Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

  Japan’s colonial empire and new status as a great regional power in control of both continental and insular possessions was the second great legacy Meiji bequeathed to Hirohito. In 1894, nearly a decade after having decided to catch up with the advanced Western nations by joining them in the competition for Asian colonies, the oligarchic leaders of the nation declared war on China for the purpose of occupying and controlling Korea. China lost and the next year ceded Taiwan, along with the Liaotung Peninsula of southern Manchuria, and the Pescadores Islands. China agreed to pay a huge indemnity and later signed an unequal commercial treaty that allowed Japanese ships to navigate the Yangtze River and Japanese businessmen to operate factories in the inland and coastal treaty ports (such as Tientsin, Shanghai, and Canton).

  Victorious war further enhanced Emperor Meiji’s prestige. Mainly a protector of the interests of the nation’s oligarchic rulers, at forty-three he became a national symbol and acquired the dual image of a monarch by divine right and a hands-on ruler making decisions in all affairs of state. In a people long habituated to an antimilitary outlook and to regarding samurai warriors with suspicion, fear, and disdain, the victory in 1895 evoked support for the new conscript military. It also stimulated xenophobic nationalism and implanted a sense of superiority to the Korean and Chinese peoples.

  After Japan’s defeat of China the international situation throughout East Asia became more complicated. Threats from Germany, Russia, and France forced Meiji and the oligarchs to return the Liaotung Peninsula to China. Immediately the Great Powers intensified their struggle for territorial and trade concessions at China’s expense. Russia acquired leasehold rights in the Liaotung Peninsula, moved into Manchuria in 1898, and made its influence felt in Korea, thereby checking Japan.13 That same year the United States fought the Spanish-American War, annexed Hawaii, and seized the Philippines, Wake, Guam, and Midway. In 1900, when the Western powers mounted an international expedition to put down the Boxer uprising in China, Japanese troops participated. The next year Japan joined the leading Western powers in signing the Boxer Protocol, which gave them indemnities and the right to station troops permanently in designated Chinese cities to protect their nationals and diplomats.

  Three years later, starting in 1904, Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. The ensuing conflict cost an estimated 110,000 Japanese lives and ended with a brokered peace, no indemnities, riots in the capital, and the prospect that someday Russia would seek revenge. Emperor Meiji played no role in the fighting but nonetheless again added luster to his image. Japan gained the unexpired Russian leasehold rights to the Liaotung Peninsula, a seven-hundred-mile-long railway running through southern Manchuria, and the southern half of Karafuto (Sakhalin Island) in the Sea of Okhotsk, and these were praised as his epochal achievements.

  Hirohito entered the world right at the dawn of this new era of imperial rivalry in Asia and the Pacific, and under him the drama of Japanese politics reached its disastrous conclusion in war and defeat. We can gain new perspective on Japanese politics by seeing how this man, who was so often out of step with his people, ignorant of their lives, never entirely sure of their real support, survived war and occupation, and how he maintained his place on the throne to continue the imperial tradition well into the second half of the century.

  Hirohito and the Japanese nation formed a political unit based on sentiment and ideology, as well as shared memories of war. In looking at his life, we can see how he and his nation stood beside each other in a deeply symbiotic relationship, the manipulation and exploitation of which came chiefly from the emperor’s side. Before, during, and immediately after the trauma of war and defeat, he presented himself to the people as a “traditional” exalted being, looking down on them while manifesting only their ideal features, never their shortcomings. They in turn were supposed to hold him in awe and trembling as a living deity and a model of the ideal father. They were to assist him in the construction of his authority, and to take responsibility for his exercise of power because he, in theory, could not. Never were the people to discuss where this model and organizing principle of their national life fell short of perfection. (Nevertheless, in every single period, some of them always did.)

  Following Hirohito’s enthronement in 1926, politics in Japan became enflamed over foreign and domestic policy issues. Political and military elites began to debate the meaning of the national polity, or kokutai. Centered on the imperial house, kokutai meant the best possible principles of Japanese state and society. As dissatisfaction with society deepened, the belief spread that reform could be achieved by utilizing the emperor’s authority. In this context a new, spiritually driven, and powerful nationalism called the “imperial way,” kd, arose and spread widely. The “imperial way” was a motivating political theology sprung from the idea of the emperor as the literally living embodiment of Japan past and present, a paradigm of moral excellence all should follow. The term denoted a kind of ideological warfare but also, on the other hand, an action plan. It was designed to make Japan free of all externally derived isms, such as Western democracy, liberalism, individualism, and communism. Free to be itself only, the nation would regain self-esteem and be able to wage a “holy” war of ideas against Western political doctrines. Although the roots of kd went back to the crisis of the mid–nineteenth century, its revival at the end of the 1920s, and its actual application in real-life Japanese diplomacy during the early 1930s, helped Japan break with its immediate past—and also greatly narrowed the nation’s range of possible choices.

  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 Shwa 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 Shwa 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.

  For the past half century, Japanese historians, journalists, and writers in different fields have tried to “work through” and establish the various meanings of their wartime and postwar pasts. Partly for want of adequate sources, critical inquiries into Hirohito’s role in the war started only in the early 1970s, but they have continued ever since. Prodded by conscientious researchers, and reacting against assorted apologists, negators of atrocities, and deliberate obfuscators of the truth, many Japanese have continually reassessed their views of Hirohito, the war, the Tokyo trials, and other key events of the occupation period: often to rationalize them, but just as often to see them more objectively, to criticize and learn from them.