Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (5 page)

The “imperial way” became a formula for overcoming the Japanese people's keen sense of spiritual and economic subjugation by the West. It provided channels for thought and emotion in all areas of life, not just the military. It worked to make people insensitive to the hurts imposed on others by wanton aggressiveness and self-righteousness, just as its American counterpart—the rhetoric of “Manifest Destiny”—had done in certain periods of aroused American nationalism. Almost overnight the spirit of international conciliation disappeared from the deliberations about and conduct of Japan's foreign policy. In its place came expressions of the Shinto impulse to purify Asia from the polluting influences of Anglo-American political culture. Also embedded in the “imperial way” was the millenarian belief, shared by all Japanese Buddhist sects but preached with especial vehemence by the Nichiren sect, that the Japanese state, because of its unique monarchy, was a tremendous power for teaching morality and unifying the entire world. References to the sacred principle of the “imperial way,” the “eight corners of the world” under the emperor's rule, and the “emperor's benevolent heart” became commonplace, and were linked to a willingness to use force against those who rejected his fatherly benevolence.

In this setting—a nation that interpreted itself as emperor centered and racially superior, with officials who recognized no morality higher than the state itself—Hirohito and his key advisers participated, directly and decisively, as an independent force in policy making. Acting energetically behind the scenes, Hirohito influenced the conduct of his first three prime ministers, hastened the
collapse of political party cabinets, and sanctioned opposition to strengthening the peace machinery of the League of Nations. When resistance to his interventions provoked open defiance from the army, he and his advisers drew back and connived at military aggression.

From the very outset Hirohito was a dynamic emperor, but paradoxically also one who projected the defensive image of a passive monarch. While the rest of the world dissociated him from any meaningful personal role in the decision-making process and insisted on seeing him as an impotent figurehead lacking notable intellectual endowments, he was actually smarter and shrewder than most people gave him credit for, and more energetic too. In Hirohito's case there is as much to be learned from what he does not say and do as what he does. During the first twenty-two years of his reign, he exerted a high degree of influence and was seldom powerless to act whenever he chose to. When Hirohito did not exercise his discretion to influence policy or to alter some planned course of action, his decision had consequences.

From late 1937 onward Hirohito gradually became a real war leader, influencing the planning, strategy, and conduct of operations in China and participating in the appointment and promotion of the highest generals and admirals. From late 1940, when more efficient decision-making machinery was in place, he made important contributions during each stage of policy review, culminating in the opening of hostilities against the United States and Great Britain in December 1941. Concurrently he and his advisers acted as a weathervane of the moods and frustrations of Japan's ruling elites. To stay on top of the decision-making process and to respond to new international developments, he consciously broke with precedents set by his grandfather, Emperor Meiji, and changed direction in foreign policy. Slowly but surely he became caught up in the fever of territorial expansion and war.

After defeat in World War II, Hirohito's life entered a new
phase. His immediate priorities shifted to preserving his throne and avoiding indictment as a war criminal. In this he proved as adept at the give-and-take of politics with Americans as he had been in his dealings with his own generals and admirals. American-imposed reforms destroyed the triangular relationship between the relatively independent monarchy, the government (as represented by the cabinet), and the Japanese people. Deprived of sovereign status, Hirohito was forced to become a “symbol” of national unity. Even as an American-created “symbol monarch” under a new constitution, however, he continued to act as a restraint on democratic trends, and to lobby secretly for Japan's return to a balance of power system operating against the Soviet Union under strong American leadership.

By the time the occupation ended, in 1952, the monarchy had reverted to its premodern, relatively powerless, private form, stripped of all masculine military and law-giving roles and relocated, once again, on the periphery of national life. For the first time in his adult life, the reality of Hirohito's political role came together with the perception of him as a figurehead. The return to power of conservative elites who had earlier been purged from office, however, offered Hirohito hope while setting the stage for nearly a decade of largely unsuccessful political struggle to revive some of his lost powers. Thereafter the monarchy itself underwent further decline, but not the many moral and political problems generated by Hirohito's continuation on the throne and the failure of the Japanese people to question their support of him.

The history of the Sh
wa monarchy and its justifying ideologies up to 1945 is inextricably bound up with the history of Japanese militarism and fascism; after that date it is connected to efforts by ruling elites to roll back occupation reforms, check Japanese pacifism, and regain the attributes of a great-power state. The first half of Hirohito's life, like that of his grandfather Meiji, illustrates the tendency of military power, in any polity, to expand in situations where
democratic institutions are either absent or nonfunctioning, the voices of ordinary people are shut out of national political affairs, and the only institutional restraint on the growth of militarism is the supervisory power of a lax or indulgent chief executive. The lessons of the second half of his life, when he was deprived of deity and stripped of constitutional powers, are less obvious. Hirohito and his advisers were involved in the staging of the Tokyo war crimes trials, and later in the making of the military alliance with the United States. The way he and the monarchy operated during and after the occupation of Japan also reveals how the power of the throne helped tame the liberation of the Japanese people and deflate their sense of empowerment.

This book therefore challenges the orthodoxy, established long before the Asia-Pacific War and fostered afterward by the leaders of the Allied occupation, that Hirohito was merely a figurehead within a framework of autocratic imperial rule, and a puppet of the military. It also challenges the idea that the army was mainly responsible for Japan's aggression during the 1930s and early 1940s, and points out the long-neglected role of upper-echelon naval officers in lobbying against arms reduction in the 1920s, bombing undefended Chinese cities during the 1930s, and pushing for war in the Pacific at the start of the 1940s. It argues further that, starting in the mid-1920s, party cabinets and Hirohito himself professed commitment to the new international “peace code” (stated in the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928) that criminalized aggressive war, but pursued a policy toward China that violated the spirit of Japan's voluntarily assumed treaty obligations embodying that code.

Even after the nation's capitulation in August 1945, Japan's ruling elites remained indifferent to the obligations imposed by international law on all sovereign states. Concerned about some of the wartime actions of the imperial state, and needing to protect the emperor, cabinet officers ordered the destruction of documents that
would have aided in trying war criminals and reconstructing the Sh
wa past. Later attempts by conservative politicians and intellectuals to portray the Tokyo war crimes trials as a judicial lynching by the victors, although derived partly from the limitations of the trials themselves, were also fueled by such prewar attitudes toward international law.

 

For more than twenty years Hirohito exercised, within a complex system of mutual constraints, real power and authority independent of governments and the bureaucracy. Well informed of the war and diplomatic situations, knowledgeable about political and military affairs, he participated in the making of national policy and issued the orders of the imperial headquarters to field commanders and admirals. He played an active role in shaping Japanese war strategy and guiding the overall conduct of military operations in China. In 1941 an alliance between Hirohito and his palace advisers on the one hand, and hard-line army-navy proponents of war against the United States and Britain on the other, made the Asia-Pacific War possible.

Two years into that war, long after Japan had lost the initiative and been forced onto the defensive, Hirohito and his imperial headquarters still imagined they could buy time to check American offensives and rebuild war power in order to fight and win a decisive battle somewhere in the Pacific. During the last year of the war, Hirohito continued to exercise a direct, sometimes controlling, influence on military operations and to project his mythic presence into Pacific battles. Only toward the end, during the first half of 1945, did he vacillate in his determination to fight the decisive battle on the homeland. It was his reluctance to break with the military proponents of fighting to the bitter finish that mainly delayed Japan's surrender.

Hirohito's relations with his military commanders were often strained. He frequently scolded them, hindered their unilateral
actions, and monitored their implementation of military policy decisions. Yet throughout their drive for territorial expansion, he stood by his generals and admirals, forgiving acts of insubordination as long as the result was military success. His own modus operandi as supreme commander, and the influence he exerted on operations, remain among the least studied of the many factors that contributed to Japan's ultimate defeat, and are therefore the most in need of reexamination.

Hirohito was not only a political and military leader, he was also his nation's highest spiritual authority. He headed a religiously charged monarchy that in times of crisis allowed the Japanese state to define itself as a theocracy. In a wooden building in the southwest corner of the palace compound, he regularly performed complicated rituals that clearly implied his faith in his mystical descent from the gods, and the sacred nature of the Japanese state and homeland. The fusion in one individual of religious, political, and military leadership complicates the study of the emperor. It is further complicated by his standing from early manhood at the center of a changing group of advisers who exerted influence on others through him because they exerted influence on him—while always taking care never to step out ahead of him. The composition of that changing entourage and the ideas of its members must be taken into account in trying to understand Hirohito. Similarly one must be open to the possibility that at key moments of decision, his rivalry with his brothers may have had some degree of influence on Hirohito's behavior.

A major concern of this book is Hirohito's failure to publicly acknowledge his own moral, political, and legal accountability for the long war fought in his name and under his active direction, both as head of state and supreme commander. Hirohito did not abdicate when disaster came, for he believed himself to be a monarch by divine right, and the indispensable essence of the Japanese state. He lacked all consciousness of personal responsibility for what Japan
had done abroad and never once admitted guilt for the war of aggression that over thirteen years and eleven months cost so many lives. Believing that his debt was to his imperial ancestors, he resolved to rebuild the empire to whose destruction he himself had contributed so much. American policy and the Cold War helped him to remain on the throne for forty-two more years—a symbol of national, ethnic continuity but also an object of recurring political debate. Eventually Hirohito became the prime symbol of his people's repression of their wartime past. For as long as they did not pursue his central role in the war, they did not have to question their own; therefore the issue of Hirohito's war responsibility transcends the years of war and defeat. It must be discussed within a context of changing Japanese perceptions of the lost war, and judgments as to how that war came about and about its true nature.