Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (23 page)

Yet this was not really a guarantee of nonaccountability, because cabinet ministers were excluded from giving advice on decisions involving matters of supreme command, the emperor did not have to accept the advice of his minister, and no procedures or institutions were ever developed for questioning the emperor on his constitutional responsibilities.
⁵⁰
Shimizu tended to read into the term “inviolable” the idea of an emperor who possessed so much political and moral power that he stood above and beyond constitutional monarchy. In that respect too, Shimizu leaned toward the Hozumi-Uesugi line without actually endorsing it.

Shimizu portrayed the state as a human body with the emperor as its brain, noting that the “brain functions as the central force of the organization.”
⁵¹
Hirohito liked this metaphor—the idea of being the brain for the state—and evoked it during the early 1930s when Minobe was under attack and had to resign his official positions. It was common in late-nineteenth-century German constitutional
thought, particularly that of Georg Jellinek (1851–1911), a legal philosopher who exerted a strong influence on Japanese constitutional thinkers. Minobe himself had used it in 1912 when he said the emperor was like the head of a human body, except that he was thinking not of himself but the country. In the end it was precisely the vagueness and ambiguity of Shimizu's thought that most appealed to Hirohito, who, despite his later claim to the contrary, was inclined toward the same thing.

Finally, when memory of the emperor Meiji was still a vivid part of Japanese hagiography, Shimizu reinforced both Sugiura and Shiratori in idolizing Meiji as the perfect model of a monarch. Shimizu contributed to the Meiji myth by stressing that emperors could not act arbitrarily but had to reflect “public opinion” in their conduct of state affairs just as Meiji had done in his Charter Oath. All three teachers told fairy tales of Meiji's personal qualities, which had enabled him to achieve his great enterprise of transforming Japan into a major imperial power but were conspicuously lacking with Taish
. All three wanted Hirohito to retrieve the lost image of Meiji, which they had built up and romanticized in their different ways. And so they drove home the point that Japan needed a new Meiji, and that he would be the one to fulfill the role and match his grandfather's attainments.

Influenced by the ideas of Sugiura, Shiratori, and the hopelessly contradictory Shimizu, Hirohito strove to measure up to his symbolic grandfather whom he was so unlike in temperament, character, and interests. Hirohito also came to believe in the sacred nature of his own authority, as defined in the Meiji constitution. But the liberal “organ theory” created by Minobe and used by the party cabinets
⁵²
of the 1920s he always regarded as a mere academic theory, good for debating in the universities but not something on which to base his own actions. Nor did he act in accordance with absolutist theological interpretations. In fact Hirohito was never a devotee of
any
theory of constitutional monarchy; the constitution did not pro
vide standards for him in making important political decisions, for, like his grandfather, he believed he stood above all national law. The real constraints on his behavior, including Meiji's spiritual legacy, had nothing to do with the constitution, and even that he set aside when circumstances dictated.

V

The process of educating Hirohito never ended. Its ultimate goal was to enable him to understand and realistically evaluate viewpoints and options, embodied in policy documents presented to him by the government and the high command, while appearing to stand outside the process of political struggle and discord that had produced the documents. Another goal was to serve Japan—an invincible, sacred land—by making its system of checks, balances, and contending bureaucratic factions work to achieve unity and consensus. This function Hirohito would fulfill not through skill in dialectical questioning and theoretical argumentation, for Japan's leaders seem not to have set high store on the effectiveness of argument to clarify issues and resolve disputes. Rather he would do so by learning how to bring his detailed knowledge of civil and military affairs and his sacred authority to bear in reaching consensus. If he performed his role properly, his judgment and will would penetrate all the groups in the ruling system and generate unity. Here Hirohito's own modest physical endowments—his slightness, his squeaky voice, and his only average intelligence—were an educational asset; an anchor, tying him to reality, helping to counter the dangerous mythological hype. He was also a person who did not understand things intuitively but learned them soon enough, by necessity.

W
hen Crown Prince Hirohito celebrated his coming of age at eighteen, in the spring of 1919, the institution of the monarchy was in decline and being buffeted from many directions. The authority of the Diet and the prime minister was increasing; the political parties were becoming more powerful. Abroad, centuries-old monarchies had collapsed overnight: the Romanovs in Russia, the Hohenzollerns in Germany, the Hapsburgs in Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans in Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Middle East. Never had hereditary monarchy appeared so unstable, or the international environment so hostile to it. At that moment Japan's delegates at the Paris Peace Conference were discovering the powerful trends toward international peace and democracy then sweeping across postwar Europe and the world.

The German kaiser, to whom Emperor Meiji had often been compared, had abdicated in early November 1918. A short time later, he escaped into uninvited exile in Holland. When the Versailles Peace Conference officially convened on January 18, 1919, the Allies immediately set up a Commission on Responsibility to consider indicting ex-Kaiser Wilhelm before a special international tribunal for infringing on “international morality” and violating the sanctity of treaties. As the work of the conference proceeded during 1919, the Japanese press reported the Allies' rejection of Japan's proposal on racial equality, and the dispute over Japan's wartime
seizure of Shantung (now Shandong) Province. Of the threat to the inviolability of monarchs that was involved in putting a former sovereign on trial for war crimes the Japanese newspapers printed very little. Behind the scenes, however, the Foreign Ministry as well as the chief Japanese delegates, Makino Nobuaki and Chinda Sutemi, worried about how the trial of a head of state would affect Japanese beliefs at home regarding the sacred
kokutai
.
¹

This was the background against which Hirohito's coming-of-age ceremony and the last three years (1918–21) of his education at the Ogakumonjo must be set: abroad, the discrediting of the monarchical principle; at home, growing public indifference to the throne, increasingly open criticism of the social and political system, rising demands for reform of the state, and the dimming of the image of a monarch able to rule directly. The ruling elites had good reason to worry about the stability of the throne and the future of the young crown prince in these years.

A further source of concern was Hirohito's personality, a topic frequently overlooked in biographies that fail to set in context his multifaceted life. Hirohito's reticence, his voice, and the impression he conveyed of a lack of “martial spirit” were character traits that emerged again and again in his reign as emperor. So too did his highly impressionable nature, one of the earliest examples of which being a school essay Hirohito wrote in 1920, at the age of nineteen, which clearly aped the viewpoints of the elders surrounding him. The tour of Western Europe he made from March to September 1921 proved a maturing experience, and he returned from it resolved to assert himself in political affairs and to prepare himself to do so.

I

Early on the morning of May 7, 1919, one week after he turned eighteen, Hirohito departed the Akasaka Palace in a horse-drawn
carriage, accompanied by a contingent of Imperial Guard cavalry. As his procession entered the Imperial Palace through the Nij
bashi (double bridge), crowds of well-wishers cheered. Changing into ceremonial garb, Hirohito purified himself and began to mark his coming of age by performing Shinto rituals in the palace's major shrines. When the ceremony ended, multiple-gun salutes were fired, and there were celebrations in the capital and in cities throughout the country.
²

By this time Hirohito had completed a large portion of his middle-school studies and was in training to become the next monarch. The coming-of-age ceremony afforded the occasion for Sugiura, Shiratori, and other Ogakumonjo teachers to publish congratulatory newspaper messages, extolling his virtues. Ogasawara, the school principal, pointed out that:

Ogasawara's evaluation of Hirohito's intelligence, diligence, and mastery of his subjects accords with what has been written about him by virtually all who knew him intimately. It is his “moreover” and “also” that pose the problem. If Ogasawara seems to be going out of his wayto convey that the prince was skilled in oral recitation and had a “sturdy martial spirit,” it may have stemmed (as historian Tanaka Hiromi has pointed out) from his concern about criticism of
the Ogakumonjo. In late March 1919, shortly before the coming-of-age ceremony, the
Jiji shinbun
had reported that as a consequence of the protected, closed society of the Ogakumonjo, the crown prince almost never spoke in public and lacked a martial spirit. Viscount Miura Gor
, a close confidant of the
genr
Yamagata as well as of Prime Minister Hara Kei, had also called for reform of the school's rarified education policy.
⁴
Ogasawara, like Hirohito's other teachers, knew that the crown prince was shy and lacked interest and skill in making speeches. In fact, after this public assessment of the prince's progress, Nara Takeji, Hirohito's future military aide-de-camp, wrote in his diary about the prince's silence at the banquet held on May 8, 1919, as part of his coming-of-age celebration:

Nara then recorded a conversation with General Field Marshal Yamagata. Yamagata had been granted an audience with the crown prince, and now he recalled that when he had asked questions of Hirohito, he had received no answers at all. Neither had the prince asked any questions himself.

Nara might also have noted that the late adolescent not only failed to convey any “personality” in public, he also moved clumsily and his voice was still high-pitched, neither of which was the case with any of his brothers. But what should be said about Hirohito's reticent mien? Was it the product of his inexperience and lack of confidence, or was it part of an identity created for him by others, a consciously cultivated product of his monarchical studies? And what is to be made of his strange voice? Was it, too, an artful construction, or the result of slow-arriving hormones?

Like his brothers but much more so, Hirohito was a person of strong emotions trained never to show them. He was also a lonely person who had developed, as early as his middle-school years, the habit of talking to himself when under stress.
⁷
The example of his grandfather, who hardly ever spoke to him and whom he so desired to emulate, probably served to increase his youthful reticence. In addition Professor Shiratori had given him numerous examples of imperial ancestors who fitted the Chinese Confucian (and popular Buddhist) image of the taciturn monarch who said little but accomplished much, and whose silence was exemplary. Hirohito may have come to think of taciturnity as a tactic, a way of shielding himself from the intrusive gaze of his pedagogues.

His limited virtuosity in verbal expression, moreover, was in keeping with Japanese cultural and aesthetic traditions. Unlike his grandfather, a pure autocrat, Hirohito had a keen sense of being a monarch
under
(in the narrow sense of being protected under or by) the Meiji constitution. He had constitutional duties to perform, and when performing them showed his face more as mask than as personality. The mask was a part of his psychological attire, which, like
physical vestments, he also donned in performing his religious, ceremonial duties. And one of his most important duties was to embody Japanese morality.