Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (167 page)

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 Sh
wa. 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
, Sh
wa) 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.”
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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!'”
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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 minis
ters 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 Sh
wa-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.