Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (32 page)

Apart from contributing in important ways to Britain's war effort, George V had also furthered Britain's national interest and strengthened the cause of the British monarchy through his dealings with other royal families.
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He had refused to grant asylum in Britain to his doomed cousin, Czar Nicholas II, during the Bolshevik Revolution; but in 1919, with the war over, he assiduously undermined Lloyd George's effort to place his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II on trial in London as a war criminal.
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When given an opportunity to shore up the authority of the Japanese imperial house, George decided to use Hirohito's visit to strengthen Britain's cooperation with Japan.
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George V had nearly reached the age of fifty-six when, on May 9, he came in person to Victoria Station to greet an excited twenty-year-old crown prince. He went out of his way to treat him as the monarch of a great power, and on May 29, near the end of Hirohito's stay in England, George brought Queen Mary and the highest officials of the land with him to Victoria Station to bid farewell to the prince. The king's welcoming strategy, riding with Hirohito to Buckingham Palace in an open carriage while crowds cheered along the route, later going out of his way to be seen with him, certainly impressed the prince and left him with friendly feelings toward the British. Indeed, all of Hirohito's experiences in England, including the academic degrees and royal accolades bestowed on him, strengthened his sense of national pride.

The whole spectacle of Hirohito's visit to England also impressed the first secretary of the Japanese Embassy in London, Yoshida Shigeru, as can be seen in this letter to his father-in-law, Makino:

Yoshida may have had few opportunities to meet and observe the crown prince before he wrote to Makino. Yet one cannot doubt for a moment his profoundly positive emotions on looking at Hirohito and seeing an image of “inborn” qualities that, by definition, were associated with the national polity, centered on the Imperial House. Even if what Yoshida was seeing was his own idealized image of the throne in the persona of the crown prince, the image that reached his eye was the same one seen by many Japanese elites. Precisely this eagerness and idealism of people like Yoshida to believe that the crown prince symbolized a future Japan that was better than the present one must be counted among the reasons for the success of the Western tour.

Later in life Hirohito claimed that his European tour led him to realize that he had been living like “a bird in a cage” and henceforth needed to open himself to the real world.
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He also implied that King George V had taught him how the British monarch counseled, encouraged, and, on occasion, warned his ministers regarding the conduct of political and military affairs, and that he had come to admire British-style constitutional monarchy. But the real image George conveyed was that of an
activist
monarch who judged the qualifications of candidates for prime minister and exercised his considerable political power
behind the scenes
(always pretending, of course, to be neutral and above the fray). If George's example impressed the young crown prince, it encouraged him to retrieve the imperial prerogatives his father had been unable to exercise.
Since George felt that the cabinet should reflect the monarch's political judgments on cabinet appointments, the expulsion of government ministers from office, or the altering of policies he disliked, that lesson too would have encouraged Hirohito (and his entourage) to regain the waning powers of the throne.

To the extent that George V strengthened Hirohito in the belief that an emperor should have his own political judgments independent of his ministers, George's “lessons” had nothing to do with “constitutional monarchy.” They were also incompatible with the spirit of Taish
democracy, which at that time sought to reduce the emperor's political powers and turn him into a symbolic figurehead. If George really was Hirohito's role model, as was later claimed, then the lessons he learned from George could not have led him to become a true constitutional monarch.
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Given the profound differences between the British and Japanese variants of constitutional monarchy, that is hardly surprising. In the pre–World War II Japanese imperial system, politics, religion, and military command were inseparably connected, the emperor had dictatorial authority and vast powers. In military affairs he did not require the advice of any minister of state, and he was expected to rule in order for the system to function properly. The British model was entirely different.

The most important instruction Hirohito and his entourage received from their observations of George V concerned public relations and the use of large-scale ceremonies and court rituals to popularize monarchy and strengthen nationalism.
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George V had saved the Germanic British monarchy from destruction at the hands of the British people by abruptly Anglicizing it during World War I, when “people were calling for the abdication of the ‘German King.'” By changing the Germanic surname of the royal house and family to Windsor and inventing the “ancient” ceremonial monarchy, George V “made the Royal Family seem timeless and firmly rooted in the moral landscape, enabling them to shield so effectively
the system of class privilege.”
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Hirohito and his staff were not as innovative as King George V, but they did take notice of George's fine sense of public relations in the new age of mass media, and of his skillful use of ritual as a strategy for perpetuating the political influence of the monarchy.

Apart from teaching him the real lessons of George V, the Western tour emboldened Hirohito to make a significant disclosure of character to unnamed members of his entourage. According to the unpublished memoirs of his military aide, Nara, shortly after Hirohito returned, he confessed to his disbelief in the divinity of his father and his imperial ancestors. In Nara's words it seemed as though:

Nara completed his memoirs in late 1956, a decade after Hirohito's postwar disavowal of his divinity. Many defenders of the throne were still trying to whitewash the problem of Hirohito's unacknowledged war responsibility and obscure the fact that he had previously been regarded as an object of religious worship. If Nara was correctly reporting Hirohito's moment of candor, then Hirohito, at age twenty, made three noteworthy points:

He declared that he no longer believed his ancestors were living gods or that his own father was a living deity—something for which he could hardly be blamed. Second, and nevertheless, he affirmed
the right of the state to impose on ordinary Japanese the belief that “the ancestors of the imperial house are truly gods and that the present emperor is a living deity.” On the other hand, rather than defend what he now seemed to believe, or work to change the
kokutai
, which inhibited objective discussion of Japanese history, he felt he should accept the deceit that was expected of him and keep the
kokutai
just “as it is.” His pragmatic, voluntary subordination of his own mind to the precepts of the imperial system forecast his (and his entourage's) active acceptance of the heightened cult of emperor worship that arose as a destroyer of careers in the mid-and late 1930s. The public actions of this prince would never be governed by his own private standards of goodness, morality, and integrity.

Third, by stating his preference for a British-style relationship between the throne and the nation, Hirohito inadvertently challenged an operative principle of the Japanese monarchy. In the process he revealed how unready he still was to play the role of emperor. For if the system of civil and military relations under the Meiji constitution was to function smoothly, with the imperial house as the one effective force for integrating state and nation, civil government and military affairs, then the emperor really had to exercise his enormous—indeed dictatorial—political and military authority. Moreover, prewar Japanese nationalism also demanded a real monarch who ruled, not a nominal one who merely reigned.

Keenly aware of these imperatives, and of the crown prince's impressionable nature and idealistic sentiments, Nara implied that Hirohito's confession of disbelief was not so serious as it might seem. The prince was merely reflecting the mood of those around him. He was not really uncomfortable in his unbelief. In fact, rather than expressing deeply held convictions, he was succumbing to thinking that had “flared up suddenly all over the world after the Great European War” and filled Japan. In this Hirohito was not alone, for, as Nara continued: