Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (30 page)

Five months prior to his departure for Europe, on October 28, 1920, Hara had told Imperial Household Minister Nakamura:

In short, in order to ensure its success the tour was carefully choreographed down to the smallest details. And because of the precarious condition of the Taish
emperor's health, the tour could not be prolonged. The crown prince would have time to visit only five European countries: England, France, Belgium, Holland, and Italy, plus the Vatican. The Harding administration was planning to invite the prince, but the Hara government decided to omit the United States from his itinerary largely on the recommendation of the Japanese ambassador in Washington, Shidehara Kij
r
. In a secret telegram to the Foreign Ministry, Shidehara expressed fear that the prince might not be able to handle “the difference in national sentiment between Japan and the United States” and “the rough behavior of ordinary Americans,” particularly newspaper reporters.
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Shidehara also worried about the uncertain state of Japan–U.S. relations on the eve of an arms reduction conference. Should any incident occur during a royal visit, it could have extremely damaging effects on public opinion in both countries.
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So Hirohito was denied the chance to visit the United States.

On March 3, 1921, Crown Prince Hirohito and his thirty-four-man entourage led by Prince Kan'in, Count Chinda Sutemi, and Lt. Gen. Nara Takeji, and accompanied by Prime Minister Hara, entrained at Tokyo Station for the port of Yokohama. There they boarded a boat that took them to the newly refitted warship
Katori
. After bidding them good-bye, Hara returned to join more than fifty thousand well-wishers standing on shore, and the
Katori
steamed out to sea, accompanied by a cruiser escort.
⁴⁶

Bound for Europe and his first encounter with the world outside Japan, Hirohito grew elated. During the next six months of travel, he followed a daily routine of study and physical activity and never eased up. He received his strongest impressions in France and especially Britain, the country originally scheduled as his main destination. The Western tour was the first major attempt by Japan's ruling elites of the Taish
era to manipulate Hirohito's
image, and defenders of Hirohito often cite it as a source of his alleged commitment to “constitutional democracy.”

Hirohito's outbound passage aboard the
Katori
took him through the Asian and European territories of the British Empire, starting from Hong Kong, where for fear of Korean assassins he went ashore only briefly. Accompanied by the British governor-general and guarded by the entire British police force on the island, they strolled through the city for about forty minutes, then had lunch aboard a British warship.
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Next he sailed to the island of Singapore, already a vital center of commerce for all of colonial Southeast Asia. During his three-day stay in Singapore (March 18–21), he attended British receptions in his honor, visited a Japanese-managed rubber plantation and a museum, and circumnavigated the island.
⁴⁸

On March 22 the
Katori
departed for Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), second largest island in the Indian Ocean and a British colony that produced rubber and tea for the industrialized economies of the West. Six days later the warship arrived at the capital, Colombo. With neither Japanese nor expatriate Koreans living on the isolated island, the imperial party felt free of danger for the first time. After five days in Columbo, the
Katori
departed on April 1 for the warm waters of the Red Sea, their destination the Suez Canal, the famed “lifeline” of the British Empire. They reached the canal on April 15 and the next day began the hundred-mile journey through the sea-level waterway with barren desert sands stretching away on each side.

After docking at Port Said, at the entrance to the canal, on April 17, they traveled to Cairo, the ancient capital of Egypt, then in its last year as a British protectorate. The next day, in Cairo, Field Marshal Viscount Allenby, the British high commissioner, acted as Hirohito's host and arranged for him to see the Pyramids and the Sphinx, and visit with the Khedive Fuad, soon to become the first king of formally independent Egypt. Leaving Cairo on April 20, the imperial party sailed into the Mediterranean, bound for the British
colony of Malta, a military outpost guarding the route to Suez. On Malta, where the
Katori
anchored on April 25, they were welcomed by the British residents and guided to the graves of Japanese sailors killed during World War I. Another diplomatic welcome awaited them on April 30 in the British colony of Gibraltar, where they stayed for three days before departing on the last leg of their long sea journey.

Hirohito had just turned twenty years of age when the
Katori
finally arrived at Portsmouth, England, on May 7, and he was greeted by rows of flag-decorated British warships with their crews standing at attention. His subsequent itinerary called for him to stay twenty-four days in England, twenty-six days in France, five days each in Belgium and the Netherlands, and eight days in Italy. Except in Italy, where out of consideration for the king and the shortness of his visit he stayed on in the palace, the monarchies gave him the same formal treatment: three nights in the palace as the honored guest of the monarch, followed by stays in private hotels or private residences as the guest of the nation.

In England high military officials and diplomats formed a welcoming committee, headed by the Prince of Wales. Members of this select committee and other royalty always accompanied Hirohito on official visits and ceremonies. The high points of his visit to Britain included a three-night stay in Buckingham Palace, speeches at London's Guildhall and Mansion House, visits to numerous British military facilities (where he sometimes wore the uniform of a British army general), visits to both houses of Parliament, the British Museum, the prime minister's mansion at Chequers, the towns of Windsor and Oxford, the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh, a three-day stay at the castle of the duke of Atholl in Scotland, and a tour of Manchester and the Midlands industrial region.

The French leg of his tour (which began on May 31 and was divided into two periods of ten and sixteen days each) gave him
considerably more freedom than he had been able to enjoy in monarchist Britain. On his first day in Paris, he visited stores and the Eiffel Tower, where he ordered Captain Yamamoto to purchase miniature Eiffel Towers as gifts for his fiancée, Princess Nagako, and for his brothers.
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Later he toured the Louvre and visited the parliament, the Sorbonne, and the Invalides. He also spent much time while in republican France touring battlefields, military schools, and observing French army maneuvers in the company of Generals Foch and Joffre, and Marshal Pétain. He visited more war monuments and battlefields while in Belgium (June 10–15), as the guest of King Albert I. In the Netherlands (June 15–20), he toured Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rotterdam and was feted at numerous official ceremonies and banquets, including one hosted by Queen Wilhelmina, who later wrote his father a warm letter about the prince's visit. En route to Paris from The Hague, on June 20, his train stopped in eastern Belgium so that he could visit the city of Liège and tour yet another World War I battlefield. The second phase of his French visit took him to cities in eastern and southeastern France, where on July 8 he reboarded the
Katori
at Toulon and headed for Italy.

Hirohito arrived in Italy—a country with a large nobility but an insecure monarchy—on July 10, 1921, some fifteen months before Mussolini and the Fascists came to power. He spent eight days visiting Naples, Rome, and Pompeii, often in the company of his guide, King Victor Emmanuel III, soon to be a keen admirer of Mussolini. On July 15 and 16, while staying in Victor Emmanuel's palace, Hirohito removed his military medals and decorations and twice visited the Vatican, where he exchanged greetings with Benedict XV, the pope who had attempted unsuccessfully to mediate a settlement of World War I and later defended the kaiser from the threat of a war crimes trial. For the remainder of his Italian stay Hirohito attended the usual ceremonial functions, visited patriotic war monuments, and observed a sports tournament held under the
auspices of the Italian military, then already under the influence of Mussolini's Fascist movement.

On the return voyage to Japan, which began on July 18, Hirohito did little sightseeing as the
Katori
retraced its course through the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean to Singapore. Only when his ship anchored to take on coal at Cam Ranh Bay in French Indochina did he go ashore to walk in the tropical forests and later to ride in a motorcar along the newly constructed Highway Number 1, which ran parallel to the railroad linking Hanoi and Saigon. On August 25 the
Katori
finally departed Cam Ranh Bay for Tateyama, Chiba prefecture, arriving there on September 2. The next day it steamed into Yokohama Harbor, where Prime Minister Hara rode out in a boat to greet the prince personally aboard the
Katori
, while his cabinet and members of the imperial family waited at dockside.
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Although it remained for Hirohito to make reports to his parents and to the spirits of his imperial ancestors, he had successfully completed the government's first public relations campaign to counter popular perception of the imperial house's decline.

Japanese press coverage of the Western tour was extensive and noteworthy. On Hirohito's departure from Japan, the
Tokyo Asahi shinbun
proclaimed grandly: “The crown prince's flag of the country of the rising sun bears down on the waves heading toward the West. Mark this glorious March 3 in history.”
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Thereafter the
Asahi
and other large dailies sensationalized “our crown prince's” triumphant tour of Europe, while the Home Ministry relaxed its restrictions on printing photographs of the imperial family. On June 4 the newspapers ran pictures of a smiling crown prince in military uniform. On June 24 the papers showed Hirohito in a frock coat with a high collar, holding a walking stick. Previously the press had been permitted to photograph him only in a motorcade on an official visit. While in Europe, however, he was shown walking on a street in civilian attire. When Hirohito visited the duke of Atholl in Scotland, where he was deeply impressed by the warm intimacy between the lord's family
and his tenants, the Japanese press was allowed to report his official statement: “The duke's family live frugally and love their people deeply. If we have this type of politics, there will be no need to worry about the rise of extremist thought.”
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The press also reported his comment, on July 9, on touring the battlefield of Verdun, that those who still glorified war should “see this ‘scene.'”
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