Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (41 page)

Kiyoura's “transcendental cabinet,” based on leaders drawn from the imperially appointed House of Peers, ignored the wishes of the elected House of Representatives. Ultimately it galvanized the parties in the Diet into launching a movement to protect their political rights (termed the “second movement to protect the constitution”).
⁷⁷
Within five months the parties had succeeded in frustrating Kiyoura despite the support he had from the regent. In the general election of May 10, 1924, the “three-faction alliance to protect the constitution” won an overwhelming victory; and on June 7, 1924, Kiyoura resigned. Hirohito thereupon sent an emissary to Saionji, then convalescing in Kyoto, and the latter recommended Kat
K
mei, president of the Kenseikai, to succeed Kiyoura.
⁷⁸
Kato immediately formed a three-party coalition cabinet, signaling a major triumph of the Taish
democracy movement. However, this victory of party unity over the forces of oligarchy and privilege lasted only until the summer of 1925, after which parliamentary conflict resumed, with the
kokutai
(thus the throne) emerging as a powerful weapon for the parties to use against one another.

Kat
's tenure as prime minister spanned the Forty-ninth Imperial Diet, which began on June 28, 1924, to the start of the Fifty-second on December 26, 1926. During these months Hirohito and the court group supported General Ugaki's military reforms, the noninterventionist China policy associated with Foreign Minister Shidehara, and a highly repressive peace preservation bill. In Saionji's view the latter was needed to keep the Left from winning seats in
the Diet. Thus a suitable “framework” would be maintained within which “normal constitutional government” could someday develop.
⁷⁹
Saionji did not worry that the new security law, by emphasizing the sacred nature of the
kokutai
based on the imperial house, would enable political groups to begin using the concept of the unassailable
kokutai
as a political weapon against opponents.
⁸⁰

On March 7, 1925, the lower house of the Diet passed the Peace Preservation Law, aimed at making anarchist, communist, or republican ideology unthinkable. It was the first law to include the word
kokutai
since the era of the Council of State, which had ended in 1885.
⁸¹
The Diet debate brought out the problem of whether to confine the
kokutai
solely to the throne, the locus of sovereignty, or to tie it tightly to human relationships and the family system so that it might serve as a guide to wider action. The Kat
cabinet and the leading political parties took the position that the
kokutai
should be confined only to the emperor's superintendence of the rights of sovereignty and
not
expanded to include the social order and the moral sphere.
⁸²
Thus organizations that stood for reform of the state could be tolerated so long as they professed loyalty to the imperial house. Soon after the new security law went into effect, however, this situation began to change. By late 1926 the
kokutai
had become a destructive weapon in the conflicts of the political parties, just as it had shown signs of becoming during the battle over Hirohito's marriage.

The palace entourage quickly became alarmed at the growing friction among the conservative parties, and the tension between interest groups: elected ones in the Diet, and nonelected ones in the emperor's privy council and House of Peers. The breakdown of cooperation among the parties in the Diet began in the summer of 1925 and deepened during the last year of Hirohito's regency and the first months of his reign as emperor. Wakatsuki Reijir
(prime minister from January 30, 1926, to April 20, 1927) had to endure intense conflicts in the Diet that contributed to making the entire
political situation more unstable and tense than ever. While Hirohito kept fully abreast of these conflicts, he seems not to have grasped the danger. Professor Mikami's lectures on Meiji's “benevolence” had made him totally committed to demonstrating his own benevolence: aroused by the behavior of the parties in the Diet, and influenced by Makino, he became so benevolently active behind the scenes that the situation quickly worsened.

First, during the Fifty-first Diet, the Seiy
kai raised an issue of corruption in the ruling party by charging two high Kenseikai officials with involvement in a brothel scandal, and calling on Wakatsuki to resign. Next, following the conclusion of the Fifty-first Diet, on July 29, 1926, the Seiy
kai brought the
kokutai
issue forward by circulating to Diet members a photograph showing a young Japanese woman, Kaneko Fumiko, sitting in a police interrogation room on the lap of her Korean husband, the political dissident Pak Yol. The couple had been arrested in September 1923, detained for nearly three years, and finally convicted for plotting the assassination of the crown prince. On April 5, 1926, eleven days after they were sentenced to be executed, the Wakatsuki cabinet commuted their punishments to life imprisonment in the name of the emperor. Now an anonymously printed pamphlet accompanying the photograph accused Wakatsuki's Kenseikai cabinet and Justice Minister Egi Tasuku of lacking a sense of the
kokutai
for having commuted the couple's death sentence.

No mention, of course, was made of the crown prince, though it was his action behind the scenes that had helped to bring about the commutation. Hirohito had simply informed Chinda that he felt the couple had not done anything to justify such harsh punishment.
⁸³
The rowdy criticism coming from the Diet chamber and the position of the Home Ministry on this affair were so at odds with his commitment to the ideal of imperial benevolence and compassion as to rouse him to action. The unintended consequence of Hirohito's personal need to demonstrate proper imperial behavior by
saving Pak Yol and Kaneko Fumiko, however, was to intensify Diet debate on the issue of the
kokutai
.

The politicians Ogawa Heikichi, Mori Tsutomu, and other leaders of the Seiy
kai and Seiy
Hont
parties supported the anti
kokutai
charges against Wakatsuki in the Diet.
⁸⁴
At a general meeting of Diet members in September 1926, Seiy
kai president Tanaka declared that “This [Pak Yol photograph] problem…goes beyond the rights and wrongs of policy. It is against the essence of the
kokutai
concept.”
⁸⁵
In October at a regional meeting of Seiy
kai members, a party leader declared, “We have to say that it sets a bad precedent, destructive of the
kokutai
, for them [the Wakatsuki cabinet] not to discuss the importance of politics. Where the imperial house and the fundamental concept of the
kokutai
are concerned, we cannot go along with a government that deliberately slights this problem.”
⁸⁶