Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (25 page)

The lèse-majesté incidents of the postwar period were part of the larger Taish
-era challenge to veneration of the throne.
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After Hirohito became regent in November 1921, however, people were also arrested and charged with lèse-majesté simply for saying,
“What a lot of people for just one youngster”; or “This is too much! His majesty the emperor is only a cocky young kid. Yet whenever he goes by, all traffic is stopped for several hours beforehand. Some fools even wait more than ten hours to see the procession pass.”
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Reverence for the throne was being undermined not only by the public's growing awareness of the emperor's protracted illness, but by socioeconomic changes and the Taish
democracy movement, which cogently argued the case for a broader suffrage.
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Yet the Hara government and the
genr
would allow only a modest revision to benefit rural male elites. Rather than undertake a fundamental rationalization of political power to reflect societal changes, they vetoed demands for a universal male suffrage law, left the privileged hereditary peers and the privy council intact, and groped for ways to protect the throne and counter the Taish
democracy movement.

One of Hara's very first concerns was public criticism of the immense wealth of the imperial house. “If you make people think the wealth of the imperial house is the wealth of the nation,” he told Imperial Household Minister Hatano Takanao, “then no matter how large the income is, no one will ever complain.”
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In a nation increasingly divided by class conflicts, Hara knew that the throne stood in danger of being drawn into controversy. More than a million people in farming and fishing villages, but most in towns and cities spreading through thirty-seven prefectures, plus Hokkaido, Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto, had just taken part in mass protests known as the “rice riots.” Although the rioters had directed their anger against rising commodity prices, the underlying cause of the riots was the landlord system, which required tenants to deliver the largest portion of their crops as rent. Hara could not deny the “enormous income” of the imperial house, for the imperial house was indeed Japan's largest landowner, and care had to be taken to ensure that henceforth it not be involved in economic activities perceived as inflicting hardship.

The
genr
Yamagata concurred. In October 1919 he too warned Hatano immediately to sell shares from the emperor's stock hold
ings, and also to dispose of wetlands and dry fields from the imperial estates. The imperial house at that time enjoyed an annual income of 6 to 8 million yen from its management of mountain forests alone.
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It owned palaces, mansions, schools, mausoleums, and museums in Kyoto, Nara, and Tokyo, and received income from its investments in corporate stocks and bonds, together with an annual government allotment of 3 million yen. It also earned profits from the purchase of stock in colonial banks and enterprises, such as the Bank of Korea and (starting in 1925) the South Manchurian Railway Company. That wealth, added to its income from domestic mines and other sources, enabled the Imperial Household Ministry to function as the guarantor and trustee of some of Japan's largest capitalist enterprises—a “great creator of credit and confidence for the development of Japanese capitalism as a whole.”
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Due to its immense wealth, on a par with the largest
zaibatsu
(great financial institutions or capital groups, with which prewar and wartime Japanese corporations were affiliated), the throne could relate to the nation in countless ways that had not been possible in Meiji's time. If Hatano did not understand that fact, Hara and Yamagata did. The time had come to use the imperial economic power to buy the nation's goodwill.

Against this background there occurred, during the second half of 1920, prior to Hirohito's graduation from the Ogakumonjo, an incident at court which showed how easily the monarchy could be drawn into the political strife of the Taish
democracy era. It began as a fuss within the upper stratum of the ruling class over the question of color blindness in the family of Hirohito's fiancée. Questions about the crown prince's education, which had arisen around the same time as his engagement, in June 1919, were also involved. Hirohito's education, engagement, and European trip, which were entwined from the outset, quickly fueled conflict over who would ultimately control the political and economic power inherent in the imperial institution.

To wit: In 1917, one year after Hirohito's formal investiture as
crown prince, Captain Ogasawara had presented his mother, Empress Sadako (later Dowager Empress Teimei), with the names of three princesses he felt would be suitable partners in marriage for the crown prince. She chose Princess Nagako, the daughter of Prince Kuni Kuniyoshi, to be Hirohito's future wife. Then as now, the engagement of a crown prince was considered a major national event requiring much advanced preparation. Since Hirohito had already met Princess Nagako and liked her, and she had all the qualifications needed to become an empress, Hatano informed Prince Kuni by letter, in January 1918, of his daughter's selection as the crown prince's fiancée. The Kuni family thereupon hired Sugiura, Hirohito's ethics teacher, to begin giving her weekly lectures in ethics.

The imperial engagement ceremony was scheduled to be held at the end of 1920, but in June 1920 the most powerful of the remaining
genr
, Field Marshal Yamagata, attempted to have the engagement canceled on the ground that color blindness existed in the Shimazu family, on Nagako's mother's side. On June 18 Yamagata forced Hatano to resign—ostensibly for not having thoroughly investigated the matter but also in order to expedite sending Hirohito on a foreign tour—and began to install his own Ch
sh
-faction followers, starting at the top with Gen. Nakamura Y
jir
as the new minister of the imperial household. Supporting Yamagata was Prime Minister Hara. He too was troubled by the possibility that the Taish
emperor's chronic ill health and mental debility might have been caused by genetic defects in the imperial family, but he was also hoping to strengthen his influence in court affairs by cultivating good relations with Yamagata. Thinking of a healthy imperial family in the future, rather than the maintenance of the purity of the imperial bloodline for its own sake, Yamagata wrote to Prince Kuni asking him to “withdraw out of respect for the imperial house.”
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