Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (198 page)

51.
Shimizu expressed the relationship between the emperor and the state in terms of an organic—brain/body—metaphor, but also added that “there is no contradiction between saying that the state is an entity which possesses the right of sovereignty and, at the same time, the emperor is the subject
of sovereignty. Unless one reasons this way, one cannot explain the Japanese national polity.” Quoted by Suzuki (
Nihon no kenp
gakushi kenky
,
p. 266) from Shimizu T
ru,
Kokuh
gaku dai ippen kenp
hen
, p. 21.

52.
From 1885, when the cabinet system was established, until 1945, no Japanese prime minister ever ran for the Diet, and only four—Hara Kei, Hamaguchi Osachi, Inukai Tsuyoshi, and Kato Takaaki—had been elected to the House of Representatives. Prime ministers did not lead the majority of the House, though they were tacitly accepted by it. The
genr
chose the prime minister; later, at the start of his reign, Hirohito and his court group became the appointers, taking into account, when it served their purposes, the preferences of the majority conservative party in the lower house, but just as often ignoring them. Thus imperial Japan had a “party cabinet” system of government rather than a parliamentary cabinet government. This is not to imply either that the Westminster model of parliamentary cabinet government worked democratically in the interwar decades. Neither Lloyd George nor Ramsay MacDonald were leaders of the majority party of their governments, but the distinction between the Japanese party setup and the British model of parliamentary government is useful and worth making.

C
HAPTER
3
C
ONFRONTING THE
R
EAL
W
ORLD

1.
On May 28, 1919, Foreign Minister Uchida K
sai cabled the Japanese ambassador in Paris that the kaiser's trial would have a negative influence “on popular beliefs concerning our
kokutai
.” Afterward Makino joined Wilson and Lansing in opposing the trial of Wilhelm II. See Uchida to Matsui, May 28, 1919, in
Nihon gaik
bunsho, dai san satsu, gekan, 1919
(Gaimush
, 1971), p. 1078.

2.
Tokyo nichi nichi shinbun
, May 8, 1919.

3.
Quoted from Tanaka Hiromi, “Sh
wa tenn
no tei
gaku,” in
This Is Yomiuri
(Apr. 1992), pp. 101–2. Tanaka termed these congratulatory accounts a “report card.”