishments and bullying by superiors at all levels led to a steady erosion of army morale, and to an increasingly open resort to violence by officers to maintain discipline and manage troops.
⁸⁶

During Hirohito's last three years at the Ogakumonjo, 1918 to early 1921, the maintenance of discipline in the ranks became an urgent task. Concurrently the values of military men changed, as did the times. World War I brought in its wake the Bolshevik Revolution abroad and the “rice riots” at home, creating a situation that forced the army once again to examine its own character. The riots that erupted throughout Japan in the summer of 1918 led to the callout of more than 57,000 troops to suppress them. These protests were followed over the next three years by disturbances connected with labor and tenant disputes and with the campaign for universal male suffrage. The most violent strikes in Japanese history occurred in this period: at the Tokyo Artillery Arsenal (1919 and 1921), the Kamaishi iron mine (1919), the Ashio copper mine (April 1921), Yawata Steel (1920), and the Kawasaki-Mitsubishi Shipyards in Kobe in the summer of 1921. The Kobe strikes, involving more than 35,000 workers, led to the army being called out again—as always, in support of management. Before the turmoil in Kobe ended, more than 300 workers were wounded and some 250 arrested.
⁸⁷
Thus the army returned to its original mission of maintaining domestic law and order, and its standing in ordinary Japanese life plummeted. For the second time since its creation—the first being in the 1870s and 1880s—the army became an object of open public criticism, especially reviled
whenever troops were used to put down peasant protests and labor strikes.
⁸⁸

Because the military was a microcosm of society, as well as a major employer of factory workers in its arsenals and shipyards throughout the country, the changes that occurred in Japanese life during the six years between the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the end of the war boom in 1920 also inaugurated a new phase in the military's relationship to the monarchy. The industrial sector was already outgrowing the agricultural sector in productivity. The sphere of imperial rule was contracting. The demeanor of Commander in Chief Emperor Taish
, his utter lack of charisma, and the
genr
's gross manipulation of him were almost common knowledge in political circles. After 1918 Taish
was increasingly unable to attend the army and navy grand maneuvers, appear at the graduation exercises of the military schools, or perform any of his other annual ceremonial duties, including the convoking of the Diet. He faded from public view just when the ideological climate was most unsettled and the military was searching for ways to overcome its social isolation. These developments made it more difficult to persuade conscripts to obey orders just as though they came directly from the emperor.

Rather than counterpose itself dogmatically to the new trends in thought, the army followed the current mood, revising its education system and initially taking a tolerant attitude toward many aspects of the Taish
democracy movement.
⁸⁹
Some army officers began studying the social causes of industrial and rural conflicts. Within a short time they started to question whether a
kokutai
based on the founding legends was an adequate spiritual source of their institutional identity. Articles soon appeared in the official journal of the army,
Kaik
sha kiji
, which implicitly downgraded the importance of the imperial house as a symbol of the unity between the military and society.
⁹⁰

V

By the time Hirohito graduated from the Ogakumonjo in 1921, what had begun as a crisis of oligarchic government in 1912, occasioned by the transition from Meiji to Taish
, had developed into something much more serious: a burgeoning crisis of legitimacy for the monarchy. While anticolonial movements in Korea and China buffeted the empire abroad, militant labor and tenant movements suddenly arose and began to spread, testifying to growing public dissatisfaction with the status quo at home. In this new post–World War I setting, with the Japanese people forcefully asserting their own views of the
kokutai
and questioning the unequal social order dominated by bureaucrats, the military, and capitalists, the late-Meiji image of a harmonious family-state became impossible to sustain.

Hirohito's middle-school tutors failed to register any of these changes. The calls for social reform; the decline in the army's consciousness of being the emperor's army, which had set in after 1918; the sudden acquisition by many groups of a more realistic concept of self-interest—these developments did not figure in his middle-school curriculum. The dissonance between what he was taught at home and in school about his family, the world, himself, and what was happening outside his classroom doors would increase over time.