Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (51 page)

For a typical example, in colonial Karafuto almost the entire population of more than 295,000 (including approximately two thousand Ainu and other aborigines) was mobilized to participate in the enthronement.
³⁷
When the ceremonies ended, the Karafuto colonial government followed up by undertaking more than five hundred memorial projects, ranging from the construction of public parks and agricultural experimental farms to the building of “a youth hall, sacred storage places for safekeeping the emperor's picture, monuments for Japan's war dead, and government office buildings.”
³⁸

Activities similar to those in Karafuto went on in a much more restrained manner in colonial Korea, where Governor-General Sait
Makoto had tolerated the growth of an indigenous Korean press as part of Japan's 1920s “cultural policy.” The colonial government began the month with a luncheon banquet at the Kyong-bok Palace on Meiji Day, November 3. Schoolchildren participated in flag-waving (Japanese, of course) and lantern processions. Accolades of the emperor were generously bestowed; more than eight hundred elderly men received gifts from the emperor; a banquet for designated collaborators was hosted at the Korean monarch's royal shrine; a contingent of dancers was enlisted from Seoul's Chinese community to perform in street processions. The newly established Keij
(Seoul) Broadcasting Company covered the November ceremonies and rituals of accession in the prescribed manner. So too did the colonial government's official Korean-language newspaper, which had more than twenty-two thousand subscribers or approximately 22 percent of the colony's three major dailies.
³⁹

The Korean public at large, however, was far more influenced by the colony's three other Korean newspapers, which countered
the official coverage with strikingly nationalist articles. They denied space to the imperial pageantry and brazenly put down the imperial celebrations by running scores of articles that called attention to the increased police repression and preemptive arrests of Koreans. On November 9, eve of Hirohito's deification ceremony,
Tong'a ilbo
(Oriental daily) reminded its readers of Korea's own uniqueness by publishing an article on the foundation myth of Tan'gun, progenitor deity of the Korean race and so counterpart to Amaterasu Ōmikami. Also, to make sure its readers did not forget, the newspaper carried notices on “Han'gul Day,” set aside to honor the invention of characters for writing the Korean language.

Thus the magnificent imperial pageantry and rituals of 1928 evoked sharply different nationalist responses, and in Korea revealed the deep tensions that beset the empire. But insofar as vast segments of the Japanese population played a role in these celebratory events and commemorative public projects, and the nation as a whole tuned in to radio descriptions of the rituals at their climax in November, as well as the military reviews of early December, these practices may have shored up waning ideological beliefs and made people more supportive of the state.

IV

The formal ceremonies (termed
sokui no rei
) of ascending to the throne, based on the myth of Amaterasu Ōmikami, began with an imperial procession from Tokyo to Kyoto on November 6, 1928, and reached a ritual climax in Kyoto four days later, when Hirohito took possession of all three sacred imperial regalia and reported his temporal accession to the spirits of his ancestors. In an afternoon ceremony on November 10 before an audience of about 2,700 civil and military officials and Diet members, Hirohito read aloud the following words to the people of Japan:

After completion of the
sokui no rei
, sacred dances were performed before the emperor's portable shrine. Two days later, on the night of November 14–15, a “great food-offering ceremony” (
daij
sai
) was held in Kyoto, followed by two consecutive days of banquets.
⁴¹

The
daij
sai
, the most important and dramatic of the enthronement events, marked the emperor's deification and confirmed his “descent from the gods.” The idea of the rulers' sacred divinity lay at the core of emperor ideology as it had in Meiji, and had proved itself to be necessary to the survival of emperor ideology into the middle of the twentieth century. Based on an imperial ordinance of 1909, the
daij
sai
ceremony departed from the ancient form of that religious rite by its heavy emphasis on the myth of the emperor's descent from heaven and by its connection with his postenthronement ritual visits to the Grand Shrine of Ise and to the mausoleums of Emperor Jimmu and four previous emperors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
⁴²

The
daij
sai
started on the night of November 14 and lasted into the early morning hours of the fifteenth. First the official guests seated themselves inside special structures near the compound where the
daij
sai
was to be performed, while honor guards in ceremonial costume took up their places. Next the Sh
wa emperor, wearing ritual garments of raw white silk and attended by court
ladies and a chef, entered a specially constructed compound, containing three main wooden structures, wherein he re-enacted symbolically the descent from the “plain of high heaven” in Shinto mythology. After purifying himself for the gods in the first chamber, he and his attendants passed through a hallway into two thatched huts in succession, called the
yukiden
and
sukiden
. Placed within these innermost chambers were rectangular matted beds—the
shinza
and
gyoza
—on which he performed secret rites. The
shinza
was believed to embody the spirit of the sun goddess, Amaterasu Ōmikami. By reclining on it in a fetal position, wrapped in a quilt, the emperor, according to Shinto theology, united with her spirit, thereby consummating his symbolic “marriage” to his progenitor deity. Afterward, sitting on the
gyoza
facing Amaterasu Ōmikami, he made the food offerings to her and other deities that completed the process of his becoming a living god or “manifest deity (
arahitogami
).”