Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (2 page)

I
n the following pages the reader will encounter a Sh
wa emperor who differs from his official, though far from accurate portrayal, and a reinterpretation of the entire Sh
wa era (1926–1989). From the outset I place Emperor Hirohito, the imperial institution, and the beliefs, concepts and values that constituted emperor ideology at the very center of events. Who was he? Why and how was he so carefully schooled for active leadership in Japan's civil and military affairs? What roles did he play in Japanese life and in actual decision-making before and after 1945? How did the emperor/people relationship change over time? Above all, why does a new, critical interpretation of his past help us to better understand and respond to problems in our present, radically different circumstances?

The Sh
wa
my biography was not a passive “constitutional monarch,” but an active, essential participant in the events that unfolded around him. From the bombing of Chinese cities to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and thereafter through the fighting in the Pacific, he interacted with his governments and his Imperial Headquarters, sometimes preventing his generals and admirals from conducting the war just as they wished. This did not mean, of course, that he called all the shots or was solely responsible for making policy.

Although not a conqueror by nature, Emperor Hirohito became, in ways that I document, absolutely central to the Japanese war effort. Keeping him on the throne after the defeat, not investigating his role in policy-making, and insulating him from possible trial contributed to a falsification of history. It impeded historical
clarification of the decision process leading to war and delayed surrender. It limited the development of Japanese democracy. It made rethinking the lost war and its atrocities difficult, and allowed many people to delay bringing the war to closure by means of effective apology and reparations.

I wrote this biography of the Sh
wa Emperor between 1991 and the late winter of 2000, and the timing is important. The emperor's death two years earlier had unlashed a flood of diaries and memoirs by persons who had worked intimately with him, not to mention numerous scholarly studies. By continuing my research until the end of the century I was able to access a great deal of this material, though the emperor's personal documents continue to be deliberately withheld from the public.

In addition, the Cold War had ended in ways harmful to militarists and militarism but potentially supportive of political reform in the industrially advanced states. Nearly everywhere worldwide interest in democratic thought and practice revived
in ways that were both positive and negative
. While I worked on Sh
wa history, Japan's leaders had to preside over the collapse of their bubble economy and the bad debt problems resulting from the collusion between bank executives, Finance Ministry officials, and assorted economic power brokers. Lacking a system of democratic accountability with possible criminal punishment of senior bureaucrats and business executives, the ruling LDP persistently put the protection of vested interests ahead of the general public interest.

As Japan's economic situation steadily weakened throughout the 1990s, the public's demand for political reform became a major issue. Concurrently, new efforts to promote
an assertive
nationalism gradually took on a more strident tone. Having expanded their social base and moved into the political mainstream, both old and new nationalists were increasingly able to exert influence in debates over national security and constitutional revision. Although the military was no longer on the scene as a key
player, and Japan's international situation and strategic position
as an American satellite in East Asia
were quite unlike what they had been before World War II, the heavy weight of the past remained. By the time the English edition of this book appeared, Japanese debate was beginning to focus on historical issues of security and independence abroad and democracy at home.

As I worked on my book, keenly aware of how top American leaders had fought the war in Vietnam, and never taken responsibility for the millions of Vietnamese deaths they caused or paid reparations for the destruction they wrought, I saw opportunities to gain perspectives on policy-making in different periods of twentieth-century Japanese history, and to probe the distinctive Japanese practice of public non-accountability that protects high officials from liabilities under the law. If I had written the Sh
wa emperor's story just a few years later, against the background of President George W. Bush's proclaimed “war on terrorism,” the parallels with the 1930s and 1940s would stand out more sharply. For that earlier time when Japan was the policeman of Asia was also when its top military and political leaders asserted a right to engage in pre-emptive strikes to protect and expand their empire.

During the heyday of the late Emperor Hirohito, he ruled and reigned as a “living deity” over a modern state nourished on “ nostalgia” for a past that never existed. Using prime ministers whom he helped select to execute his “ imperial will,” he participated actively in a consensual, pluralistic decision-making process. Down to mid-August 1945, confusion, perpetual intrigue, and elites unable to agree on a unified national policy characterized Japanese policy-making. Strong bureaucracy, weak prime ministerial leadership, “coalition” cabinets that often lacked real power, and elitist political parties with right-wing, underworld ties were this system's hallmarks. At its center stood the enigmatic emperor, nourished on a nationalism that was sometimes celebratory but more often defensive. While not strongly authoritarian or bellicose by nature, he was
determined to exercise his Meiji constitutional prerogatives, and to protect his imperial house at all costs.

After World War II, the American occupation regime, for reasons of expediency, rushed to legalize the Japanese monarchy by framing the new constitution around it. The “model” that GHQ drafted under General Douglas MacArthur's direction largely removed the emperor from the political sphere, committed the nation to pacifism, and shifted power to the cabinet and Diet. A new national politics began. Hirohito, no longer the nation's ultimate power broker, was allowed to remain on the throne, protected from judicial scrutiny by American and Japanese leaders who refused to hold him accountable to any degree for his multiple roles in Japan's wars. The attempt by President Truman and General MacArthur to institute a new principle of sovereignty in Japanese life without ever having condemned the old one, locked Japan into a whole structure of deceitful arguments about its past.

A major theme of this book is the containment of democratic change by the modern monarchy whenever such change threatened the authority and domination of power by a small number of privileged groups. In pursuing it, I discuss the thoughts and beliefs that bound Japanese society and infused the policies of Emperor Hirohito and his officials:
kokutai
,
kodo
, direct imperial rule, Japan as spiritually superior and divinely protected, racially homogeneous and unique. These features, along with emperor worship, faith in the power of the Yamato spirit, various legal practices and linguistic conventions, sustained the wartime exercise of power by unaccountable elites. That not all of these other ideas were fully discredited after August 1945—
kokutai
, for example, morphed into
tennosei
—influenced the U.S. government's decision to shield Emperor Hirohito, projecting him as both peace-loving and politically impotent.

Finally, this is a study of what happens to a nation when its head of state, after having been derelict in the performance of his duties,
is granted immunity from punishment and allowed to remain in an honored position of authority. American policy makers bore a heavy share of responsibility for this outcome. Ultimately, not investigating Hirohito's multiples roles and insulating him from criminal trial left intact for the rest of the twentieth century the principle of impunity for heads of state. Today we are more sensitive to the need to combat such sovereign immunity, though our commitment to doing it continues to be overridden by our flawed strategic approach to maintaining world order.