Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (70 page)

Although often criticized by
genr
Saionji for these hard-line views, Konoe was trusted by Hirohito. It cannot be proved that Konoe influenced the emperor's decision to permit Japan to leave the League. But Hirohito had long been exposed to the view that the Great Powers were motivated by racial rivalry and hoped to keep Japan from rising to the rank of the the dominant power in Asia. Moreover, we know that Konoe's ideas did affect the court officials closest to the emperor, as well as the different elites with whom they had to deal in their role as consensus builders.

Ultimately, however, short-term political considerations caused Hirohito to align with the military. Hirohito recognized and drew confidence from the fact that most states had accepted Japan's faits accomplis. So far no Western power had recognized Manchukuo; but neither, so far, had any made Japan suffer economic punishment for that conquest. The most important need, in Hirohito's view, was to stabilize the domestic political situation, which had been shaken by assassinations of prime ministers, attacks on his entourage, and aborted coup attempts. That priority required him to avoid a confrontation with the commanders of the Kwantung Army, which was needed to defend Manchukuo.
⁹⁹

 

Of Hirohito's private life during the Manchurian Incident there are virtually no published materials, apart from a two-page document in Kawai's diary, and a few anecdotes by fiction writer Koyama Itoko, who claims to have met the emperor unofficially, and been shown court documents.
¹⁰⁰

By 1932, Hirohito and Nagako had been married for eight years. She had borne four girls, of whom three had survived, and was pregnant with a fifth child. That summer, when the situation in Manchuria forced them to remain in the capital instead of traveling to their vacation retreat in Hayama, they spent many hours of the day in each other's company, and maintianed carefully regulated work days. He awoke, as a rule, at seven-thirty, she a little earlier. They dressed without the aid of servants and usually breakfasted on milk and food prepared by two “court ladies” (that is, maids). When they finished, one of the maids rang a bell to let the chamberlain on duty know that he could enter and greet them. Their day started with baths, followed by outdoor exercise taken separately. For the pregnant Nagako, exercise consisted of tending flowerbeds or a round of golf accompanied by a nurse. Toward noon Hirohito returned from his office to lunch with her, then left for work until about four o'clock, when he again joined her for tea. They took dinner together around six-thirty and snacked again around nine before retiring to their bedroom, usually at ten. When Nagako was not tending her garden, she spent part of each weekday rolling bandages for the troops in Manchuria.

The summer and fall of 1932 were a particularly stressful period in their lives. He was struggling to cope with the Manchurian crisis; she worried over her inability to produce a male heir to the throne. Having been socialized to live strictly regimented lives of public service, they had recently submitted to pressure from Privy Seal Makino, Secretary Kawai, and Grand Chamberlain Suzuki and agreed to let their first child, six-year-old Princess Teru, move out
of the palace to live in a separate building within the imperial compound. Neither of them were happy about the move, but they did not seek to defy the court tradition that seemed to mandate it.

In this atmosphere, sometime in late 1932, Empress Nagako miscarried. Afterward pressure mounted for Hirohito to fulfill his monarchical duty by taking a concubine. The elderly Count Tanaka Mitsuaki, a former president of the Peers' School and Imperial household minister, who had served both Meiji and Taish
, searched in Tokyo and Kyoto for a proper mate. Ten princesses were selected, of whom three made the final cut, and one (allegedly the prettiest) was rumored to have visited the palace and played cards with Hirohito (in the presence of Nagako). The monogamous Hirohito supposedly took no further notice of her. In early 1933 Nagako became pregnant again and on December 23, 1933, she gave birth to Prince Akihito. The personal crisis was over.

V

After the invasion of Jehol and Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations, the Kwantung Army widened its sphere of occupation: In early April 1933, the army entered Hopei Province, south of the Great Wall, in the vicinity of Peking. Hirohito intervened, the offensive was halted, and the army withdrew to Shanhaikuan. But on May 7, the army again crossed into North China. This time Hirohito sanctioned the action post facto, but made sure Honj
knew he was infuriated. Honj
noted in his diary entry of May 10: “The emperor does not intend to obstruct the operation, but neither can he permit decisions made independent of the supreme command.” Of course, the emperor did permit it because he had no alternative.
¹⁰¹

That same month a spokesman for the Kwantung Army command announced that Jehol had been annexed to Manchukuo. Though not stated publicly, the annexation also included outer dis
tricts of Hopei and Chahaer Provinces, which lay within China proper. The decision for this annexation had not been made in advance by the cabinet; neither was it based upon “treaty rights.” On the last day of May, Nationalist emissaries signed the humiliating Tangku Truce Agreement, granting de facto recognition to Greater Manchukuo and establishing a demilitarized zone south of the Great Wall in eastern Hobei. The Manchurian Incident was now closed, at least temporarily, as an issue of Western concern.

Having stabilized by truce a profound political and military instability, the contending forces drew apart. Chinese guerrillas kept up their warfare in Manchukuo. For the next four years the “buffer” zone between Manchukuo and North China proved to be less a zone of peace than a Kwantung Army staging base for unremitting political, military, and economic pressure on all five provinces of North China within the Great Wall.
¹⁰²
But the mere presence of the zone, combined with Soviet willingness to sell Japan the Chinese Eastern Railway, and Britain's efforts to improve relations, allowed the emperor to believe that international tensions would soon ease.

As for Chiang Kai-shek, having opted to appease Japan for the short term in order to buy time to build up his forces and develop economic power, the generalissimo could now concentrate on fighting the Chinese Communists. But so long as a Japanese army controlled Manchuria, and stood poised to sweep Kuomintang influence from North China, Sino-Japanese relations could never return to normal. Neither Chiang nor the Chinese public had the least intention of letting Japan get away with its aggression.
¹⁰³

In Japan the contending forces and groups also turned inward. The Imperial Way generals and their supporters remained in positions of power; the army and navy remained at odds. As twenty-eight-year-old Prince Takamatsu, serving aboard the battleship
Takao
, confided to his diary on June 11, 1933, the army was enveloped in a “fascist mood,” which the politicians needed to
understand. The truce agreement pleased the emperor, but it was not enough. “We must somehow restore harmony, end bullying by the military, and restrain the selfishness of the
zaibatsu
.”
¹⁰⁴
A few weeks later Takamatsu noted that “90 percent of the national income now accrues to about 10 percent of the people.” On July 21 his worries shifted to the “unappreciated effort” of naval power, not only in “bombarding Shanhaikwan and the Shanghai Incident,” but in enabling “the army to act and diplomacy to work” throughout the crisis. Over the next few months the prince noted growing signs of radicalism in the navy and in society at large. As 1933 drew to a close, the birth of Prince Akihito to Empress Nagako evoked in him both joy and relief that the burden of imperial succession had finally been removed from his shoulders. The news that the imperial line would be perpetuated brought widespread relief to the nation as well, though only momentarily.

Toward the end of 1933, national policy remained in flux, with Manchukuo undigested and enthusiasm for the war beginning to subside, which was not what military leaders, bureaucrats, and journalists wanted. Fearing that the new penchant for militarism and war was about to reverse itself, army propagandists took action. The movie departments of the large newspapers had already been competing to produce “visual newspapers,” or newsreels, of the incident.
¹⁰⁵
Now the Osaka
Mainichi
newspaper company saw a chance to promote business and boost profits by making a new type of patriotic film that would show the nation what needed to be done in the period ahead.
¹⁰⁶
As producer Mizuno Yoshiyuki explained, “communism and totalitarianism were contending with one another. Terrorism was everywhere. So we thought we could use the great power of film to make the nation understand the ideological confusion and the international situation.”
¹⁰⁷
The result was
Japan in the National Emergency
, a widely acclaimed documentary, produced in August with the assistance of the Army Ministry and shown throughout the country during late 1933.

Japan in the National Emergency
is important today primarily for the light that its landscape of patriotic images and scenes, culled from the years 1931 to early 1933, shed on emperor ideology. In this film the armed forces used Hirohito's spiritual authority to endow the empire—and themselves—with a moral mission to expand. By processing a wide variety of visual images of national unity, the film reinterpreted the logic of Japanese ultranationalism for the early 1930s.

Army Minister Araki narrated half of the film's twelve segments, and at different moments in his presentation showed large maps of Asia and the Pacific, and a picture of Geneva. Araki equated military power and morality, using myth as his frame of reference for understanding the meaning of the incident. His two main rhetorical devices were the “great mission” bestowed on the “divine land” by the gods, and the hostile efforts of the Chinese and the Western powers to isolate Japan and prevent the “Yamato race” from realizing its sacred destiny, “secur[ing] peace in the Orient.” Later in the film Araki defined Japan's role more concretely, seeing it as both strategic and cultural. The task was “to create an ideal land in East Asia,” which meant constructing Manchukuo and there realizing a harmony of the races. In effect Araki presented imperial aggrandizement as an idealistic effort to realize an antiracist utopia in Manchukuo.