The Enigma of Japanese Power (44 page)

Most conspicuously contradicting the mythology of Japan as one happy family, homogeneous and unified in thought and priorities, are the national disputes provoked by what one might call Japan’s undigested pre-1945 past: its attempt to rule Asia and the blatant political suppression at home. In this instance, the conflicts are kept alive by groups that belong only partly or not at all to the System. The most important of these national conflicts revolve around the position of the emperor. National Foundation Day, the Yasukuni shrine, revision of the constitution, the introduction of patriotic ethics courses in schools and the status of the Self-Defence Forces. Whenever one of these issues is rekindled by government action or statements, the few remnants of the Japanese left, together with coteries of intellectuals and certain religious groups, can be counted on to react vehemently.

National Foundation Day, or Kigensetsu, was first instituted in 1872 – in the early stage of development of the
kokutai
ideology – to commemorate the day in 600 BC on which the mythical first emperor, Jimmu, allegedly established his capital in Yamato. Also known as Empire Day, it was celebrated on 11 February until the occupation scrapped it as a dangerous vestige of militarist fanaticism. The holiday was reinstated by law in 1966 under a slightly different name. But not until 1985 did a prime minister, Nakasone Yasuhiro, participate in the official ceremonies. A storm of indignant protest had prevented him from attending in 1983, so that much preparation was required to help make his 1985 appearance half-way acceptable. Nakasone’s friend, the president of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Goto Noboru, was given the task of arranging for the necessary compromises, and Goto’s advertising and public relations firm, Tokyu Agency, worked out the details and the publicity. Instead of the proposed three shouts of ‘Tennoheika banzai’ (too reminiscent of the cry that charging soldiers and kamikaze pilots used when they threw themselves on the enemy), the ceremony called for three ‘banzais’ for the founding of Japan, and a mere prayer on behalf of the emperor.

The left and the Christians criticised Nakasone for having brought the country ‘a step closer to the old militarism’, while the nationalists attacked him for having diminished the significance of the commemoration. Some 22,000 teachers. Christians and other opponents participated in protest rallies all over Japan, but about double that number of Japanese joined local celebrations, suggesting that perhaps the balance has turned in favour of the Kigensetsu advocates. Even so, the mythical Jimmu, instead of being ceremonially worshipped, was only referred to in an official speech, which shows how hard put to it the nationalists are to reintroduce bits and pieces from the past.

One of the best-known symbols of national disunity is the Yasukuni shrine, once one of the two most prominent shrines of state Shinto, the artificial ‘religion’ that consisted of ceremonies intended to add lustre to the ‘national essence’ mythology. The souls of 2,464,151 soldiers who have died for Japan since just before the end of the last century are formally enshrined in this sanctuary. Among them are Tojo Hideki and the other generals executed by the Allies as war criminals. It is not a war cemetery, but it contains mortuary tablets with the names of the enshrined soldiers and memorials to such élite corps as the Kempeitai (the military police) and kamikaze pilots. Mementoes from the Burma railway, a kamikaze plane and a one-man suicide submarine are among the exhibits of the shrine.

Around 15 August, when Japan commemorates the end of the war, the Yasukuni shrine is the centre of a controversy that has been reignited almost every year since 1975, when Prime Minister Miki Takeo visited the shrine on the day in question. He established this precedent under pressure from the electorally influential Association of War Bereaved Families, but made it clear that he worshipped as a private individual. His successor, Fukuda Takeo, took the compromise a step further by praying as a private individual but signing the visitors’ book as prime minister. The next premier, Ohira Masayoshi, who had Christian sympathies, managed to stay away. Suzuki Zenko, who was next, stuck to his major political principle of ‘promoting harmony’ and resolved not to tell the waiting army of newspaper and TV reporters how he had signed the visitors’ book and how he had prayed. It was once again Nakasone who bluntly broke through every remaining barrier. On 15 August 1985 he not only prayed at the Yasukuni shrine in his capacity as prime minister, but offered flowers paid for with government money and walked straight to the inner sanctum – all major symbolic acts. He was also accompanied by most of his cabinet ministers and a couple of hundred LDP parliamentarians.
¹⁶

The Yasukuni shrine controversy has been the most conspicuous of those connected with the undigested past, since for many Japanese it still symbolises what they consider a dangerous slide back towards militarist values. Since Nakasone’s much publicised visit, it has also become a source of diplomatic friction with China, where internal opponents of the regime’s open-door policies have used anti-Japanese sentiment to strengthen their position. This, in turn, caused Nakasone to scrap his 1986 and 1987 visits, though practically the entire cabinet and droves of LDP parliamentarians showed up on both occasions.

Once the focus of Japan’s state religion, the emperor, or rather his position in the post-war order, remains very controversial. After 1945, Emperor Hirohito was made to personify the good conscience of a Japan that was supposedly victimised by the war. Yet some Japanese, even in the 1980s, resented the authority in whose name their fathers, husbands and sons were sacrificed. Pressed on this matter, a minority thinks that Hirohito should have resigned in 1945 in a symbolic gesture indicating awareness of the misery perpetrated by those who invoked his ‘will’. A much larger and more vocal group is concerned that his son, Akihito, may once again be used as a political instrument by forces that have not confronted and rejected Japan’s militaristic and authoritarian past.

Hirohito occupied the ‘chrysanthemum throne’ longer than any of his 110 real and 14 mythical predecessors.
¹⁷
When on his eighty-fifth birthday in April 1986 he celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of his enthronement, this oldest and longest-reigning monarch in the world had, with an unsurpassable sense of duty, lived a life that for sixty-five years had been in the most rigorous way controlled by others. Yet, ironically, political circumstances granted Hirohito a greater potential to exercise power than either his father or grandfather commanded. He chose not to use this power. The only time when military men, acting on behalf of the ‘imperial will’, clashed with his personal will was on the occasion of the pivotal
niniroku jiken
(26 February Incident) in 1936, an attempted
coup d’état
that left the emperor enraged over the murder of several political figures. He ordered the rebels evicted from their positions and rejected their offer to commit suicide on his command.

Hirohito’s personal role in the Second World War remains largely unknown. He is said to have made, at least formally, the major decision in 1945 to accept the Allied terms for surrender, but the true sequence of events may never become known. He himself, long imprisoned by court officialdom, never made any public statement about his motives in the first half of this century, except for a formal reference in 1981, when he declared that he had not been able to prevent the declaration of war on the United States while adhering to constitutional provisions that did not provide for him to make direct political decisions. No one, except his wife and his closest chamberlains (who remain silent), ever had an informal conversation with him.

The account given by General MacArthur about the statement of the emperor at their first meeting on 27 September 1945, does not match at all what a spokesman for the Naimusho reported four days later, or what their Japanese interpreter, the only other person present, remembered. MacArthur wrote many years after the meeting that Hirohito had said, ‘I come to you . . . to offer myself to the judgement of the powers you represent as the one to bear sole responsibility for every political and military decision made and action taken by my people in the conduct of war’ – a line that has entered many Western history books. From what the Naimusho and the interpreter have said, one must draw the conclusion that the question of responsibility was not raised other than to leave it to ‘future historians’.
¹⁸

In speculating about Hirohito’s motives, probably the most significant clue is that at the age of seven he was placed under the supervision of General Nogi Maresuke, who had to substitute for father and friend. Nogi, a war hero, was a pathological nationalist for whom a sense of duty and self-sacrifice had religious meaning. When his mentor and only boyhood friend committed ritual suicide upon the death of Emperor Meiji (Hirohito’s grandfather), the eleven-year-old crown prince was, as part of his education, forced to come to terms with this without showing any emotion. Nogi had left a testament in which he bewailed the moral weakness of Japan at the end of the Meiji period and appealed for a restoration of the ‘Japanese spirit’. There are indications that this had a traumatic effect on Hirohito.

Hirohito never knew any kind of spontaneous pleasure, with the sole exception of a stay with the British royal family which he has described as the most beautiful time in his life.
¹⁹
When he was three months old he was taken away from his seventeen-year-old mother. He was not allowed childhood friends or childhood games. He was a stranger to his brothers. His own children were brought up in separate residences. Empress Nagako was the only companion in his life. Before his illness, he found his direct solace in the three days each week he was allowed to spend in his laboratory, a simple wooden shed housing microscopes and specimens for his marine biology research.

Japanese court life remains extremely regimented, rigid and antiquated. After a brief period during the occupation years when, as part of a US-inspired campaign to make him resemble a European monarch, Hirohito travelled through Japan, visiting factories and talking with ordinary people at work, he has had very little contact with his subjects. Compared with the 1950s and 1960s, during which the mythological aspects of the institution were strongly denied, the imperial family is today once again surrounded by taboos. In a booklet published in 1985 by the Association of Shinto Shrines and aimed at middle-school pupils, the old myth of the emperor as a descendant of the sun goddess is reinstated, and a number of LDP members of parliament have again come out with statements about the uniqueness of the Japanese imperial institution which can never be understood by foreigners. The bureaucrats of the imperial household agency refused to permit gold coins issued by the government to commemorate the sixtieth enthronement anniversary to carry the emperor’s portrait. He has never appeared on any coin or stamp for the openly stated reason that these can be easily defaced.

Despite the famous announcement of the emperor’s human status on New Year’s day of 1946, rightist activists, some nationalistic intellectuals and bureaucrats, and several LDP groups promote a view of his status and role that is little different from when he was still officially a Shinto divinity. In the weeks when Hirohito was near death in the autumn of 1988, cabinet ministers excused themselves from international meetings, celebrities postponed scheduled weddings, TV stations and weekly magazines reduced their frivolous offerings, numerous corporations and schools cancelled festivities and the press contributed massively to creating a quasi-sacred atmosphere.

Although the opinion was widespread that the emperor’s illness ought not deprive schoolchildren of their autumn festivals and athletic competitions, school authorities need to be concerned about intimidation from proliferating rightist groups. Publishers and editors are for the same reason very careful about anything that appears under their imprint in connection with the imperial family, even under normal circumstances.

Rightist groups and the nationalists in the LDP are expected to use the impending succession ceremonies to seek to expand their influence. The main rite of enthronement, or
daijosai
, which will probably take place a year after Hirohito’s death, provides for the symbolic transformation of the new emperor into a woman, followed by his symbolic impregnation by deities and his rebirth with divine qualities. Constitutional stipulations have placed the throne on an even less exalted plane than where Western constitutional monarchies have positioned it, and refer to the emperor as ‘the symbol of the people and the unity of the nation’. But the only practical impediment that they are likely to present to the resurgence of emperor worship is that they give dissenters in parliament a legal basis for opposing the expenditure of government money on the religious ceremonies.

The imperial succession carries the potential for renewed and rather virulent nationwide conflict. For the first time since the war, Shinto religious observances will take centre stage, and the way in which individuals react to these could become the measure of their ‘purity’ as Japanese in the eyes of their nationalistically inclined compatriots.

Another issue connected with the undigested past that illustrates an underlying national disunity is the government’s attempt to reintroduce moral education (see Chapters 4 and 11). Yet another concerns the position of the Self-Defence Forces. Their actual status conflicts with postwar agreements enforced by the occupation authorities. Article 9 of the constitution renounces the sovereign right to wage war and specifically forbids the maintenance of land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential. This was a condition General MacArthur had to write into the constitution to make the retention of the emperor acceptable to the Allies. The irony of the controversy is that since the 1970s the United States has been pressing for increased Japanese defence efforts.

The Self-Defence Forces, the ‘higher task’ of education, the precise role of the emperor, state support for national commemoration ceremonies and the Yasukuni shrine issue all belong to a peculiar Japanese mental twilight zone characterised by simplistically formulated taboos and unclearly formulated attacks on these taboos. The Socialist and Communist parties, the Nikkyoso, the dwindling leftist labour movement and (depending on the issue) some intellectuals, Christians and representatives of the new religions, who regard themselves as guardians of the post-war constitution, can be counted on to react with yawn-inducing predictability to all actions and statements tending towards reinstatement of what the US occupation authorities removed.

This anti-rightist opposition consists mostly of ritual slogans shouted at rallies, and only rarely of reasoned arguments. Its protests are highly coloured with the ideological utterances so typical of the Japanese left. They do not attempt to tie the separate issues together within a coherent frame of reference so as to present a convincing, lucidly argued case. For a considerable number of non-activist Japanese the route to follow is still the one mapped out by General MacArthur and his reformers: a route never properly followed, yet still recognisable by such US-lit beacons as the new democratic role of the emperor, the ban on state Shinto and ‘democratic’ education. The controversial issues connected with the undigested past tend to be associated with an uncomfortable sense that certain groups might again lead Japan astray.

The Japanese press, which generally sits on the fence between the two national camps, exemplifies the intellectual incompetence with which these issues are approached. Press reaction to the effort to reintroduce ‘moral education’ in the schools has shown considerable unease, but this is never expressed in intellectual terms such as would provide points of reference for an unemotional debate.

Japanese who oppose the retrogressive predilections of their administrators focus their attack mainly on symbols. Thus the political left and many intellectuals are adamant that nothing in the constitution must be amended. Even the smallest change in this document written by non-Japanese will, they believe, open the way to a revival of pre-war practices. Connected with this is the fear of a resurgence of militarism. Although this fear strikes many outsiders as exaggerated, it cannot be rationally put to rest, since the developments that cause it remain so vague and since nothing is ever spelled out clearly – an ambiguity that remains a central attribute of the exercise of power in Japan. While the opposition wastes its energies on symbolic issues, socio-economic developments that mark the consolidation of the depoliticised System slip far beyond its control.

Instead of systematic debate about the issues from the undigested past, there is only a stand-off between rightist-conservative and leftist-liberal forces, and a ritualistic repetition of slogans. Many on the left know that to start discussion would merely deliver them into the inescapable embrace, through the obligations that come from any friendly Japanese contact. Gradually the forces of the System appear to be winning out as the voices protesting at the full reinstatement of some of the elements from the undigested past become weaker.