Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (52 page)

So, staged behind a thick veil of secrecy in the dark of night, the rituals of the
daij
sai
climaxed in Hirohito's deification, giving him, it was claimed, an attribute that, as emperor, he had lacked until that moment.
⁴³
Members of the imperial family and invited guests were unable to watch the ceremony. The press cautioned the general public, which had also been prevented from scrutinizing the “awe-inspiring mystery,” to suspend rational judgment about the
shinza
.
⁴⁴
On the other hand, the press did not suggest that judgment should be suspended about the amount of money being spent on the enthronement while the nation was in a depression, for that would have been an act of lèse-majesté. At least a few critical placards were made, saying, “Oppose the succession ceremonies! Celebrate the anniversary of the revolution!” There is also a line in a collection of “proletarian”
tanka
poems published in honor of May Day, 1929, that reads: “The big hoopla succession ceremonies are costing $7,360,000! They will break the backs of the poor!”
⁴⁵

On December 2, 1928, two weeks after acquiring his god-
persona, Hirohito traveled to the Yoyogi Parade Ground in Tokyo to review the biggest display of army and air might in Japanese history. For hours he watched from an elevated stand as more than 35,000 troops, including 4,500 cavalry, marched past in a chilly drizzle.
⁴⁶
Two days later he went on to Yokohama for a Grand Review of the Fleet. A total of thirty-nine submarines and 208 ships, including the giant aircraft carriers
Kaga
and
Akagi
, and about 45,000 crewmen took part in this final event, along with 25,000 members of the Imperial Reservists Association, and thousands of minor dignitaries from around the country. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Japanese formed the crowd of spectators in Yokohama. Millions listened to running radio commentary of how the supreme commander reviewed his fleet while 130 naval aircraft flew over the harbor in slow, droning battle formation.

These two huge displays of military power marked the real completion of Hirohito's enthronement.
⁴⁷
Both were broadcast from Tokyo and replayed throughout Japan by a special nationwide radio hookup, so that the people could hear the “boom of the imperial salute guns, the strains of the national anthem, the tread of the soldiers, the clatter of the cavalry, and the hum of airplane propellers.”
⁴⁸

In his splendid history of the enthronement, Nakajima Michio noted that the grand military reviews were designed to show the people that their sovereign had now acquired all the attributes of his position and become a complete emperor. They emphasized that his abstract, symbolic identity as the nation's highest religious authority was, in practice, always combined with his concrete image as supreme military commander. Two images, two concepts—but one perception: one emperor performing two distinct but combined roles of equal gravity.

V

So began what became an official and accelerating emperor cult. It worked to enhance the personal image of a ruler who physically was not imposing, and whose demeanor was not godlike, though very controlled. It worked also to strengthen national unity and the subjective ties that bound individuals and groups to the nation through the emperor.
⁴⁹
And if the dogma of the divine emperor required that limits be set on rational thought and debate about the monarchy, then let the limits be set by the policies of repressing “unhealthy thought” (that is, political dissent) and heightening martial spirit.

By late December 1928 the yearlong enthronement festivities had ended. The press less frequently reflected the nationalistic fever associated with them. The Kyoto Palace remained open to the public, though. Enthronement memorial books continued to be published. Officials continued to declare that the emperor and his subjects had been joined as one entity: “one mind united from top to bottom.”

Newspapers continued to editorialize on the mission of “young Japan.” The “thought police” pressed ahead with their work of arresting communists and other dissidents. And many Japanese, because of the enthronement, probably were more strongly than ever convinced of their innate moral superiority as a people and a race. Such thinking would soon have profound repercussions on the political events of the 1930s, tainting the mood of the country with the belief that Japanese culture was spiritually redemptive and a force for the regeneration of the world, while Western culture, on the contrary, was defiling and needed to be purged.
⁵⁰

This political reconstruction of Japanese identity, with renewed emphasis on race-people-nation rather than classes within a nation, must be carefully examined. The new racial consciousness was created in a context of worsening economic conditions and intensified rural class strife, with tenant organizations challenging the landlord regime, on which the imperial system in the countryside was partly
based. Tenant disputes rose steadily from 1,866 in 1928 to 3,419 in 1931; industrial strikes also increased, reaching a prewar peak of 984 in 1931.
⁵¹
And just when social conflict was heating up, along came a clarifying, soothing, heaven-sent racism to infuse Japanese nationalism with a universalizing impulse.

As time passed Hirohito lessened his exposure to the Japanese people. During 1928 he made many tours and visits to the army and navy academies and their graduation ceremonies, the Diet, his private mansions, his relatives, and his ancestral mausoleums—all places where there was little chance of anyone approaching him with a dreaded direct appeal. His travels as supreme commander (
daigensui
) in connection with special military reviews and exercises continued at a rate of about four to six annually from 1928 to the start of World War II; but his longer, regional excursions (
chih
junk
) in his divine capacity as heavenly sovereign declined abruptly and then just stopped after a visit to Hokkaido in 1936.
⁵²
The emperor's trips in connection with naval reviews and army grand maneuvers served to mobilize the nation and, at the same time, to highlight his divine and militaristic emperor images, not his secondary status as a “constitutional” monarch. Instead of creating intimacy with his subjects in their period of economic suffering, these pseudo-public appearances left him as remote from, and as uncomprehending of, their daily lives as ever.
⁵³

On those rare occasions in the first two decades of Sh
wa rule when the consecrated emperor traveled on civil inspection tours, Home Ministry and prefectural officials regarded his visits as very serious events requiring the most careful advance preparation and allowing for zero human error. When an error occurred, the consequences could be unfortunate. On November 16, 1934, for example, a motorcycle policeman leading the imperial motorcade through Kiry
City, Gumma prefecture, was supposed to take a left turn at an intersection. Instead he led the procession straight on, slightly upsetting the itinerary of the tour. Seven days later the
erring policeman committed suicide, the governor of Gumma and all the top officials involved in staging the tour were reprimanded, police officials in Gumma had their salaries docked for two months; and the home minister himself was questioned and severely criticized in the Imperial Diet.
⁵⁴

To protect and welcome the emperor, to ensure that the crowds who bowed before him remained silent and controlled, that nothing went amiss while he was in the prefecture, local officials formed special committees, and those serving on them, after praying to the gods for strength and guidance, rehearsed every minute detail of his approaching benevolent visit.
⁵⁵
They mobilized all resources, laid out red carpets for Hirohito to walk on, swept and decorated the streets along which his motorcade would pass, disinfected (literally) and purified (ritually) the limousine in which he would ride, his railroad cars and the imperial locomotive, even the stations where he would stop. Sometimes the railroad tracks along his route were scoured and doused with disinfectants, especially where he was scheduled to alight.

The excessive, almost morbid need to make Hirohito's way spotless and germless, and his presence invisible (as all eyes had to be looking down, not at him), provides insight into the assumptions underlying Shinto beliefs. Threaded through the emperor's enthronement rituals, and his travels in connection with them, are many obsessive dualisms: clean against unclean, pure against impure, the self against the other. From these deep conceptual and emotional dichotomies would follow a natural, almost inevitable progression during the 1930s and early 1940s: We Japanese confront the world as a racially pure nation; therefore our wars are just and holy wars, and our victories create “new orders” in East Asia.
⁵⁶

To present Hirohito as deity incarnate, untouched by the evils of the political world, of his court, and of society—as pure, “sacred and inviolable”—required smoke, mirrors, and other magic—or, at the very least, concealment. Here the court group found additional
reason to hide from the public Hirohito's political actions during the Wakatsuki and Tanaka cabinets. If they had been concerned to cover up their own political interventions and those of the preen-thronement regent, they dissembled even more in order to conceal the numerous interventions of the postenthronement emperor. Precisely this combination of secret political maneuvering and public deception, authoritarianism and lack of consciousness of personal responsibility became the hallmarks of the Sh
wa emperor and the men of “moderation” who served him at court.