Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (50 page)

The Sh
wa enthronement rituals, festivities, and national unity banquets were planned and staged under recession conditions. Nevertheless, to finance these activities at different levels of government, the Fifty-fifth Imperial Diet unanimously passed a budget that, in U.S. dollar terms at that time, amounted to $7,360,000. In cost, scale, amount of advance preparation, numbers of participants, and numbers of policemen assigned to supervise them, these events outshone all previous enthronements.
²⁶
But as the times were not considered “normal”—Hirohito had recently been the regent and Taish
had been largely hidden from the public—the oligarchic elites who decided these matters felt it necessary to skip over the vacuum of Taish
and link Hirohito directly to Meiji. This required rearticulating all the myths about the monarchy. After all, tradition and mythology helped to hold society together, despite its underlying conflicts.

Technology was also harnessed to the glorification of the
monarchy. In 1928, when the enthronement year began, Japan had entered the age of mass advertising and mass consumer culture. For nearly three years, regular nationwide radio broadcasts had been affecting public opinion and values.
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Symbolically the enthronement was an exercise of power taking place at a time of renewed Japanese military activities on the Asian continent, and of increased reliance by the state on repression to prop up the fragile monarchy. Hence its total impact may best be understood when it is related to the rise of political reaction in Japan. Such reaction was evidenced by the Tanaka cabinet's repeated dispatch of troops to China's Shantung Province, and the increase, from 1928 onward, in the number of officials specializing in thought control.

After revision of the Peace Preservation Law, the government appointed in all prefectures “thought procurators” and “special higher police.” The armed forces established their own “military thought police,” and special Home Ministry police officials were assigned to work full-time on uncovering anti-
kokutai
“conspiracies” being plotted by communists and other radicals. As a result, from 1928 onward the imperial state assumed a sterner attitude toward its critics. First, communists and leaders of the sectarian Shinto organizations of Ōmotoky
and Tenriky
, which refused to recognize Amaterasu Ōmikami as a superior deity, were subjected to increased police surveillance and repression; later the surveillance was extended to liberal intellectuals in journalism and the universities.
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Thus the process of manufacturing a new emperor through ritual and propaganda went hand in hand with a major expansion and dispersion of the thought-control apparatus.

A Grand Ceremonies Commission, with Prince Kan'in as president and Prince Konoe as director, took charge of staging the Sh
wa enthronement rituals. Serving on the commission were Chief Cabinet Secretary Hatoyama Ichir
, Imperial Household Ministry officials Sekiya and Kawai, various vice ministers, and the governor of Kyoto, where the ceremonies were to be held.
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The
commission's task was to ensure that all the events and commemorative projects of the enthronement were carefully scripted so as to reflect the themes of loyalty and service to the new emperor.
³⁰
Its main accomplishments, therefore, would be largely organizational and ideological. Checking the process of monarchical demystification and decline, keeping everything controlled that could be controlled, the commissioners reduced spontaneity to a minimum while enhancing, so far as it could be enhanced, Hirohito's distinctively uncharismatic personality. They also instilled the feeling that Japan was a “divine land” in which the monarch who became one with the gods at the same time bonded with his subjects as their collective “parent.”

Assisting the commission in this remaking of the monarchy were the still new and relatively independent mass media, mainly radio and newspapers, which rose to the occasion by instructing the nation on the meaning of the unfamiliar rites and celebrations that were planned. Japanese newspapers were expanding their circulation and becoming national rather than local and regional. Their reporters were anxious to ingratiate themselves with the central bureaucracy. So, too, were radio announcers, who, in reporting on the pageantry at Kyoto, were dependent on scripts prepared in advance by the Imperial Household Ministry.
³¹

For a whole year, press and radio reported the ceremonies and rituals on a daily basis, day and night, throughout the home islands and in the Japanese colonies, as Hirohito and his entourage skillfully implemented the real lessons they had learned from King George V—lessons not about the constraints of constitutionalism but the importance of state spectacle and ritual in enhancing the monarch's dignity and authority.
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When it was all over, the commission gave the print media unqualified praise for having acted as the new holy scripture of the Japanese state.
³³
Compliance with the wishes of the state, abject submissiveness to the fashions of the time—these were roles the modern Japanese press would continue
to play. Censoring itself whenever it was not censored by authority, the press never became a free voice of conscience for the Japanese nation.

The enthronement rituals and ceremonies, from their start in January to their climax in early December 1928, helped to manufacture a new imperial image for the young emperor. The rituals began with Hirohito's dispatch of emissaries to the mausoleums of his four predecessors, and that of Emperor Jimmu, notifying the imperial spirits of his forthcoming enthronement. At the same time the yearlong schedule of ceremonial events at the three permanent shrines within the palace compound was made public. Next, on February 5, the emperor participated in rituals that chose by divination the fields where rice was to be grown to present to the sun goddess, Amaterasu Ōmikami. Through spring, summer, and fall the pace of events quickened. Using the press, radio, and public lectures, government officials and famous intellectuals instructed the nation in the revived themes of emperor ideology, which they often presented in explicit contrast to heterodox sentiments, such as communism and anarchism, that ran counter to official
kokutai
thought.
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The enthronement culminated during the months of November and December 1928. In November, in towns and cities in every prefecture and metropolitan district throughout the empire, hundreds of thousands of people took part in banquets and award ceremonies; millions of schoolchildren joined in flag parades and lantern festivals. Before the year ended the throne had dispensed millions of yen as an expression of imperial benevolence for the nation's poor, liberally awarded medals, granted titles, and bestowed posthumous decorations on historical figures from the thirteenth, fourteenth, and nineteenth centuries who were noted for loyalty to the throne.
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Also in the name of the emperor, the government reduced the sentences of 32,968 criminals, including the assassin of Hara Kei; commuted the punishments of 26,684 prisoners in the colonies; and granted special amnesty to another 16,878 prisoners.
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Municipal and prefectural authorities, town and village governments initiated construction projects at all levels that gave unprecedented numbers of ordinary people the chance to participate actively in ushering in the new monarchical era.