by Meira Chand
Japan’s new Western-trained army went to war with China in 1894. It overran Korea, then Taiwan and demanded China allow Japan to move into the Kwantung peninsula of south-east Manchuria. So alarmed were the powers of the Western world by this upstart behaviour that Japan was forced to relinquish her slice of Manchuria. She watched Russia take over instead. But in spite of this loss, a new confidence was born within Japan. The sacred dream of past Emperors, laid down at the birth of the nation, was for Japan to eventually fulfil its predestined place as ruler of the world. A first step had been taken towards this vision.
It was decided to go to war again, this time with Russia, on 6th February 1904. Once more Japan relied upon ingenuity. She moved forward with silence and stealth. Although war was not formally declared until February 10th, a surprise attack was launched on February 8th, crippling Russia’s Far Eastern fleet at Tsushima. What was left of the Russian fleet fled to the stronghold of Port Arthur, on the Kwantung peninsula.
This act of stealth by a tiny nation, inferior in strength and size to Russia, caught the imagination of the world. The Japanese navy has opened the war by an act of daring which is destined to take a place of honour in naval annals, enthused The Times in London in 1905. An identical act of stealth, played to the same rules, began the Pacific War many years later at Pearl Harbor, and brought then a different reaction from world opinion.
Before Russian reinforcements arrived it was imperative for Japan to capture the garrison at Port Arthur. Emperor Meiji turned for this task to his favourite General, Maresuke Nogi, calling him out of retirement. Nogi knew Port Arthur well; his brigade had captured the town from the Chinese in the earlier war. He had taken the place in a day with the loss of only sixteen men. He remembered it as an easy target and saw no need to bother with a new assessment. He took his two sons into battle with him. In 1904 Port Arthur was no longer the place Nogi had earlier defeated; time had moved on. Weapons were improved, thoughts upon strategy had altered, and Port Arthur was now Russian territory.
As he had previously, Nogi hurled wave after wave of infantry at the forts of Port Arthur, but without success. The Times reported the battle as a succession of Charges of the Light Brigade, made on foot by the same men, over and over again. Death was certain and the methods innumerable. There were bullets, shells and shrapnel. There were mines, torpedoes and hand grenades, pits of fire or stakes, and poisonous gases. Besides these was the dread of disease: typhoid, dysentery, beriberi and always the ever present danger of gangrene for the wounded. A new era in warfare had also dawned. Now, at Port Arthur, General Nogi could simultaneously look back to the Middle Ages, and forward to an even more brutal age of warfare. His men, in heat and rain, advanced towards both boiling oil and electrified wire. They struggled against planks speared with nails to tear their feet, and the new devices of searchlights and magnesium flares. Against this illumination men wandered blindly, while machine-guns targeted them in the beam.
Both Nogi’s sons died. He watched them through binoculars, waving their swords at the head of their troops. By the time General Nogi had taken Port Arthur observers noted that corpses do not appear to be escaping from the ground as to be the ground itself. Everywhere there are bodies, flattened out, stamped into the earth as if they were part of it. What seems like dust is suddenly recognisable as a human form, stretched and twisted and rent to gigantic size by the force of some frightful explosion. It seemed to the world that the Japanese Army won its battles by accepting a price in human life no other nation was prepared to give.
Although devoted to his Emperor, this price was too much even for Nogi. He prepared to commit ritual suicide. until Emperor Meiji forbade it.
‘As long as I am alive, you must remain alive also,’ he ordered. Obediently, General Nogi retired again.
In 1908 Emperor Meiji called Nogi to him once more and entrusted him with a new order. He was to be mentor to seven-year-old Prince Hirohito. In retirement General Nogi was headmaster of the Peers School and now spent his time imparting to the sons of the aristocracy the Way of the Samurai; the ethics upon which he had been raised.
Nogi, white-bearded, elderly and one-eyed, vintage warrior, scarred in face and body by sword, arrow, bayonet, bullet and shrapnel wound, should have been intimidating to a seven-year-old. But General Nogi was a Japanese gentleman of the old school. Besides the will that knows no defeat he also cultivated the art of calligraphy, tea ceremony and flower arrangement. His hobby was growing bonsai trees. He constantly mourned his lost sons, just as the child put into his care looked always for a father. The affection that grew between the old man and the child, was said to have made life almost happy for Hirohito.
Nogi saw Emperor Meiji regularly to report about the child in whom he now took such an interest. Meiji’s trust was a source of pride to the General. He saw his last task in life as forming the young Prince in the image of his master, Emperor Meiji. He spent many hours with Hirohito imparting his knowledge of the great battles of Japanese history, reliving the pain and glory of Port Arthur, reiterating a vision of Japan as the premier force in the world. This vision of Japan’s place in the world and the ethics of the Samurai code threaded through Nogi’s stories of battles and strategies in the mind of the growing boy.
It was Nogi’s task to bring the introspective child out of his shell. There was nothing, Nogi insisted, that could not be overcome by practice and will power. Hirohito came to idolise Nogi, with his military mind and military bearing. To gain Nogi’s approval he became a competent sportsman and put himself through hours of study and physical training, standing under glacial waterfalls until he could control his shivering. He aped Nogi’s puritanism, his contempt for sexual pleasure and his thrift. Nogi took an unassuming lifestyle to extraordinary degrees.
‘Be ashamed of torn clothes, but never of patched ones,’ he told Hirohito.
He insisted the child wear coarse cotton underwear and kimono; he should not be softened by the touch of silk on his skin. Under Nogi’s influence Hirohito began to hoard things. He used his pencils until the stub was too small to grasp, and rubbers were worn down to a crumb.
Each day in the school the children bowed towards the Imperial Palace and repeated the Rescript on Education. After this they sang the national anthem.
‘What is your dearest ambition?’ General Nogi then asked them.
‘To die for the Emperor,’ the children replied.
Hirohito bowed with the other children, but was already aware this national sublimation would one day be directed towards himself.
In 1912 the Emperor Meiji died. Nogi was away at the time, sent by the Emperor as his representative at the Coronation in London of King George V. By the time he returned Meiji was dead. The State Funeral was held on 13th September.
The evening before the funeral General Nogi called Hirohito to him. They sat either side of a low table and discussed the calligraphy Hirohito had done that day. Then followed a lecture by Nogi lasting almost three hours. Hirohito sat motionless trying not to betray his physical discomfort or fatigue.
‘I am satisfied with your progress while I have been away,’ General Nogi said at last. ‘Please remember that my physical presence is not necessary for me to be with you in your work. I shall always be watching you and your welfare will always be my concern. Work hard, for your sake and for the sake of Japan.’
Hirohito bowed and left the room. Within an hour Emperor Meiji’s funeral cortège began its journey to his resting place in Kyoto, the ancient capital. A cannon thundered in the distance and prostrate subjects lined the route to Tokyo Station.
General Nogi observed the start of the cortege and then returned to his house in Azabu. His wife waited for him. They bathed and dressed in white kimono and bowed before an autographed portrait of Emperor Meiji. His wife passed General Nogi a cup of sake from which he took a sip. He turned then to bow to her. At this sign Countess Nogi drove a dagger into her throat cutting the artery. General Nogi then thrust a short sword into
his bowels, pulling it crosswise and up, falling forward upon the knife in the required manner. He had kept his promise to his beloved Emperor Meiji, made after the death of his sons at Port Arthur. He had lived until his master died.
When told the news the twelve-year-old Hirohito heard it impassively, in the manner General Nogi would have wished. If he stiffened, if desolation consumed him, he showed nothing to the courtiers before him.
‘Japan has suffered a regrettable loss,’ he said with the composure that befitted a new Crown Prince.
At Emperor Meiji’s death, Prince Yoshihito, Hirohito’s father, ascended to the Chrysanthemum Throne, taking for his era the name of Taisho. His reign was short and undistinguished. His behaviour became increasingly erratic; court officials feared any public appearance. At a military parade he slashed soldiers with a riding crop, ordered a man to unpack his gear and then repackaged it himself. Such behaviour soon forced the Regency upon seventeen-year-old Hirohito. What small freedoms he enjoyed now vanished. His every move was monitored, his words and gestures coached. Courtiers hemmed him in.
An early marriage for Hirohito was now considered a necessity. Empress Sadako was progessively minded and wished her son to have some say in the choice of his wife. She had married her husband without so much as a glimpse of him. Marriage promised Hirohito a relationship closer than any as yet experienced in his life. Beauty was not what he looked for in this rare opportunity. He passed over the prettier applicants for the role and settled for the homely Princess Nagako. She was the niece of Prince Higashikuni and Prince Asaka, his heroes during his childhood in the Akasaka Palace. Her family, dashing in comparison to the one he lacked, made his choice immediate. After a considerable wait the marriage took place on 26th January 1924. Immediately, speculation began as to when Nagako would produce an heir.
At the end of the following year, as Nagako recovered from the birth of a girl, Emperor Taisho died and Hirohito became the new Emperor. Tradition demanded that ancient Kyoto, not modern Tokyo, was the venue of Hirohito’s enthronement. The Coronation ceremony was on 6th November 1928. From the previous evening people crowded the route in Kyoto along which the Emperor would ride in a horse-drawn carriage. They were ordered not to defile the roadside; bowel movements must be held. As the weather was cold and kidneys less obedient all onlookers were urged to carry a bottle. These must be corked and at the end of the festivities deposited at collection centres for disposal.
Such clarity of detail did not stretch to all issues surrounding the Coronation. There was confusion about the title of the new Emperor’s reign. A name must be chosen by which his era would be posthumously remembered. The Mainichi Daily News announced that the Hirohito era would be known as Kobun, light and literary achievements. This news was leaked from the palace as Emperor Taisho lay dying. Hirohito was furious and to punish the paper altered the name of his reign to Showa, enlightenment and peace. Many said it was a bad omen to change the name of a reign in this manner.
Religious rites initiated the new monarch into the Shinto priesthood. His position was that of supreme intermediary between the world of the living and the world of the spirits. He planted shoots of superior rice, whose lush maturing would symbolise the harvest of his reign. In ritual celebration he descended for a night into the womb of the Sun Goddess, to be reborn divine. No Emperor could rule without possession of the Mirror of Knowledge, the Sword of Power and the Jewels of Antiquity, bestowed upon him by the Goddess. This Imperial regalia was officially transferred to each new monarch. From now on Hirohito must speak regularly to his Imperial ancestors before the Mirror of Knowledge, reporting the events of the reign of Showa. He was twenty-five, and his sincerity and optimism were undeniable. He wrote the first Imperial Rescript of Showa himself, determined his own words should shape the expectations of his life. From where the new Emperor stood the future looked golden.
Hirohito saw the reign of Showa as fulfilling the prophecy of his ancestors. The first Emperor of Japan, the legendary Jimmu Tenno, had laid down for the nation a vision of its true destiny. Hakko Ichiu meant the bringing together of the eight corners of the universe under the roof of Japan. There was nothing Hirohito wanted more for his reign than the fulfilment of this prophecy.
Hirohito was a quiet, thrifty man. The lessons of austerity learned from General Nogi were never forgotten. He cut down immediately on extravagances, including the number of clothes given to courtiers and the presenting of dried fish on occasions of note. The corridors of the Imperial Palace had reeked with the smell of these gifts at his enthronement and disgusted him. He updated his office with Western furnishing and installed a telephone for direct access to whoever he chose. He built a miniature golf course in the Palace grounds. He wished his reign to embrace the modern world. And he desired his lifestyle to follow that of the British monarchs.
Although, as monarch, Hirohito was above politics and day-today decision making, he had no desire to be a shadowy figure hidden away behind moats and walls, or a puppet in the hands of ambitious men. He wished to be rid of the image of the father who had filled him with shame. He wished to propel Japan to her rightful place as a powerful, modern nation and, to this end, his daily life was that of any hardworking statesman. His meticulous, methodical nature, obsessively concerned with detail, missed little. He put his seal to nothing he had not evaluated, and knew at all times every move within the Government. But the formality of court life that encouraged Hirohito’s obsession with detail, also weakened his initiative. He had been trained since birth to fit the patterns of protocol. Above all the correct discharge of his duties was ever uppermost in his mind.
In childhood Hirohito had wished to be more like his suave younger brother Chichibu, Oxford-educated, avidly sociable, who played tennis and listened to jazz. Chichibu with his outspoken ideas, who refused to conform, occasionally referred to his brother as ‘slow coach’. Hirohito once sadly confided to a court official, ‘He has so many attributes of royalty which I lack. He is a natural leader. He has no reticence about showing what he feels, and knows what he wants from his ministers or his people. The business of kingship comes easily to him.’
Unlike the extroverted Chichibu, Hirohito was withdrawn. His greatest interest had always been the study of marine biology, a subject upon which he was already an expert. He had the circumspect nature of the scientist and was never happier than at his microscope with his old tutor, Professor Hattori, or collecting specimens on the beach at his Summer Palace at Hayama.
Lacking Chichibu’s forceful characteristics, Hirohito relied on other traits of survival, honed through his unhappy childhood. Secrecy and guile, he discovered, achieved as much as Chichibu’s forthrightness. The lessons of military strategy learned at General Nogi’s knee, and at which he excelled with brilliance, he applied to games other than war. He was an adept player in the intrigues of his court, playing the Military against the Government, the army against the navy, one person against another with consummate ease to get his way. No criticism could be levelled against him, and responsibility for any misjudgements was assumed by those beneath him. As Emperor, Hirohito was infallible. As a man, things did not always go according to his will.
The country had been polite in its welcome of the new Emperor’s daughter and hoped a son would follow. Instead, before his marriage was five years old, the Emperor had fathered three daughters. Whispers began at court of the need for the Emperor to take a concubine, to give the nation an heir. He would have nothing to do with the plan. He felt affection for his homely wife. Her support and the birth of children gave him for the first time the feeling of a home.
Empress Nagako was acutely aware of her failure to produce a son, and no stranger to the habits of the nobility. Her own father had produced nineteen children from a swarm of concubines. Court intrigue abated only when Nagako’s fourth pregnancy was announced. Once more a daughter was born. Eventually the Empress became pregnant again and at last gave birth to a boy, Prince Akihito.
The f
irst five years of Hirohito’s rule had not been easy. Pressure was all about him, not only in his personal life but in his public duties. Plots abounded in which his name was always invoked. Fanatical devotion to the monarch was the excuse for secret societies to act against supposedly political or moral deviation. Rightist plots, hatched by the Black Dragon Society and Shumei Okawa, or army plots by ambitious officers like Kingoro Hashimoto or plots in which these two factions worked together, blew like an ill wind through the first years of Showa. The number of dubious secret societies proliferated, as did the plots they hatched. March Plots, October Plots, December Plots, February Plots. There was a tight, idealistic circle of comradeship amongst the brightest of young right-wing minds in Japan. The ambitions of these men abounded about the Emperor who remained secluded in his palace, far from the grassroots of his nation.
The world was seen by the Emperor through the four courtiers closest to him: the Imperial Household Minister, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Emperor’s Aide-de-Camp and the Grand Chamberlain. There were also genro, state-appointed counsellors. Hirohito’s genro was Prince Saionji, the last survivor of a small group. The Prince had spent his working life in the service of both the previous Emperors. The breadth of his mind and vision were almost unparalleled in Japan. He was seventy-two when appointed as genro to Hirohito. It was his job to temper the royal judgement for the good of the nation. He saw Japan’s future in co-operation with the West and rejected her military past. His advice was unfailingly for the moderate course. His views were not always in tune with an idealistic young man in his twenties. Sometimes, Hirohito, irritatingly restrained by Saionji, found ways to disregard or manoeuvre around him. But for many who were also of liberal mind, the old man’s place beside the Emperor was seen to bode well for the era of Showa.