Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (76 page)

Honj
, a stubbornly persistent fanatic, repeatedly pressed the emperor to change his thinking regarding his deification. “Because we in the military worship your majesty as a living god,” Honj
opined on March 28, 1935, “it is extremely difficult in military education and command to treat your majesty as only a human—which
is what the organ theory [of Minobe] requires.” Hirohito tried to enlighten Honj
somewhat the next day. Addressing the text of the constitution, he pointed out that “[a]rticle 4 says that the emperor is the ‘head of state.' That says precisely what the organ theory says. If you wish to reform the organ theory, you must inevitably reform the constitution.”
³⁰

Hirohito's view of the constitution had been shaped by Shimizu T
ru, who opposed the “emperor organ theory” yet also found fault with Uesugi. Like Shimizu, Hirohito straddled these two main interpretations. That he refrained from coming out in defense of Minobe, thereby allowing Uesugi's absolutist theory to triumph, was only to be expected. Essentially Hirohito stood for protecting and strengthening the imperial house, drastically reducing the importance of elected professional politicians in making policy, and allowing limited reforms only as needed to meet crises. Because he equated himself with the state, and hence the state of the state, as it were, he tended to view all who opposed the established order as standing in opposition to him, and a threat to his sovereignty.

On this last point he was not wrong. Many advocates of direct imperial rule rejected the very notion of a state based on law and sought a dictatorship unrestrained by any constitutional interpretation. Hirohito was never prepared to go that far. The irony is that, in sacrificing Minobe, he and the Okada cabinet sanctioned a war against heresy that not only wiped out academic freedom but also abetted the very military radicalism they sought to control.

III

In late 1934, several Imperial Way officers at the Army Cadet School were arrested on suspicion of plotting a coup. No punishments were imposed in this incident, but the following year two of the same group—Isobe Asaichi and Muranaka Takaji—were again arrested, for having distributed a document charging that officers of
the Control faction, such as Maj. Gen. Nagata Tetsuzan, had once authored plans for coups d'état against the government. This time the highest echelons of the army reacted. The accusations by Isobe and Muranaka were condemned as disloyalty, and both officers lost their commissions. Other officers of the Imperial Way targeted for retaliation a stalwart of the Control faction, Military Affairs Bureau Chief Nagata Tetsuzan, who was rumored to be planning a major purge to rid the army of factionalism.

In August 1935—six months into the populist movement to denounce Minobe's interpretation of the constitution—Lt. Col. Aizawa Sabur
of the Imperial Way entered Nagata's office and used his samurai sword to slash him to death. At that point the struggle within the military over reform of the state and the demand for increased military spending, which lay in the background of the movement to denounce Minobe, took a more dangerous turn.

The anti-Okada forces in the army, still using the slogans “
kokutai
clarification” and “denounce the organ theory,” now stepped up their attacks on the emperor's entourage and the hereditary peers. Senior Imperial Way generals arranged to give Aizawa a public court-martial under the jurisdiction of the First Division, a hotbed of Imperial Way officers based in Tokyo. When Aizawa's show trial opened on January 12, 1936, his lawyers quickly turned it into an emotional indictment of the Okada cabinet, the court entourage, and the constitutional theory of Professor Minobe. They not only won popular support in many parts of the country but even in such unlikely places as the palace, where Hirohito's own mother, Dowager Empress Teimei K
g
, now a woman of strongly rightist views, became an Aizawa sympathizer.
³¹
Before the trial could run its course, however, it was disrupted by a military mutiny in the capital. Army Minister Hayashi's earlier dismissal of Imperial Way General Mazaki as superintendent of military education, and the issuing of orders for the transfer of the entire First Division to
Manchuria, had triggered the largest army uprising in modern Japanese history.
³²

Around five o'clock on the morning of February 26, 1936, the word storm over the
kokutai
, which had raged throughout 1935, burst into rebellion. Twenty-two junior-rank army officers, commanding more than fourteen hundred fully armed soldiers and noncommissioned officers from three regiments of the First Division, plus an infantry unit of the Imperial Guards, mutinied in the center of snow-covered Tokyo. They seized the Army Ministry and the Metropolitan Police Headquarters and proceeded to attack the official and private residences of senior statesmen and cabinet ministers. The rebels—1,027 were recruits who had just entered the army in January—assassinated Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Sait
Makoto, Finance Minister Takahashi, and the new Inspector General of Military Education, Gen. Watanabe J
tar
, a known supporter of Minobe's constitutional theory. They also killed five policemen and wounded Grand Chamberlain Suzuki, among others. While the assassinations were in progress, other mutineers raided the newspaper offices of the
Asahi shinbun
and
Tokyo nichi nichi shinbun
. Shouting, “Traitors!” at the journalists, they overturned type trays and fired their weapons into the air.
³³