Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (53 page)

The Sh
wa enthronement rites, celebrations, and festivities of 1928 affected Japanese political culture at all levels but served chiefly to reindoctrinate those in positions of public responsibility—especially government officials, schoolteachers, and policemen—in the sacred myths of Japan's origin. Taish
's incompetence had abetted the rise of Taish
democracy; Hirohito's enthronement hastened its demise and revived the theocratic ideal of the fusion of religion and politics. The rites and celebrations of Sh
wa thus contributed to closing Japanese society once again to the absorption of new Western thought. Above all, his enthronement pronounced that the emperor, ruling as well as reigning, had been made into a living god.

Many dignitaries invited to the Kyoto ceremonies sounded this theme of the emperor's divinity in a special issue of the popular business magazine
Jitsugy
no Nihon
that appeared in November 1928. Fujiyama Raita, president of the Great Japan Sugar Company and member of the House of Peers, gave expression to it when he wrote: “Witnessing this ceremony, I really felt that our emperor is the descendant of the gods and that our nation always has a god”
⁵⁷
The court ritualist Hoshino Teruoki reiterated:

No student of the enthronement can fail to be struck by the zeal with which this message of manifest divinity was proclaimed, and the significant numbers of ordinary Japanese who received it enthusiastically. As for Hirohito, neither then nor later did he ever publicly do anything, on his own initiative, to make people question that he was a “living god” or question the idea that Japan was a “divine country” because he and his people had united as one.
⁵⁹

In his analysis of Yokohama newspaper editorials devoted exclusively to the enthronement that appeared between January 1928 and January 1929, the historian Nakajima Michio identified three themes to which the enthronement gave heightened expression. First, the enthronement was seen as a great opportunity to indoctrinate the people in the national morality, thereby aiding the government's campaign to control dangerous thoughts.
⁶⁰
To that end the editorialists urged the adoption of the “Oriental principles” of “the father's way and the mother's way” (
fud
bod
), premised on the notion that the mother personified love while the father was the “main carrier of morality.”
⁶¹
The view that men—or at least Japanese men—were morally superior to women was dear to monarchists of the period. But the supreme values in national morality were loyalty to the emperor and filial piety (
ch
k
). The emperor's awards of sake cups to elders over eighty, and the honoring by village and town authorities of persons over sixty years of age, reflected this way of thinking.
⁶²

Enthronement propaganda also stressed the compatibility of the
kokutai
with modern science. Considering that the mainstream position in earlier
kokutai
debates had underscored the estrangement of the
kokutai
from modern thought, this represented a remarkable reversal of argument. Now journalists asserted that “modern science” actually validated the
kokutai
. Scientific studies
were daily demonstrating that “the spirit of respect for the gods, reverence toward ancestors, the unity of the monarch and the people, the unity of rites and governance, and the identity of loyalty and filial piety…constitute the most sublime human principles.”
⁶³

A third editorial theme of 1928 was that the enthronement of the Sh
wa emperor had inaugurated a new era in which youthful Japan was poised to become the hub of the entire world and to assume the mission of guiding all peoples.
⁶⁴
An editorial in the
Yokohama B
eki Shimp
of December 1, 1928, titled “Young Japan and its Global Mission,” claimed that loyalty and filial piety constituted a leadership principle for the entire world: