Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (72 page)

W
hen Japan recognized Manchukuo and withdrew from the League of Nations, most Japanese felt that something fundamental had changed. Youthful, ancient Japan had fought another war of “self-defense,” and in the process scored an armed victory over Chinese warlordism and a spiritual one over “Western moral decadence.” By its own efforts, the nation had opened a new road to modernity and put forth a claim to becoming greater and more respected in the world than it had been.

For General Araki and other politically active officers of the army, the rhetoric of “crisis,” “Sh
wa restoration,” “Anglo-Saxon encirclement,” and so on was simply a mobilizing device too effective to let go. They prolonged the euphoria of victory and took advantage of it by continuing the Imperial Way theme, using it to strengthen army influence in politics and to reshape the emperor's image. The pleasant view of an indestructible and virtuous Japan confronting morally inferior, devilish foreign states spread widely. So too did notions of “national defense state,” “empire,” and “holy mission” to spread the “emperor's benevolence.” These ideas led people to invest the military's expansion abroad with notions of goodness. They also strengthened their desire to overcome the West in every field of endeavor and, in that way too, structured a new, more exclusionary sense of collective identity.

Under Meiji, Japan had superficially “escaped from Asia”
(
datsu'A
), assimilating certain concepts, as well as the technology, and in certain ways even the identity of the leading Western societies. The practical consequence was a kind of hopeful, shallow, often resentful sense of solidarity with the white Western communities in Asia, including the adoption of their racist attitudes and epithets toward Chinese and other Asian peoples. Now, however, Japan was on the rise, independently striving, building, renewing its role as the—rightful—leader in Asia. Therefore many ideologues now discovered that Western political thought was essentially exploitative, hegemonistic, and aggressive—in short, a contagious plague that for a time had infected insular Japan and caused it to threaten the interests of fellow Asians. Henceforth Japan should act not so much in “self defense,” as to spread the Sh
wa emperor's virtues by establishing a morally superior society in Manchukuo, where the “five races” would live in hierarchical “harmony” in accordance with the “principle of the ‘kingly way.' ”

Japan's Manchukuo-vindicating new national image, as well as some characteristics of its worship of the state, resembled aspects of German Nazism and Italian Fascism. (The latter developed partly out of an Italian search for a counterpart to Japan's national political religion of emperor worship.)
¹
With the arrest in 1933 of eighteen thousand dissidents, and the forced recantation of many left-wing leaders, the communist movement in Japan was all too easily suppressed.
²
Between 1934 and 1936, what remained of Taish
democracy and the institutions of constitutional liberalism were similarly enfeebled by intimidation and assassination. Although racial intolerance and bigotry never became a state policy as in Nazified, anti-Semitic Germany, racial discrimination against other Asians was habitual for many twentieth-century Japanese, having begun around the time of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, with the start of Japanese colonialism. The Anti-Comintern Pact made with Germany and Italy in November 1936 brought in Nazi ideologues who gained many Japanese supporters and injected Nazi-style anti-
Semitic arguments into mainstream public discussion—where defamation of Jews was already widespread. Thereafter all Japanese governments shamelessly manipulated the popular image of the Jews, not so much to persecute them as to strengthen domestic ideological conformity.
³

Ethnological studies of the rural areas from which the army recruited most of its troops during the 1930s suggest, however, that despite the best efforts of the Ministry of Education, many country people were relatively unaffected by official propaganda. To them emperor ideology was neither so meaningful nor so valid as their own nativism. Family and village considerations still took precedence over state considerations. Indeed, down to the start of the China war in mid–1937, many villagers displayed only the shallowest acceptance of the emperor's authority.
⁴
Knowing this, the army always acted on the premise that soldiers were rooted, above all, to their families and villages. The army's Field Service Code (
senjinkun
), issued on January 8, 1941, emphasized that “[t]hose who fear shame are strong. Remember always the good reputation of your family and the opinion of people of your birthplace.” And: “Do not shame yourself by being taken prisoner alive; die so as not to leave behind a soiled name.”
⁵

Significant exceptions to rural ignorance of the emperor's authority were persons in posts of responsibility in local society. Village officials, schoolteachers, policemen, Buddhist and Shinto priests—the foot soldiers of Japanese nationalism—invoked the authority of the emperor and the power of the state to strengthen their local authority. Their loyalty to and veneration of the emperor often seemed spontaneous and deeply felt. But most villagers did not occupy positions of public responsibility and probably were not devout believers in the emperor. Their patriotism was of a different order.

In 1935, for example, anthropologists John and Ella (Lury Wiswell) Embree interviewed farmers in the remote agricultural
village of Suye Mura on Kyushu Island. When Ella Wiswell's book,
The Women of Suye Mura,
appeared many years later, it described a world of hard-drinking, outspoken farm-women, who laughed at the emperor's pretensions. Wiswell recorded a conversation with a literate woman of the village: