Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (19 page)

Hirohito himself was always very modest about his interest in biology. When
Sagamiwan sango
appeared, Hattori offered an assessment of his former pupil's scientific bent in a discussion that appeared in the
Sand
Mainichi
on October 2, 1949. Asked whether the emperor's studies should be viewed as genuine scientific research rather than the work of an amateur, Hattori replied:

Hattori's assessment makes sense. Specimen collection and the study of taxonomy without question fitted Hirohito's methodical nature. And certainly during his most active years, when surrounded by great disorder, by problems to which all solutions were hard and uncertain, science was a steadying, relaxing constant in his life. Taught by Hattori, the emperor became a naturalist and a patron of marine biology, pursuing as a hobby the collection of sea plants and animals, such as slugs, starfish, hydrozoa, and jellyfish.

As a would-be scientist and a serious student of the biological evolution of sea creatures over many thousands of years, Hirohito had to be aware of the vastly different time scale of the Japanese imperial house, which by arbitrary official determination went back only twenty-six centuries. It is doubtful, though, that awareness of this discrepancy led him to reject completely his early ingrained belief in the divinity of his own ancestral line. Hirohito always placed a premium on the values that were inculcated in his youth. And as he grew older, he learned to appreciate only too well the value of ideological illusions in strengthening obedience to official codes of behavior. For him the relationship between modern science and the account of the
kokutai
, or national polity, taught by his other teachers were reconcilable, not inherently conflictual.

The more general point, however, is that science cultivated the rational, scientific pole in Hirohito's outlook: his sense of himself as a disengaged thinker, open to arguments and counsel based on reason and evidence. But there was another side to Hirohito, associated with his sense of morals and vocation. This side worked to adjust his scientific bent and practice to the imperatives and constraints of divine emperorship. Here the ideas he received from Sugiura Shigetake, Shiratori Kurakichi, and Shimizu T
ru were far more influential, for they formed the context in which his rational, objective thinking was embedded.

II

Sugiura Shigetake was an ultranationalist Confucian educator who had received a Western education in England and returned home to become a founding member of the Society for Political Education, and contributor to its famous magazine
Nihonjin
(The Japanese), “whose express purpose was the ‘preservation of the national essence.'”
¹⁰
Sugiura took part, with his friend T
yama Mitsuru, in the conservative intellectual reaction against the Civilization and
Enlightenment movement that had dominated Japan in the first decade and a half after the Meiji restoration. Later he served as an official of the Ministry of Education, concerned with moral instruction. In 1892 Sugiura became the founder and principal (until his death in 1924) of the Japan Middle School. By the time Ogasawara recommended him as Hirohito's (and later Nagako's) ethics teacher, many of his former students already occupied distinguished positions in Japanese political and economic life.

Sugiura was fifty-nine years old, an ideologue and monarchist of the highest repute, when he lectured Hirohito on the principles that should guide his behavior. To Sugiura these were embodied in the three imperial regalia of sword, jewel, and bronze mirror, which the sun goddess, Amaterasu
mikami, allegedly bestowed on her grandson, Ninigi-no-mikoto, to use in pacifying the Japanese people. The regalia had mainly ethical significance, in that they denoted the three virtues every monarch should possess: courage, intelligence, and benevolence.

Hirohito did not openly dispute this teaching, but he came to view the regalia in his own way, mainly as symbols of his political and moral authority. As such, they required constant guarding and occasional display to insure the security of the throne. Moreover, Hirohito could not seek the ultimate source of his sovereignty in legitimacy of blood. As a descendant of the fourteenth-century northern court, his genealogical line had not been regarded—by either the nineteenth-century scholars of the “National Learning school” or the Meiji government—as the most legitimate line of succession.
¹¹

The other fundamental rules Hirohito was taught to respect were contained in the Charter Oath of Five Articles (1868) and the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890).
¹²
These documents had enhanced the Meiji emperor's power and authority, and Sugiura believed that the ideals in them (which all subjects were supposed to live up to) should also become Hirohito's standard for the future.

Sugiura's approach to Meiji's Charter Oath emphasized the wisdom in the document but played down its political contingency. Here too Hirohito went beyond Sugiura and, from his own reading in nineteenth-century Japanese history, learned to situate the document within its times. The staging (on April 6, 1868) of the “oath” rituals, in which Meiji swore to the sun goddess, mythical progenitor of the imperial family, and the Charter Oath of Five Articles, which guided reforms early in his reign, were expedient concessions to potentially obstructionist feudal lords and Kyoto court nobles. The latter might have challenged the power of the samurai coup (that is, Restoration) leaders. The performance of the oath rituals marked a first step in establishing the independent authority of the “imperial will.” Hirohito would later insist that the Charter Oath was an ahistorical, timeless document—a “Magna Carta” of Japanese liberalism—but he spent his first two decades as emperor seeking to realize the “imperial will.”

The Imperial Rescript on Education (including the special readings Sugiura gave to key words) also deeply impressed Hirohito. Sugiura's very first lecture on the education rescript focused on the term
k
so k
s
, which appears in that document, in order to determine exactly how it should be interpreted.
¹³
“
K
so k
s
,” he declared, “refers to the ancestors of His Majesty the Emperor and the Japanese nation. When our ancestors founded this nation it became coeval with heaven and earth and everlasting.”
¹⁴
Sugiura went on to observe how successive emperors through the ages had always sought to carry on the “unfinished work of their imperial ancestors.”
¹⁵
Because Sugiura believed in the moral superiority of the Japanese throne, his subsequent lectures on the education rescript could not avoid elevating the Japanese monarchy at the expense of other countries.