Little is known of the lectures on economics given by Yamazaki and others, including Inoue Junnosuke, president of the Bank of Japan. In fact, it is doubtful that they or any other economists had a great impact on Hirohito. Court officials were generally both ignorant of economic policy and untrained to understand principles of finance. The trivial cost-saving measures Hirohito instituted in 1929 in response to the Shwa financial panic left the impression that neither he nor his court team understood basic economics. It might well be that Hirohito’s main interest in the economy derived from his concern for law and order, domestic tranquillity, and international stability.
Law professor Shimizu’s influence on Hirohito is also difficult to assess but seems to have been much more important than Yamazaki’s. Every Tuesday he would lecture on the Meiji constitution and on “administrative law,” a topic that included discussion of contemporary political events. On Fridays he would expound on the Imperial Household Law (kshitsu tenpan), which governed such matters as the ordinances (kshitsurei) based on it, establishment of the regency, and the formal ceremonies of accession to the throne.6 Shimizu always aimed to present proper conservative attitudes on questions of constitutional and civil law, though exactly what themes he emphasized and what positions he staked out in his lectures of the regency years is unclear.
More is known about Hirohito’s history professor Mikami Sanji, who lectured before the regent on the political history of the Meiji period and was a prime creator of the stereotype of Meiji, “the Great.” On January 14, 1924, for example, Mikami spoke of a famous incident from the prehistory of modern Japanese imperialism: the argument over whether to “conquer Korea,” which had split the Meiji government in 1873. Meiji had listened dutifully to the instruction of the president of the Grand Council of State, Sanj Sanetomi; afterward Meiji advised the self-designated leader of the proposed expedition to Korea, Saig Takamori, not to proceed before a diplomatic mission to the Western nations, headed by Iwakura Tomomi, returned. In that way a costly foreign project was deferred until the country was better prepared to undertake it. Makino felt Mikami’s lecture was a good reference for the young crown prince. “The…[Meiji] emperor,” wrote Makino in his diary, “made a wise decision, and it resulted in good fortune for the nation in a difficult period when the Restoration reforms were being established. For the prince to hear such stories will have a great effect in nurturing his virtue.”7 Given Hirohito’s reticence, however, neither Makino nor anyone else could be certain how he had reacted to what a lecturer said (or did not say) about a particular subject.
Mikami’s lectures to Hirohito focused on Meiji’s inexhaustible virtue and benevolence. He hammered home this theme over and over again as the Taish emperor lay dying and the court prepared for Hirohito’s accession. Vice Grand Chamberlain Kawai mentions that on November 19, 1926, Mikami spoke on how the Restoration leaders had encouraged Meiji always to do good and eschew evil. Makino’s diary entry of that day notes that Hirohito seemed deeply moved, continuing:
There were bold words of remonstrance concerning how one must really exert oneself to manifest generosity, love and esteem, prudence and dignity…. Professor Mikami culled examples from all over the world and amplified them. Such a lecture is very timely today. Therefore, in another room, I expressed my satisfaction to the professor and drew his attention to a few more points for his reference.8
Meiji’s virtues continued to furnish lecture material throughout 1926 on his frugality, learning, and pedagogical intentions concerning his son. The painstaking efforts of Meiji’s advisers to nurture his benevolence was never overlooked.9 Mikami’s last talk in 1926, delivered on December 3, stressed that: “The emperor should be generous and think of the people as his treasure; he should preserve his health…; he should labor to heighten his augustness and high virtues, yet also try to be gentle; he should care well for his subjects.”10
Mikami’s lectures also affected the entourage and contributed to its plan to establish in 1927 a national holiday to commemorate Meiji and celebrate his “great virtue.”11 The impact of Mikami’s ideas on Hirohito was more complex. The weekly lectures on the almost-mythical Meiji probably strengthened Hirohito’s resolve to live up to the ideal of an activist, dynamic monarch, manifesting the qualities of benevolence Meiji was supposed to have possessed. On the other hand, his “nervousness” and tension may have been exacerbated by the hyping of Meiji. An overelevated, unrealistic standard of behavior was set before him to emulate and attain. And almost certainly this pressure caused him a great deal of anxiety. Moreover, at the same time as he was being asked to be a gentle and benevolent monarch, he was also being instructed in military science, economics, and international law and diplomacy, which required a completely different, more disciplined, vigorous type of behavior.
During these years Hirohito was taught about the morally dubious activities in which rulers, of necessity, normally engage. His instructors imparted to him the doctrine that in making international policy decisions, states must eschew ethics and sometimes use force to optimize their interests. The only question that really mattered, he learned, was: Is it in the national interest?
To focus Hirohito’s attention on the pursuit of national advantage was the task of Professor Tachi, Japan’s preeminent international lawyer. Tachi offered his answers to the question of what constituted the national interest in lectures on the history of diplomacy and the precepts and prohibitions of international law. Before joining the faculty of Tokyo Imperial University, Tachi had studied in Germany, France, and Britain between 1900 and 1904.12 He was a member of the Japanese delegations at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the Washington Conference of 1921–22.13 His nationalist positions on questions of international law made him well regarded in both the Japanese Foreign Ministry and the army high command. It was hardly surprising that a private scholar who took his orders from the Foreign Ministry should have been chosen to teach international law at court.
Tachi came to lecture Hirohito after Japan (though not the United States) had signed on to the new Versailles-Washington framework of institutions based on principles of formal equality among sovereign nations, peaceful resolution of conflicts, and outlawing of aggressive war. Unlike Mikami, Tachi did not talk about virtue and benevolence. He avoided moral criteria in understanding international law, and shied away from restricting the rule of force by the rule of law. Tachi taught that war in general was always legal, never illegal; “established international law” existed to subserve the interests of states; the right of self-defense included war that expanded territory or protected the lives and the private property of nationals living in other states. This nineteenth-century view of international law had been generally accepted before Versailles and the Covenant of the League of Nations had declared new basic principles and established new (American-inspired) organizations to govern and resolve disputes among nations. Those new principles, however, failed to impress Tachi or the Japanese Foreign Ministry under any of its ministers, including the liberal Shidehara.
Tachi’s nationalistic view of international law was the official Japanese view, in which Hirohito was instructed from the late 1920s through the early 1930s. As historian Shinohara Hatsue pointed out, those were precisely the years when U.S. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson and many leading international law experts in the United States—such as Quincy Wright at the University of Chicago, James T. Shotwell at Columbia University, and Clyde Eagleton at New York University—were developing an opposing theory to criminalize aggressive war and abolish the principle that belligerents should be treated impartially.
As Hirohito built up his knowledge and gained experience of political and diplomatic affairs, he increasingly took the initiative in ordering “special lectures” on matters that he felt required the advice of outside experts.14 Lectures on the political situation in Weimar Germany, Soviet Russia, China, Korea, and the League of Nations were intended to keep him abreast of main developments in foreign affairs and
in the Japanese colonies. Senior military officers, the army and navy ministers, and various aides-de-camp delivered military science lectures to him, usually on a weekly basis, then augmented their instruction by having him participate in annual military field exercises and “grand maneuvers.” These provided opportunities for him to meet and question the rising stars of his professional officer corps, and to signal to army and navy leaders how he might respond to their formal submission of requests.15
II
From the start of the regency, government and Imperial Household Ministry officials experimented with new ways of making the throne more responsive to Japanese society. In their efforts to recover lost authority, they relaxed the legal restrictions that before World War I had kept the press from photographing the monarch. In 1921 all the print and visual media of the period—newspapers, magazines, and film—were harnessed as the crown prince became de facto monarch. Photographic equipment soon was coming into Japan on a scale that rivaled the import of electric machinery and cotton textiles. An advertisement in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi shinbun, using a picture of the regent Hirohito and Princess Nagako together, was allowed to pass without question.16 Books containing previously banned pictures of Hirohito’s autograph and the imperial seal were published without incident.
Under Makino’s direction the Imperial Household Ministry dispatched the crown prince on his first “experimental tours” to Kanagawa prefecture, and to the home island of Shikoku, in preparation for a later journey to the colony of Taiwan.17 These tours did not draw on the precedent of Meiji’s six imperial excursions, undertaken annually between 1872 and 1877, long before the establishment of the “emperor system.”18 Meiji’s tours had carried the message that he was a living deity engaged in the project of national unification. Hirohito’s first domestic tours, by contrast, carried no ideological message but were designed primarily to allow court officials to witness his performance and make suggestions for improvement. Secondarily, however, it was hoped that the tours would bring the imperial house closer to the people and, in that way, restrain the Taish democracy mood that Hirohito’s own father was inadvertently assisting simply by being passive, nonperforming, and often disoriented.
Makino wrote:
The train departed at 9:45 A.M. for the grand army maneuvers. I accompanied [the prince regent]. We arrived at Shizuoka Station at 2:15 P.M. and went to the imperial mansion…. He viewed old documents and saw a display of fireworks in the evening.
I shall be brief for we plan to write out our report on this trip later…. dealing with matters that must be reformed after adequate deliberation…. For example, [the regent’s] posture…[and] his demeanor…. An appropriate demeanor should be adopted for the simple-hearted folk in Shikoku. Their expectations are naturally different from urbanites in places like Hokkaido or Tokyo. In this area, just to have the chance to worship the person of the emperor is a supreme honor. There is no need [for him] to nod in acknowledgment for every courtesy. The word I heard most often among the welcomers was ogameta: “I reverently beheld him.” One should assess the public mind by just that one word.19
After the Shikoku trip, a more reassured Makino wrote (December 4, 1922), “We feel better now about him. Prudence and meditation will enhance his virtue. He seems more aware of his role and this gives us more confidence for the future.”20
On April 12, 1923, Hirohito departed from the Yokosuka naval base aboard the warship Kong, bound for Taiwan, a colony governed outside the Meiji constitution, where the Japanese population was a distinct minority and the climate, customs, and sentiments of the people were unlike those of Japan. His tour, another rite of passage, took him to the island nearly four years after the powerful Hara Kei cabinet had abolished the system of colonial government by the military and placed day-to-day decision making in the hands of a civilian governor-general.
This change had been carried out partly to placate anti-colonial movements in the Japanese colonies and partly to improve Japan’s image by bringing it into apparent line with Western colonial practice in Asia. The military, however, had continued to rule in Taiwan just as in other Japanese colonies, though not so harshly as in Korea.
Hirohito’s visit had two aims: first and foremost to remind the people at home that the moral source of all their worldly achievements was the imperial house, now represented by him; and second to reaffirm Japan’s possession of Taiwan by putting his own seal on Meiji’s colonial legacy. His imperial motorcade went first to “the place where the Japanese expeditionary force initially landed on Taiwan and Imperial Prince Kita Shirakawa, commander of the Imperial Guard Division, had died from malaria.” In other words the regent began by demonstrating concern not for the colonized population but for his own imperial family, one of whom had died in the conquest, and whose spirit was enshrined in all but ten of the island’s sixty-eight Shinto shrines.21 In the 1930s Japan would compel Taiwanese (and Koreans) to worship at such shrines under the pretext of pursuing an assimilationist policy, but in this period it followed a less harsh program.
Apart from his visits to shrines, a number of military facilities, and a Japanese sugar refinery, Hirohito targeted the youth of the colony by visiting thirteen Japanese-built schools. In another symbolic gesture of benevolence, he reduced the prison sentences of 535 political prisoners who had been arrested in 1915 for plotting an armed uprising against Japanese rule.22 But he had undertaken the tour mainly to reinforce belief in the monarchy and to project an image of exemplary moral perfection; and this aim he achieved simply by the dignified way in which he displayed himself and by the press’s extremely detailed coverage of his visit.
When he arrived at the governor-general’s headquarters in Taipei, for example, the Tainichi shinbun reported that a band played “Kimigayo” (the Japanese national anthem) as his train entered the Taichu station area. The stationmaster opened the train door and “onto the platform stepped the bright, glorious, splendid figure of the prince.” Guided by numerous officials, and their accompanying military and civil attendants, they all formed a line on the left side of the platform. Hirohito “advanced and saluted the recipients of imperial accolades, Japanese and Taiwanese alike. Then he drove off with his grand chamberlain in a car emblazoned with a shining golden chrysanthemum seal.” Military police and civil police chiefs guarded him in front, while the governor of the colony led the procession of cars that followed.23
The order in which the imperial entourage and the colonial bureaucracy arranged themselves here vis-à-vis the crown prince was characteristic of all public imperial functions and not specifically intended to reflect the special relationship of hierarchical inequality between Japan and its colonies, which had been forced on them without their consent.
In the May–June 1923 issue of Taiwan jipp, after Hirohito’s departure from Taiwan, Chief of General Affairs Kaku Sakatar affirmed the regent’s importance as a model of morality and benevolence for the entire Japanese empire. “I believe,” Kaku declared, that:
our people’s moral values are generated from the imperial house and that the crown prince’s visit clearly shows this reality. We are most grateful that he has presented himself as the model of morality for the common people. The prince is richly imbued with the value of filial piety toward his parents; he gets along well with his brothers. He is open but composed and does not display emotion. His majesty’s philanthropy and humaneness extend even to animals. His modest, frugal way of life is a guide for all his subjects. His every word and action show the essence of morality. What especially moves me is that regardless of his subjects’ class or office, wealth or poverty, he always smiles warmly on all.24
Hirohito’s tour had helped Kaku to communicate the image of the imperial house as the source of the nation’s morality and the emperor as the “model of morality for the common people.” Kaku’s emphasis on “filial piety” and the prince’s amicable relations “with his brothers” was premised on the expectation that the Chinese population of Taiwan would respond
enthusiastically if addressed in such terms of Confucian family relationships. But however one interprets the regent’s performance, Kaku’s language attempted to justify to the Chinese people a colonial order that had already become questionable as a result of rising demands for national self-determination and nationhood.
Hirohito sailed home from Taiwan as he had traveled there, departing Keelung on April 27, 1923, aboard the Kong. Two days out to sea he celebrated his twenty-second birthday. Ahead of him lay his long-postponed marriage to Princess Nagako, continued academic study at court, and more tours and ceremonies as required by the new policy of bringing the imperial house closer to the people.
On his return to Tokyo, two events occurred that were to have an unforeseen impact on Hirohito’s later life. One was the discovery in June 1923 of the newly formed, illegal Japanese Communist Party, the first group in Japan’s modern history to call for the abolition of the monarchy; the other, which followed his first experience of a cabinet change, ranks among the worst natural disasters of the twentieth century.
On August 14, 1923, Prime Minister Kat died, and Admiral Yamamoto Gonbei was appointed his successor. Two weeks later, on September 1, while Yamamoto was forming his cabinet, the great Kant earthquake struck the Tokyo-Yokohama region. The quake and the fires that followed killed more than 91,000 people, left 13,000 missing, injured more than 104,000, and destroyed more than 680,000 homes in the Tokyo area alone.25 While the fires raged and the aftershocks continued in both cities, Japanese vigilante groups, abetted by military and police officials, carried out murderous pogroms against Koreans and leftists rumored to have ignited fires, looted, and poisoned wells. More than six thousand Koreans were hunted down and killed throughout the Kant region and in many other parts of the country.26 Hirohito now gained his first experience as an active commander in chief issuing emergency imperial edicts. He placed Tokyo and its environs under martial law on September 3 and, after all danger from the earthquake had passed, toured sections of the devastated capital on horseback, in military uniform, accompanied by martial-law-commander General Fukuda. On October 10 he paid a similar visit to the Yokohama-Yokosuka area.27
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 15