Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (20 page)
Read Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Online
Authors: Herbert P. Bix
Tags: #General, #History, #Biography & Autobiography, #Military, #World War II
Thus Sugiura taught that in foreign countries the relationship between ruler and ruled was determined by power and limited to
submission, whereas in Japan, “the emperor rules the people without power. Benevolence has been planted so deeply in the minds of the people that the sovereign/subject relationship has become indestructible. Therefore the people joyfully submit themselves to the emperor.”
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It is doubtful whether Hirohito ever accepted Sugiura's notion of rule “without power.” But the idea of emperor-as-embodiment-of-benevolence was infinitely attractive to Hirohito, and the more he chose to act in his military capacity, the more attractive this alternative became for him. Sugiura was not only implanting a sense of morality in the future monarch, he was also fostering dissonance and frustration.
Summarizing Sugiura's twelve introductory lectures for Hirohito and his fellow students in their first year, and highlights of his later lectures, Nezu Masashi, the early biographer of Hirohito, noted:
These were titled the Imperial Regalia, the Rising Sun Flag, the Country, the Military, Shrines, Rice, Swords, Clocks, Water, Mount Fuji, Sum
, and Mirrors. Only in the second year of his ethics course did Sugiura have them read about abstract topics such as benevolence, fairness, rectification of wrongdoing, fidelity, justice, and uprightness, as well as concrete topics such as the imperial enthronement, Uesugi Kenshin [a late-sixteenth-century samurai warrior], the forty-seven masterless samurai of Ak[the classic tale of feudal vendetta], and Tokugawa Mitsukuni [an exemplar of imperial loyalty and Shinto nationalism]. In the third year he lectured on George Washington, Columbus, Malthus's theory of population, Peter the Great, and Rousseau, and in the fourth year he selected Kaiser Wilhelm II and Muhammad. There were only thirty foreign examples. The vast majority of his topics were from Confucian learning and the history of the Japanese emperors. Sugiura lectured four times on the Boshin Edict [of 1908], five times on the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and
Sailors [of 1882], and eleven times on the Imperial Rescript on Education [of 1890]. But he gave just one lecture on the Meiji constitutionâan indication of the relatively low value he placed on this.
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In his lectures Sugiura tended to undercut the scientific knowledge that Hirohito was discovering by celebrating Japanese nationalism and expansionism. He talked about the chrysanthemum flowerâthe crest of the imperial houseâand concluded that “We call the European powers advanced civilized countriesâ¦. [However] just as we can say that the chrysanthemum is the most outstanding flower, so Japan is unsurpassed in both its national strength and its civilization.” He also sought to convey a sense of rivalry between whole races, noting that “The European nations and the United States are of the same racial stock, the âAryan race'â¦. Our Japanese empire must be conscious of confronting the various Aryan races by our own power in the future.”
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Hirohito never warmed to Sugiura as an individual the way he did to Hattori. But he also never broke away from Sugiura's neo-Darwinian view of the international order. Nor did Hirohito ever abandon the notion, as implanted by Sugiura, that superior moral and spiritual qualities ultimately determined the outcome of conflict.
Of the foreign leaders whose lives, Sugiura felt, exhibited positive lessons for Hirohito, two were men with whom the Meiji emperor was often compared. During the first five years after Meiji's death, journalists and bureaucrats frequently ranked Meiji's achievements with those of the seventeenth-century Russian czar Peter the Great and Germany's Wilhelm II.
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In his lecture on Peter, given in 1917, Sugiura explained that the twenty-five-year-old czar Peter went abroad to study foreign technology and returned to lay the foundations of the modern Russian empire. But his successors failed to build on the foundations Peter had laid, and so contributed to the upheaval in Russia.
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When lecturing on Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Sugiura treated the deeply flawed and racist kaiser as a
great man who had failed for lack of competent advisers, and enthused over the good fortune of the Japanese emperor to be surrounded by many excellent advisers.
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The eighteenth-century French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the other hand, he described as a rootless, self-indulgent character who could never keep a job and was worthy of no admiration at all. Rousseau's theories “have led to cursing against the state and government.” Japan, he concluded, could avoid “the residual poison of European liberal thought” provided its leaders “show benevolence to the people, the people show loyalty to those above them, and everyone knows his place in the scheme of things.”
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Hirohito never abandoned the rhetoric of benevolence, loyalty to superiors, and proper place. His attitude toward new foreign ideas, however, was more pragmatic than Sugiura's. For him any Western system of thought was acceptable if it could be used to further the achievement of national independence and power. The only absolute value, whether in a time of reaction or in one of liberal awakening, was the state, which he learned in his early twenties to equate with the throne.
“Love of Learning,” “Posthumous Names,” “Remonstrance,” “Measure,” “Piety,” and “Sagacity” were other topics in Sugiura's syllabus. In these ethics lessons he mainly extolled past emperors as described in the eighth-century Japanese dynastic histories the
Kojiki
and the
Nihon Shoki,
written in Chinese. In a Sugiura lesson titled “Cherry Blossoms,” Hirohito was told that the Japanese people were like the falling cherry blossoms: “When our imperial fatherland was in peril, our people rushed forward without regard for their lives.”
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And in “The Scientist” Hirohito was advised:
In times of war the scientist fully prepares large artillery, airplanes, and warships, together with other modern implements. If they are used with a spirit of loyalty, courage, and justice, then, for the first time, we can say that war preparations are fully completed. With such
preparations we can proudly declare that we have no enemy in the world. This is the meaning of Article 5 of the Charter Oath.
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In 1919, when the problem of racial conflict came to a head at the Paris Peace Conference and the Japanese Foreign Ministry was complaining of the racial discrimination suffered by Japanese subjects in various countries, Sugiura dwelled on the hostility that existed between undifferentiated “Caucasians (so-called whites)” and “Mongolians (so-called yellows)” as a whole, without regard to their national identities. For him these were the only two (of “seven common”) racial groups “that have formed powerful states and possess advanced civilizations.”
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The history of the European advance in Asia from the time of Vasco da Gama in the late fifteenth century down to World War I, was shown as:
an attempt by the white race to overpower the yellow race. Siam is nominally independent, but it obviously has no real power. Although China is a big country, due to many years of internal strife the Chinese lack the power to unite as a state, and are thus utterly incapable of competing with the forces of the white race. In the Far East the Japanese Empire alone has been able to deter the Western invasion in the East.
In addition the Americans too haveâ¦adopted imperialism and are gradually extending their power into the Pacific. They have taken Hawaii and the Philippines and are trying to expand their commercial rights even in China and Manchuria.
Viewed in this way world history is the history of rivalry and contention between the yellow and white racesâ¦. The whites shout about the yellow peril and we are angry about the white peril.
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To counter the rhetoric of racial strife, a rhetoric of racial harmony was suggested. “The ideal of humanity could be realized,”
Sugiura continued in his lecture on “Race,” if the different races of the world cooperated with one another and advanced civilization. Unfortunately:
the Europeans and Americansâ¦are apt to look down on the yellow race with preconceived notions. I think it will be very difficult to abolish racial prejudice. Looking at our country, equality of the people has been our principle ever since the restoration of imperial rule. Yet even today there is a tendency to look down on the
eta
and
hinin
[despised hereditary status groups
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] of former timesâ¦.
Regardless of whether we can achieve our stand to abolish racial discrimination, it is most important to resolutely maintain our own principles. If we put benevolence and justice thoroughly into practice, then the Europeans and Americans cannot help but admire us. If we can do that, we will not have to be concerned about abolishing racial prejudice.
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Such ethics lessons may inadvertently have raised questions in Hirohito's mind about what exactly he was supposed to do as a benevolent monarch.
Sugiura's lectures elevated the ideal of the imperial house based on Confucianism and Japanese hegemonism; denounced foreign thinkers who talked about liberalism, individualism and socialism; and encouraged a conventional, social-Darwinian view of international relations in terms of conflict between the white race, led by Europeans and Americans, and the yellow race, led by Japan.
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Essentially Sugiura taught that the emperor's authority derived from the teachings of his ancestors, going back in time to the sacred progenitor of the imperial line. This view connected with Japanese expansionism, as well as with the we-they distinction in “race relations” and the notion that Japanâand the Japanese spiritâwas superior to the West and to Western things. It also assumed that for
the emperor to lay burdens on his subjects was entirely natural because they existed to sacrifice themselves for him, not the other way around.
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Another formative influence on young Hirohito's life was Shiratori Kurakichi, who brought him Japanese and Western history. Shiratori had studied in Germany. In 1909 he published articles in the journal
Tyjih(Oriental review) debunking the Confucian legends of the Chinese sages Yao, Shun, and Yu, thereby highlighting the irrationality of traditional Chinese culture.
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His attitude toward China can be understood as compounded of an impatient “escape from Asia” way of thinking (associated with the noted Meiji educator Fukuzawa Yukichi) and attitudes of contempt toward others that welled up in his generation after the Sino-Japanese War. A liberal, positivist historian in the tradition of the nineteenth-century German Leopold von Ranke, and a recognized expert on Asian and Western history, Shiratori was fifty when he became a court official and took charge of general academic affairs and the teaching of history at the Ogakumonjo.
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