Hirohito worked on the revised memoir of his reign all through 1977, 1978, and 1979. He insisted on continuing with it into his eighties, just as he insisted on performing some of the more physically exhausting court ceremonies and on not letting his son take over as regent while he lived. He never seemed to tire of the project. Irie, in his diary entries for 1980, notes how the emperor worried about Honj Shigeru’s account of the February 26, 1936, military uprising. The names of some of the prime movers in saving him from indictment during the occupation period are mentioned: Fellers, Terasaki, Keenan, and so on.53 Voices from the past kept recurring, as did the events of 1941. His concern with what his brother Takamatsu had said about him in print had become obsessive.
While Hirohito was tirelessly reconstructing the version of the war years he had narrated many decades earlier in 1946, others had begun thinking of Japan after Shwa. The Association of Shinto Shrines, organizations of veterans and bereaved families, conservative Diet members, and many local prefectural assemblymen were campaigning to strengthen the authority of the monarchy. One of their objectives was to mandate by law the use of era-names (such as Meiji, Taish, Shwa) in counting time in official documents. In 1979, after years of debate in which opposition to the measure always prevailed, the Diet finally passed the “Era-Name Law”—a regressive measure that prescribed the use of each emperor’s reign title to indicate contemporary time.
Some three decades earlier, GHQ had ordered this institution of “imperial time” deleted from the revised Imperial Household Law. When the conservatives tried to legislate the practice into law, GHQ had declared the era-name system to be incompatible with the spirit of the new constitution because the emperor no longer ruled. Now, in 1979, the bill had become law, ensuring that people would go on thinking in terms of imperial eras which ended with the physical death of each emperor. The notion of the uniqueness of the Japanese people was once again reaffirmed. Hirohito’s reaction to this outcome is unknown but he could hardly have been displeased. The passage of the Era Name Law set the stage for a new attempt, during the next decade, to strengthen the authority of the throne.
During the early and mid–1980s, Asian nations once invaded and colonized by Japan were achieving rapid economic growth, making productivity gains, and, in the process, finding that their voices were heard in international affairs. As Japan came under scathing criticism in the United States for its protectionist economic practices, its domestic policies were also subjected to closer scrutiny by nations in East Asia. Starting in fall 1981, the South Korean press criticized the wording of Japanese textbooks. The textbooks whitewashed Japan’s invasion of China (calling it an “advance” rather than an “invasion”) and misdescribed its harsh colonial role in Korea (labeling the March 1 Independence Movement a “riot”). These practices of the Ministry of Education only attracted worldwide attention, however, the following summer when China, for a combination of historic and diplomatic reasons, joined in pushing into the limelight Japan’s responsibility for the Asia-Pacific war.
Behind the protests lay concern over Japan’s economic power, but also unease at the way top Japanese officials persisted in trying to enhance the authority of the emperor, while contending that Japan needed a new national identity grounded in glory rather than shame. Prime Minister Suzuki Zenk (1980–82) quickly defused the international uproar over Japan’s slanted textbook practices, and some improvements were registered in Japan-China relations. But during the tenure of Suzuki’s successor, Nakasone Yasuhiro (1982–87), Japan continued to remain under a cloud of mistrust in the eyes of many Asian and Western peoples. Having resolved to achieve greater participation in international society for Japan, Nakasone promised to rectify the textbook problem, and over the next decade, as Japanese perceptions of the lost war continued to change, substantial progress was made under different LDP prime ministers.
Hirohito, like many other Japanese, worried less about China than about Japan’s worsening relations with the United States. The United States was buffeted by rising inflation, and the American public had come to feel that their country was stagnating under President Jimmy Carter. In 1980 they elected Republican Ronald Reagan as president. Reagan and his advisers immediately rekindled the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union and inaugurated an aggressive policy of imperial interventions. Japan’s elites responded by increasing defense spending on the premise that the United States’ global economic and military hegemony was declining and it was time for Japan to prepare to stand on its own. Nakasone immediately sought to improve relations with the Reagan administration, strengthening defense, and raising the annual military budget above the ceiling of one percent of gross national product, formally fixed by a cabinet decision six years earlier.
For Hirohito, Reagan’s policies carried the danger of war, and the Nakasone initiatives had both positive and negative sides. As he told Irie on October 17, 1982, after learning that the Reagan administration had requested that Japan not only share the burden of air defense over its sea-lanes but also blockade the Soya Strait, “If we do this, isn’t there a danger of war with the Soviet Union? Go tell the director [of the Defense Agency] that I think so.”54 On the twenty-sixth he confided to Irie his concern that “If Japan increases the size of its armed forces, the Soviet Union might be provoked.”55 Three days later, riding by car with Irie to view field birds and ducks, “All he talked about on the way was defense issues. ‘We have no politicians who can view these matters from a broad perspective. How foolish to provoke the Soviets by strengthening defense, to become so preoccupied with the percentage of GNP we spend on defense!’”56
Grand Chamberlain Irie Sukemasa died in 1983. The last two years of his diary record Hirohito’s continuing uneasiness with problems in Japan–U.S. relations.
Another political issue that roiled the Japanese political scene during the early and mid–1980s was state protection for Yasukuni Shrine. Although Hirohito had stopped visiting Yasukuni after 1975, he did not object to public officials worshiping at the shrine where the souls of those who had died for him and Japan reposed. On the other hand he did not want to deepen domestic divisions over the issue of state support for Yasukuni. The same was true of most LDP politicians in the Diet. Anxious to retain the support of the Bereaved Families Association and the Association of Shinto Shrines, while also not alienating the opposition, they had tabled a “Yasukuni Shrine Protection Bill” five times between 1969 and 1974. On each occasion the bill was defeated after discussions with the opposition Socialist Party; and all involved breathed a sigh of relief. After 1978, when the Class A war criminals, executed for “crimes against humanity,” were secretly enshrined at Yasukuni, the issue of furnishing state support for the Shinto institution became more controversial than ever. Moreover, this action made it virtually impossible for the image-conscious Hirohito ever again to visit the shrine which extols Japanese militarism and the “War of Greater East Asia.”
Nakasone, like his precedessor Suzuki, hoped to effect a symbolic strengthening of ties with the past. Legalizing state support for Yasukuni Shrine and perpetuating the practice of cabinet ministers worshiping there were ways of accomplishing that goal. On August 15, 1985, Nakasone became the last postwar prime minister to worship at Yasukuni in his official capacity. His attempt to curry favor with conservative and right-wing constituencies by legitimizing official worship at Yasukuni provoked strong criticism within Japan. To minimize the significance of his action Nakasone declared that he had bowed only once instead of twice and clapped his hands only once instead of twice, thereby indicating that to visit a Shinto shrine was not necessarily to perform a religious act. But once the governments of South Korea and China added their voices to the criticism, Nakasone stopped worshiping there. Soon the issue waned, along with national support for a law authorizing state protection of Yasukuni.57
Given Hirohito’s political concern to maintain amicable relations with China and Korea, he was probably relieved to see the Yasukuni Shrine bill
shelved. It is doubtful, however, that Hirohito gave much thought to the ethical or constitutional dimensions of the problem. By this time, the Yasukuni War Museum had transformed the Asia-Pacific war symbolically by removing the emperor from nearly all Shwa-era exhibits. Virtually all connection between him, emperor ideology, and the wars of the 1930s and early 1940s was effaced. Visitors could come and depart the museum without ever suspecting that Hirohito had once been the vital energizing leader of the war.
In Prime Minister Nakasone the elderly Hirohito found a leader with a clear position on the uses of the monarchy in an era when Japan had regained its status as a great power. Nakasone argued that power and authority had been separated in Japan since antiquity; hence the true form of the emperor was that of a “symbol” as specified in the constitution. However, Nakasone wanted to raise the emperor’s status and enhance his authority, so that he could become the symbol of the “state” rather than of high economic growth, which he had been since the early 1960s. This he was unable to bring about. All Nakasone succeeded in doing, in the course of many speeches on the theme of state and emperor, was to revive the long-smoldering resentment of right-wing nationalists against the judgments of the Tokyo war crimes trial. Echoing earlier attacks on the trials by proponents of constitutional revision, Nakasone charged that the left-wing had been trying to impose a “Tokyo trials view of history” on the nation’s youth. During his last month in office—while the United States and the Soviet Union reached agreement on intermediate range nuclear missiles—he reiterated his ideological position, calling for a “general settlement of accounts with the past” and a strengthening of the prime minister’s powers.
When Nakasone stepped down, in late October 1987, Hirohito’s life was drawing to its end. The Cold War, which had long been winding down, was almost over. Soon Japanese politicians would find it harder to practice their political double standard about the lost war. On September 18, 1987, the eighty-six-year-old emperor was reported to have an undisclosed intestinal disease. He was soon hospitalized for surgery, the first emperor to undergo such a procedure. The operation was successful but a year later, on September 19, 1988, he was gravely ill. Crown Prince Akihito was informed that his father had cancer; the press was left to speculate. The nation plunged into a mood of prolonged grieving. For one hundred and eleven days Japan raptly followed an old and dying emperor’s temperature, blood pressure, and other vital signs. Long lines of Japanese citizens queued to pray for him and to sign official “get well” registers provided by government agencies. The condolence-wishers represented a small minority, and many signed because their company superiors did first. Yet it seemed as if the entire nation was in vigil.
While Hirohito lay dying in the inner recesses of the Fukiage Palace, the Japanese media censored itself on discussion of his and the monarchy’s role in Japanese military aggression. Elsewhere, in Asia and Europe, media coverage concentrated almost exclusively on his war role, and the way Japanese officials avoided confronting that past. The stance of the Japanese toward Hirohito in his dying days, and the feelings of the rest of the world toward him could not have been more different.58
In early December 1988 a mood of calmness and detachment returned, moderating the excessive “self-restraint” that had descended on the entire nation when the news of Hirohito’s illness was first disclosed. On the seventh, Nagasaki’s Catholic mayor and LDP member, Motoshima Hitoshi, addressing the Nagasaki City Assembly, spoke matter-of-factly about the “war responsibility” of the dying emperor. His words, reported in the media, touched off a fury of rightist reaction. His own LDP turned against him. A year later a right-wing thug shot Motoshima, but the mayor survived.
Death came to Hirohito at 6:33 in the morning on January 7, 1989, with family members around him. The attending physicians, astonished at his tenacious will to live, attributed his stamina to the chaste, disciplined life he had led since youth. In the view of chief physician Takagi Akira, the emperor was sustained by his belief in the power of spirit. At the end he simply refused to surrender.
Prime Minister Takeshita delivered the official eulogy. He reiterated two of the unrealities on which Japanese politics during the second half of the twentieth century had been based. “The great emperor,” declared Takeshita, had always been a pacifist and constitutional monarch. For sixty-two turbulent years he “had prayed for world peace and the happiness of the Japanese nation,” and every day he practiced what he preached. “Regarding the great war, which had broken out contrary to his wishes, when he could no longer bear to watch the nation suffering its evils, he made the heroic decision and, disregarding his own welfare, ended it.”
Fifty-six-year-old Crown Prince Akihito took on his imperial duties the next day. A father with three grown children, Princes Hiro and Aya and Princess Nori, he faced no such succession problem as Hirohito had. During a brief ceremony he declared his loyalty to the Constitution of Japan.
The new era of “Heisei” (achieved peace) began as East and West Germany finally united, the Cold War ended, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—the world’s largest empire—started to break up. Politics everywhere became more fluid. In Japan, a minor political crisis, triggered by the usual recurring corruption scandal, once again shook the political establishment. This time, for the first time in an upper house election (July 1989), the LDP went down to temporary defeat. In the course of a single year, three prime ministers came and three prime ministers went. Hirohito’s funeral and the accession ceremonies for Akihito were held up by serious disputes among the ruling elites. Many months passed beyond the customary one year of national mourning before Emperor Akihito could begin his various enthronement ceremonies. Like that of the Shwa emperor before him, the pageantry was all government-financed, but less elaborate this time and less hyped. The public looked on with pleasure, but few seemed moved by it.
The enthronement culminated in a ceremony staged in the palace on November 12, 1990. Some 2,500 dignitaries attended, fifteen hundred of them from 158 countries around the world. This was followed two weeks later by a “Great Food-Offering Ceremony” in the imperial palace garden, November 23, with 733 guests in attendance. Neither event was a gain or a favorable portent for Japanese democracy. At the enthronement the symbolism was medieval—sacred regalia, emperor seated on high, and servile prime minister standing below and looking humbly up. Even the thought of popular sovereignty was mocked.59 The six-hour-long food offering was based on an imperial ordinance of 1909 that had nothing at all to do with the constitution of 1947. Nevertheless, Akihito’s oath was to uphold that constitution.
The daijsai religious ceremony revived state Shinto rituals based on the political culture of Meiji-era absolutism. In that sense it flouted the constitutional separation of politics and religion.60 When criticism arose, spokesmen for the cabinet pointed out that the first religious act of the new reign did not require constitutional justfication. Akihito’s installation ceremony had merely given him an opportunity to pray on behalf of his people; it had in no way transformed him into a living deity.61 And in fact, the enthronement had been an incomplete Shinto ritual as compared with that of Shwa. Nor had officials and journalists used this occasion to enhance his popularity.
In December 1990, when the imperial transition was over, and quickly forgotten, Emperor Akihito granted a press interview. Responding to questions about the lost war, he replied: “My generation has lived for a long time without war, and so I have had no occasion to reflect on the war.”62 His reply could have been voiced by Shwa. Thereafter, although an annual birthday press conference became traditional, no more serious war questions would be asked.
Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko soon resumed visits abroad. In October 1992, their visit to China, at the insistence of the Peking government, divided opinion at home about the value of “imperial house diplomacy.” In August 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the surrender, they embarked on a less controversial “journey of condolence” to the cities o
f Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the island of Okinawa. Thus apologizing only for the suffering caused by Japan’s wartime past, Akihito avoided any acknowledgment of his father’s war guilt.
As the twentieth century ended, although developments in Japan hinted that constitutional change might take place, it seemed unlikely that Akihito would ever be brought forward to lead the nation as dramatically as Meiji or as disastrously as Shwa. His personality, abilities, education, and interests all seemed to rule out such a role. So too did the many problems still unresolved from World War II—problems inherent in the institution of the Japanese monarchy itself rather than in the particular occupant of the throne. Nonetheless, like It and the genr with Meiji; and Kido, the militarists, and MacArthur with Shwa, some future national leadership may rise and find effective ways to make use of the new monarch or his successors. Whether they will move the institution as their predecessors did—to prevent the deepening of democracy and growth in the popular sense of political empowerment—is a crucial issue for Japan in the new millennium.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES
FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States. U.S. State Department documents pertaining to peace and war, from 1928 to 1941, and the Far East for 1944–54 (Washington, D.C.: USGPO).
Harada nikki Harada Kumao, Saionji k to seikyoku, vols. 1–9 (Iwanami Shoten, 1950–56).
HSN Zoku gendaishi shiry 4: rikugun, Hata Shunroku nisshi (Misuzu Shob, 1983). The diary of Hata Shunroku.
ISN Irie Sukemasa, Irie Sukemasa nikki, vols. 1–6 (Asahi Shimbunsha, 1990–91). The diary of Irie Sukemasa.
J nikki J Eiichir, Jijbukan, J Eiichir nikki, Kindai Nihon shiry sensho 4, Nomura Minoru, ed. (Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1982). The diary of J Eiichir.
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