Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (73 page)

Even allowing for Wiswell's leading questions, this interview, which occurred at the height of the “
kokutai
clarification move
ment,” suggests that the effort to prepare the populace for war had not penetrated deeply or widely. Life in the countryside was not yet geared to the political objectives of the army and navy. Nonideological irreverence for the throne and ignorance of, or disbelief in, the foundation myths were realities behind the effort to pump up state Shintoism, and they were hard to overcome.

By the eve of all-out war with China, Japanese public schools, under orders from the Ministry of Education, were inculcating Shinto mythology as if it were historical fact; emperor ideology had become fused with anti-Western sentiment; and a conceptual ground had been prepared for the transformation of Hirohito into a benevolent pan-Asian monarch defending not only Japan but all of Asia from Western encroachment. Emperor Meiji's image as a Western-style monarch defending Japan (alone) from Western imperialism was thereby enhanced—and stood on its head. From this time one can see a deepening conflict in official ideology between an emphasis on the absolute uniqueness of divine Japan, and the pan-Asian ideal that stressed a fundamental identity shared by the Japanese and their fellow Asians.

I

In the early 1930s Hirohito faced discipline problems in his military and attacks on his court entourage from within the military, from the Seiy
kai, the privy council, and civilian right-wing organizations. Hirohito's military critics faulted him privately for “obstructing the army.”
⁷
They called him an incompetent “mediocrity” who was manipulated by his advisers. Others complained, privately, that he gave less importance to affairs of state than to his recreations—marine biology, tennis, golf, and even mah-jongg.
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Young staff officers in Manchuria were irritated by his alleged dislike of war.
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Members of the imperial family were also critical. His brother Prince Chichibu and Princes Higashikuni and Kaya frequently reported that
younger officers were unhappy with Hirohito's expressions of dependency on his entourage.

The year before, in 1932, Prince Chichibu, next in line to the throne and the brother with whom Hirohito was least intimate, had repeatedly counseled him to implement “direct imperial rule”—even if that meant suspending the constitution. At that time the emperor told Nara of his intention to transfer Captain Chichibu out of the Third Infantry Regiment because he had “become very radicalized” there.
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The regiment, commanded by Colonel Yamashita Tomoyuki [Hobun], was home to many populist young officers, including Nonaka Shiro, who two and a half years later would help plan and carry out the mutiny of February 1936. Acting as head of the imperial family, Hirohito had Chichibu reassigned to Army General Staff Headquarters in Tokyo, then to a regional command in distant Hirosaki, Aomori prefecture.

In April 1933 Hirohito had tried to curb the young officers' movement by pressing Nara to have the inspector general of military education, Hayashi Senjuro, an opponent of Army Minister Araki, take appropriate “educational measures” against extremism in the army.
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It was yet another example of rule by three-cushion indirection. Araki, however, was not easily deterred from his support of the young officers. He proceeded to undermine the emperor by calling for pardons for the army cadets, naval lieutenants, and ensigns who (together with one civilian) had been indicted for the unsuccessful coup on May 15, and the murder of Prime Minister Inukai.
¹²

Through the summer newspapers and radio covered the separate army and navy trials of the indicted. As support mounted for these “true believers in the
kokutai,
” military reservists throughout Japan and the colonies gathered more than seventy-five thousand signatures on a petition calling for a reduction of their sentences.
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On September 11, 1933, a navy court-martial sentenced Koga Kiyoshi and three other naval perpetrators to death, but later
reduced their sentences to fifteen years' imprisonment. An army court-martial handed down even lighter sentences (four years' detention) to eleven young army officers who had taken part in the coup. The lone civilian conspirator, tried in a civilian court without the benefit of a huge and popular bureaucratic organization behind him, received imprisonment for life. At this time the Japanese judicial process invariably gave perpetrators of mutiny and assassination lenient treatment if they claimed to have acted purely out of patriotism. Ordinary civilian criminals, tried under civilian jurisdiction, rarely got off so lightly.

Two weeks after the navy court-martial, Prince Takamatsu, who had served aboard ship with some of the criminals, wrote in his diary that their “act of violence” had been:

Restoring discipline and order in the military became the primary concern of Hirohito and his palace advisers after the formation of the Okada cabinet in July 1934. On the surface the problem appeared two sided: Abroad, the Kwantung Army and the small China Garrison Force in the Peking-Tientsin region had begun plotting to establish Japanese influence in North China, and it was unclear in Tokyo whether they would succeed. Meanwhile radical army officers impatient for reform were fomenting civil discord and
extremism at home as a way of gaining power for themselves. The need to impose strong central control became clear during 1935, but both the palace and the Okada cabinet were slow to respond. Officers implementing national policy in the field often disagreed with General Staff officers in Tokyo who participated in drafting policy, while policy planners on the General Staffs feuded with their counterparts in the Army and Navy Ministries and in the Foreign Ministry. The emperor's task was to stand above this dissension and, without becoming directly involved, foster unity. In 1935 he was still groping for a way to achieve this.

More particularly, small incidents of anti-Japanese resistance in the demilitarized zone separating Manchukuo from northern China led the field generals to demand that Chiang Kai-shek withdraw his forces from the Peking-Tientsin area. Chiang yielded, and in June 1935, the Chinese side approved the demands of the Japanese army by signing the Ho Ying-ch'in–Umezu Yoshijir
Agreement. Five months later an Autonomous Committee for Defense Against Communism in Eastern Hepei Province was established in the demilitarized zone under Kwantung Army supervision. Intelligence agencies in the army soon followed up this diplomatic “success” by inaugurating a second pro-Japanese puppet regime, the Kisatsu Political Affairs Committee in Tungchow, under Yin Ju-keng, a Chinese graduate of Waseda University in Tokyo, whose wife was Japanese.

Hirohito's reaction to this arbitrary conduct of diplomacy by military field commanders was to propose to seventy-four-year-old Makino that an imperial conference conduct a full-scale reexamination of policies toward China. According to Makino's diary entry of June 15, the emperor said, “Even if you question the
genr
[Saionji] concerning the North China problem, he is far from Tokyo and far from the [government] authorities. I doubt he can provide us with good ideas. It will be effective to have an imperial conference depending on the circumstances [at the time of defining fundamen
tal policy].”
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Yet because of deep divisions among the political elites, not to mention the opposition and chronically poor judgment of Saionji and Makino, no such conference was convened.

II

The premeditated efforts of the Kwantung Army and the China Garrison Force to separate North China further hardened Chinese opposition. Japan's “Monroe Doctrine” for Asia became an immediate source of conflict with the United States and Britain.
¹⁶
While this was occurring, domestic debate on the
kokutai
rekindled, gradually resulting in popular distrust of the nation's ruling elites. For nearly a decade the court group had initiated efforts to “clarify” the national polity—that is, counter antimonarchist thought and impart rationality to the tangle of statements and intellectual arguments pertaining to the nature of the state. The leaders of the army, frustrated by the slowness of political reform, now launched their own campaign to promote an ideal of Japanese nationhood within the concept of the
kokutai
and the myth of the emperors' divine ancestry.

The campaign began in the House of Peers on February 18, 1935, with an attack on Minobe's “organ theory” of the emperor's position as the “traitorous thought of an academic rebel.” The speaker was Baron Kikuchi Takeo, a retired general and member of the Imperial Reservists Association as well as the Kokuhonsha—a radical rightist organization that was part of the mainstream of Japanese politics. Kikuchi demanded that the Okada government ban Professor Minobe's books. A week later Minobe spoke in his own defense, while outside the Diet right-wing groups associated with the Imperial Way officers demonstrated against him.

In early March, reserve Maj. Gen. Et
Genkur
charged in the House of Representatives that at least two of Minobe's books—
Kenp
satsuy
[Compendium of the constitution] and
Tsuiho kenp
seigi
[Additional commentaries on the constitution]—fell within the purview of the crime of lèse-majesté. Shortly afterward, on March 4, Prime Minister Okada yielded to the hysteria by declaring in the Diet that “No one supports the emperor organ theory.”
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