The Enigma of Japanese Power (41 page)

The first thing the new rulers did, in an attempt to solve their colossal legitimacy problem, was to move the Meiji emperor from his palace in Kyoto to the shogunal castle in Edo, which was renamed Tokyo. This move, together with new institutions connecting the throne with the political process, was intended to suggest that the decisions of the oligarchy were being made in the emperor’s name. In reality, the ‘restoration’ of the emperor in no way restored his temporal powers. Even while the oligarchs were effecting major political changes, they stuck to one major political tradition. All shogunate governments had theoretically been legitimised by imperial appointment. Since the sovereign was sacred and
lèse-majesté
a serious offence, the powerless emperors had always been ideal instruments in power games, and ideal shields for political manipulation.

Mutsuhito, who came to the throne as a boy of fourteen, never seemed to develop an interest in governing. That was irrelevant, however, because, even though the restoration had been preceded by a ‘restoration movement’, sanctioned by theories based on historical studies showing that the rightful place of the emperor was at the centre, the oligarchs never had any intention of giving him power. (They did ask, though, that he should appear interested; he was once chided by his political masters for paying so much attention to his horses that it had an adverse effect on public opinion.)
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Following the Meiji Restoration, the impression existed that the ruling oligarchy was eventually to be replaced by a parliamentary system which would give Japan a respected place in the ranks of modern nations. In the political debate that followed the introduction of new foreign theories, some advocated a constitutional monarchy roughly similar to those of Europe, with Mutsuhito as a king who legitimised prime ministers and cabinets. Such an arrangement would, however, have meant the gradual removal from power of individual oligarchs, and the Meiji constitution that they finally came up with showed clearly that they had seen no advantage to themselves in a limited monarchy. On paper, all power resided in the emperor, who bestowed the constitution on the nation out of his generosity. In practice, a new political system encompassing the exercise of informal power had begun to crystallise – informal power that kept the oligarchs on top. The Meiji constitution provided for yet another system to succeed that of the Tokugawa shogunate and all the other, earlier, unofficial systems that were legitimised by a theory of imperial rule that in fact had little or no connection with the exercise of real power.

The architects of the new state, who came from the class of restive lower samurai, understood that control through a hierarchy of privileges had to be replaced by control through propaganda, and they embarked on a major campaign to persuade the public of the inevitable tightness of their government. The campaign ran away with itself, resulting in the ‘national essence’ (
kokutai
) mystique, which made a politically circumscribed constitutional monarchy unthinkable. On a more immediately practical level, they refrained from writing unequivocal provisions into the constitution for the selection of leadership to be legitimised by the emperor, because that would have directly threatened their own positions. If they had allowed power to be concentrated in the hands of the prime minister or anyone else, the coalition of groups comprising the Meiji oligarchy could not have stayed together.
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Throughout the decades between then and the new constitution bestowed on the Japanese people by General MacArthur, it remained unclear who had the right to decide anything essential. Groups of elder statesmen, clustered around the emperor, made the system function; but they had no constitutional or legal position in the state, and thus were not accountable.

Who was, then? The Army? The Privy Council? The Diet? The Naimusho? The Foreign Ministry? Whose legitimacy was to be judged? As Maruyama Masao summed it up in a classic paragraph: ‘An uncertain sharing of responsibility was preferred so that no one person could be pointed out as bearing the ultimate responsibility for decisions. It is obvious that the mechanism of the Emperor-system state had inherent within it the danger of developing into a colossal system of irresponsibility.’
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Japanese power-holders of the Meiji period and later could be held responsible neither for misdeeds nor for flagrant misgovernment. The grave dangers of this tradition for the nation (and other nations) was amply demonstrated in the first half of the twentieth century. Authority for Japan’s conquests in Asia officially resided with an emperor who had no practical say in what Japan did. The anonymous decisions of this period changed the political map of Asia, started a war with the world’s largest industrial power, caused the death of roughly three million Japanese and between ten and twenty million non-Japanese and led to the communist take-over of China as well as the hastened departure of the European colonial powers from Asia. And this is to name only the major results.

One partial solution to the problem of who has the right to rule, introduced in the Meiji period and still vitally important today, is the cult of the ordained, knowledgeable administrator who, supposedly, has no ambition to wield power.

Traditionally, being in the know is associated in Japan with the right to administrative office, which seems understandable enough. The corollary, however, is that those who do not hold office should, ideally, be kept in ignorance. To simplify somewhat, one might say that in Japanese political practice for at least the past three centuries there have been two categories of people: those men entitled to exercise power, who are automatically ‘in the know’; and those on the receiving end, who are not.

Popular ignorance and official secrecy were acknowledged by Tokugawa administrators to be essential to the preservation of order. Aizawa Seishisai (1782–1863), author of a seminal work in the context of later
kokutai
ideology,
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contended that the people should accept the fact that rules existed and were beneficial to themselves, but should not be told what those rules were. He was also open about the fact that the Tokugawa regime deliberately kept the commoners weak and ignorant.
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More than a hundred years after his death, frustrated exporters trying to break into the Japanese market frequently discovered that their products were subject to regulations of which the officials could not give them any further particulars.

There are good reasons to assume that the power-holders of the Meiji and Taisho periods did not believe what they made the public swallow about a divine and infinitely benevolent emperor, or about the ‘family state’ and all that went with it. The closing years of the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of a ‘vast gulf which opened up between responsible constitutional scholarship and popular attitudes toward the constitution’.
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The
kokutai
surrogate religion answered any questions about legitimacy that might arise among a public kept purposely in ignorance.

Ideas embodying political doubts were considered really dangerous only when they reached the ears of the common people. Although in the early decades of the present century the power-holders were obsessed with the threat they posed, they did not attempt to stamp them out completely. Most intellectuals either worked directly for the government or supported it in some way, and it was difficult as well as counter-productive to restrict their intellectual production too severely. Academics whose speculations went against the grain of government-dictated ideology were, at least until the late 1920s, accommodated with a fair measure of tolerance.

Post-war Japanese administrators have dropped the term ‘dangerous thoughts’; the Japanese probably have more freedom to express critical or belligerent ideas than any other people in Asia, aside from the Filipinos. But the presumption that much of what the administrators know should be kept hidden from ordinary people has definitely survived.

I have been told a number of times by different government officials that, although they agreed with my conclusions and could find no fault with what I wrote, some of my analyses ‘would create the wrong impression’. Japanese journalists tend to criticise bureaucratic restrictions on the ‘right to know’, which go far beyond what can be excused as being in the ‘national interest’.
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The set phrase from Tokugawa days – ‘people must not be informed, but made dependent upon the authority of the government’ – is occasionally still used today.
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Fortunately for the officials, the members of the many reporter clubs attached to the ministries nearly always play along in spite of their criticisms of the restrictions.

Japanese administrators need have no qualms about their secretive habits, since these fit in with the generally accepted Japanese management of reality. Those not ‘in the know’ need not fear being considered lesser, because dumb citizens. Naïveté and ignorance of political intricacies have long been considered part and parcel of the idealised state of Japanese purity and innocence.

The most ingenious partial solution to the problem of the right to rule that Japanese power-holders have hit upon is a systematic denial that any power is exercised to begin with. To get around the legitimacy question, the administrators pretend that they are not interested in power.

This solution, again, came in with the Tokugawas. Thus the Tokugawa shoguns and their deputies did not aspire to power and were not exercising it; they were simply performing the right ceremonies to sustain the natural order. Memories of how they had arrived in a position to preside over those ceremonies were taboo.
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The Meiji oligarchy and the bureaucracy it spawned were also presented as bodies not interested in power, motivated by a selfless desire to serve the emperor and thereby the nation, for the benefit of the entire Japanese family. Soldiers and sailors, up to the ranks of general and admiral, did the same; they served the emperor without the slightest thought of self-aggrandisement. Today, it would be very difficult to find a Japanese administrator who openly admitted to a desire to gain or hold on to – much less expand – his power, a desire that is of course his main concern.

The solution that denies the possession of, or appetite for, power puts politicians, however, in a quandary. When talking to their constituents, they cannot avoid boasting that they have it and seek more of it. For if they did not have the clout to talk the ministries into building the bridges, roads and airports to benefit the electorate that sends them to the Diet, why should it vote for them? The problem for Japan’s politicians has always been that they cannot hide their real political ambitions, a fact that has earned them much disapprobation.

When the Western concept of a politician accountable to an electorate was introduced after the Meiji Restoration, it created confusion and ambivalence among Japan’s leaders and intellectuals. The oligarchy did not, at first, quite know what it wanted. Among the earliest leaders, Kido Koin advocated constitutional government responsible to the will of the people – this, however, to be attained gradually since the people were not yet ready for it. Okubo Toshimichi did not think the parliamentary form suitable, and favoured an absolute government composed of men of ability. Ito Hirobumi, influenced by Okubo, basically agreed with this.
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Still, the introduction of party politics was an inevitable concomitant of the Japanese effort to catch up with the West. That meant that something had to be done to curtail the potential for damage, since ‘the samurai-bureaucrats in charge found it exceedingly difficult to accept the idea of a loyal opposition; opposition was regarded as a threat not only to themselves but to the state’.
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As a solution, the oligarchs made sure in their propaganda that anything associated with politics was made to appear as unpatriotic.
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The Meiji press on the whole was only slightly less critical of the politicians than were the oligarchy and officialdom. Japan’s early journalists were, or pretended to be, scandalised by bribery and other electoral irregularities, thus setting a pattern that is still followed today. Party politics was portrayed to the public of Meiji Japan as vile and directed by narrow self-interest. The idea was hammered home that loyal subjects of the emperor, such as soldiers and officials, should have nothing to do with politics.
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Party government was systematically sabotaged. As a foreign political historian of the day summed it up:

Against all the efforts of the political parties to secure responsible government the Upper House [manned by bureaucrats and aristocrats] has backed up the oligarchy, and has stood ready to block all legislation presented by a government which was too closely allied with any party. Attempts at party government, therefore, have generally given place to government by the oligarchs with the support of the members of the parties, now in one combination, now in another, secured either by bribery or owing to their conviction that opposition was fruitless.
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The anti-politician propaganda was successfully passed down to succeeding generations. In the 1920s the parties were seen from the Japanist perspective

as embodiments of an unsightly and immoral competitive urge for personal power. Rather than unifying the people with imperial rule, they were portrayed as intruders who sundered a sacred and mystical bond between the emperor and his subjects – a bond of harmonious beauty which, when manifested in imperial benevolence and the loyal obedience of the subject, elevated Japan to a position of moral paramountcy among the other nations of the world.
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The relative positions in the power structure of bureaucrats and politicians, which in essence have lasted until the present, were established just before the turn of the century as a result of institutional manipulations by one of the oligarchs, Yamagata Aritomo. Yamagata has attracted less attention than some other Men of Meiji who left more quotable ideas, but in the end he probably wielded more substantial power for a longer period than any of his fellow oligarchs. He was the major force behind the establishment of a conscripted military, and he shaped the powers of the mighty Naimusho in its formative years. He, more than anyone, deserves to be called the creator of Japan’s social control bureaucrats. And he ‘clung to the position that a competitive political system multiplied divisions in society and detracted from national unity to which all should be sacrificed’.
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Even though Diet members were kept at a distance from any executive power, they became incrementally more important because of the mistake made by the oligarchy in giving the Diet a veto right over the budget – a tool, in other words, whereby political parties could force the government to make do with the previous year’s budget. This meant that, eventually, the administrators were obliged to mix with the politicians.
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Nevertheless, the battle for power between the bureaucrats and politicians was, thanks to rules introduced by Yamagata, effectively decided almost before it had begun. Following the collapse of the very first Japanese cabinet of party politicians, which lasted for four months in 1898, Yamagata became prime minister and moved quickly to control any future ‘damage’ to the nation. Okuma Shigenobu, who led that first party government, had been besieged by requests that the bureaucrats be replaced by politicians.
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Moderate politicians were pleading for a system of dual access to executive power: not only graduates of the higher civil service examinations, mostly Todai law department graduates, but also members of the Diet and prefectural assemblies should be considered for high appointment. Okuma did not oblige, but Yamagata, having regained power, spread the lie that he had.

The institutional innovation designed by Yamagata virtually closed the door for ever on the possibility of future party cabinets appointing party members as vice-ministers, bureau chiefs or prefectural governors. This had the effect of insulating the bureaucracy from any effects of political decision-making.
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To make sure that the amended Appointment Ordinance could never be rescinded, he made the Privy Council
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the guardian over his edicts. And to guarantee that cabinets would always abide by the council’s ruling, he ‘chose a rare and subtle solution, one void of legal force but massively binding in practice’.
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He made the emperor issue an ‘imperial message’ listing a number of ordinances henceforth to be referred to the Privy Council and including among them all those relating to examinations, appointments, discipline, dismissals and rankings of the bureaucrats.

A personal communication from the emperor – as distinct from a formal Imperial Edict – could never be overruled, and there was no precedent or procedure for asking an emperor to rescind it.
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There remained a very tiny possibility that a later cabinet would nevertheless have the guts to ask the emperor to change his mind, and Yamagata, with ultimate subtlety, even contrived a defence against that. ‘To protect the imperial message, he kept it secret. Few outside the Privy Council and the Imperial Household even knew it existed. . . . Yamagata had found an intricate but ingenious way of circumventing the juridical theory that no law can be irreversible.’
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