Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (10 page)

II

If Hirohito associated Japan's entire modern history with his grandfather and the loyal circle of advisers who assisted him, he perceived his own world largely in terms of the empire his grandfather bequeathed him. The two major wars fought in Meiji's name—against Ch'ing China in 1894–95 and czarist Russia in 1904–5—altered the conditions of Japanese national life and changed the international environment surrounding Japan.

The war with China deepened national integration and furthered the monarchy's transformation into a crisis-control mechanism for oligarchic, authoritarian rule. Concurrently it hastened a process of logrolling that advanced the power of political parties in the Diet, thereby imparting a measure of liberalization to the authoritarian state. Thereafter, as Japan's economic development proceeded apace, the elites in the military, the bureaucracy, the Diet, and big business found their interests frequently at odds, making domestic politics more and more fractious.

Ten years later came the Russo-Japanese War, followed by another period of growth in political party activity, as well as increased military spending to secure Japan's possessions on the Asian continent. By then the Army and Navy General Staff commands had been made directly subordinate to the emperor, and their bureaucracies had begun to elude cabinet control. To counter
this danger It
revised the Cabinet Regulations, restoring to the prime minister some of the power that had been lost in 1889.
³³
Nevertheless, the relative independence of the military was never checked, and the cabinet never became the emperor's highest advisory organ. In March 1907, the navy minister appealed to the emperor to overturn It
's work, and Meiji concurred.
³⁴

Six months later the army and navy ministers enacted General Military Ordinance Number 1, stipulating that “Regulations pertaining to the command of the army and navy which have been decided directly by the emperor are automatically military regulations (
gunrei
).” Emperor Meiji sanctioned the ordinance. With this, the army and navy acquired “the authority to enact, independently of the cabinet, a new form of law, called
gunrei
.” Thus, while the prime minister's power of unification of the cabinet remained weak, the military—with Meiji's support—was able to advance the argument that the emperor's “right of supreme command” was an independent right, free of government control.
³⁵

During Hirohito's school years—the post–Russo-Japanese War period from 1907 to the eve of World War I—the military was allowed to arrogate power that it did not legally possess. Meiji sanctioned, as the new guiding principle of Japanese defense policy, the protection of “the rights and interests we planted in Manchuria and Korea at the cost of tens of thousands of lives and vast sums of money during the war of 1904–5.”
³⁶
New efforts were also made to infuse emperor ideology and
bushid
(the way of the warrior) into the armed forces. Infantry manuals and training procedures were revised to emphasize the importance in warfare of human spirit, offensive-mindedness, small-arms fire, and hand-to-hand combat. Also incidentally, the rank and authority of the emperor's aides-de-camp were strengthened.
³⁷

In 1907 Japan's long struggle to subjugate the Korean people through control of their royal house entered a new phase. In September, Korean king Kojong dispatched three envoys to a peace confer
ence at The Hague to plead that Korea's protectorate status had been forged without his official sanction. The Great Powers denied Kojong's envoys admission to the conference on the ground that, as a protectorate of Japan, Korea had no power in foreign policy. Following this embarrassing incident, Emperor Meiji sent Crown Prince Yoshihito to Korea to shore up relations with its royal family. Shortly after Yoshihito's return to Japan in late October, Meiji approved It
's policy of forcing King Kojong to abdicate and removing his young heir, the “Crown Prince Imperial” Yi Un, to Tokyo—ostensibly to be educated but in reality to deter further anti-Japanese actions by Korean royals. On December 15, 1907, holding It
's hand, ten-year-old Yi Un came to the Koson Palace and was introduced to Hirohito, Chichibu, and Takamatsu. Over the next two years, while the oligarchs made their fateful decision to change Korea's status from protectorate to colony, Meiji acted as guardian to Yi Un, lavishing more attention and gifts on him than he ever had on his own grandsons. It
made sure too to bring the Korean prince with him whenever he visited Hirohito and his brothers.

The last occasion Hirohito met Yi Un in It
's presence was on September 14, 1909, soon after It
had stepped down as resident governor of Korea and assumed the presidency of the privy council. Six weeks later, on October 26, a Korean nationalist assassinated It
in Harbin, Manchuria, where he was on his way to discuss Russo-Japanese relations. As for the hostage Yi Un, Tokyo became his permanent home, and he was not allowed to visit Korea until his mother's death in 1911.
³⁸

During Hirohito's boyhood and afterward, Emperor Meiji was propagandized as the very touchstone of all virtue. Though Meiji's public persona was that of a progressive, “Westernizing” monarch, the fount and essence of all moral values, he was far from that. He was privately “anti-Western” in his inclinations, and politically reactionary. His personality was not very pleasant either. He tended toward dissoluteness and obesity, and spent an inordinate amount of
time satisfying his prodigious appetites. Many of the maladies that afflicted him can be traced to his excesses in food and especially drink, which eventually ruined his health.
³⁹