Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (18 page)
Read Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Online
Authors: Herbert P. Bix
Tags: #General, #History, #Biography & Autobiography, #Military, #World War II
To appreciate why Hirohito's educators felt as they did about his future role as commander in chief, two other features of the imperial military need to be considered. From the moment of their establishment, the idea existed that the modern armed forces of Japan were to be commanded by the emperor. The principle of supreme imperial command had been maintained in all the wars of the Restoration period; and long before the Meiji constitution had explicitly mandated the emperor to command the armed forces, the idea that he alone possessed the moral authority to do so existed in the ancient notion that the emperor was the medium through which the gods worked their will.
91
Furthermore, the emperor's right of supreme command of the armed forces was considered to be an independent power, antedating the constitution and superior to his sovereign power in matters of state affairs. This was quite different from the clauses in the American Constitution of 1787, which designated that the president had authority as commander in chief, but only Congress had the “power” to declare war and make “rules” for the army and navy. The emperor possessed autocratic military power, and in exercising it did not constitutionally require any prior ministerial advice or consultation.
92
Though the imperial armed forces at the time of their establishment (in the 1870s and 1880s) had the look of a modern military based on European models, they were far from modern in spirit and values.
93
The peasants who made up the bulk of its recruits remained unliberated from feudal social relations in agriculture, disposed to resist the authority of superior officers, and so deeply resentful of conscription that oldest sons were eventually exempted from military service. The solution that the autocratic founders of the armed forces devised was to introduce extremely harsh forms of punishment and discipline to control the situation, and to bring the emperor's moral authority right into the basic relationship between superiors and subordinates. Inferiors were taught “to regard the orders of their superiors as issuing directly from” the emperor. This meant that orders were infallible and obedience to them had to be absolute and unconditional.
94
In addition to taking military order and discipline to excessive lengths, the Meiji government had invested the imperial forces with a vague dual mission. The army and navy were to defend against further expansion of the European powers; on the other hand the army had to engage in coercive law enforcement as an instrument of the central government. Certainly the initial motive behind its formation was to smash the defenders of feudalism, thereby furthering Japan's modernization. But whether the army existed primarily for
the protection of the people from foreign aggression or for the protection of the government in the pursuit of its purposes was never clarified during Meiji's lifetime.
95
Unfortunately Hirohito's instructors did not explain to him how his future exercise of this sovereign independent right of supreme command would someday eclipse his role as a “constitutional monarch.” Nor did his teachers communicate to him how the sphere of the right of supreme command had expanded over time, producing rifts between the high command and the government, as well as dissension between the Army and Navy General Staffs and their respective ministries. In short, his education at this stage only allowed him to see the outer workings of the system, not its actual functioning. Only through experience, in the third decade of his life, would he learn the dynamics and pathology of the political structureâwhen the raw despotism of the monarchy reared its ugly head.
The care and attention that Hirohito's pedagogues lavished on the military side of his education were meant to teach him that the imperial house had a much deeper relationship with the military than it did with any other national institution.
1
There was, however, another side to Hirohito's training for the monarchy that had nothing to do with socialization for war but was intended to prepare him for involvement in governance, educational, and international affairs. This was “instruction for the emperor” (
tei
gaku
), imparted in a formal classroom setting by professional educators and specialists from Tokyo Imperial University and the Peers' School. The reasoning behind it was that the Meiji constitution had ascribed to the emperor enormous civil powers, as important as his military ones, and he had to be taught how to exercise them. If the Meiji constitution had created a true “constitutional monarchy” rather than something close to an autocracy, there would have been no need to place so much emphasis on educating the emperor, and he could have remained as badly educated as any of Britain's kings or queens had been.
Also mandating both civil and religious “instruction for the emperor” was the official ideology taught in the schools to counter democratic thought. The theocratic ideal of the unity of religious rites and political administration (
saisei itchi
), which had imparted
religious significance to state actions throughout the Restoration era, required that the emperor be trained to perform rites. Equally important in the rationale for educating the emperor was the core notion, dating from the Restoration, that Japan's emperor should always be “a charismatic political leader who stands at the head of and promotes the process of civilization and enlightenment.”
2
If the emperor was to continue leading the drive to modernize and Westernize, he had to be educated in a wide range of practical subjects as well as in modern political, social, and economic thought. Given this outlook, it is striking that until the age of seventeen, Hirohito was reared in total isolation from Japanese daily life and not even allowed free access to the newspapers.
3
From May 4, 1914, when he first started, to late February 1921, when he graduatedâtwo months short of his twentieth birthday, and a few weeks before the school permanently dissolvedâHirohito was instructed in any and all subjects considered useful at that time for the education of an emperor.
4
Math, physics, economics and jurisprudence, French (at that time still the language of diplomacy), Chinese and Japanese, calligraphy, ethics and historyâall were part of
teigaku
: the making of an emperor. So too was natural history, which became one of Hirohito's favorite subjects.
Hirohito's military educators, with their stress on hygiene, physical fitness, and direct imperial command, represented a radical departure from two and a half centuries of Tokugawa practice in educating a Japanese monarch. Before the Meiji restoration, monarchsâwith the notable exception of Meiji's own fatherâwere educated in subjects that would not involve them in either the political or military affairs of the Tokugawa regime. They studied abstract Confucian philosophical texts, practiced reciting Shinto prayers, and steered clear of politics. Ritual and prayer, poetry and the arts preoccupied them.
Keenly aware of the complex system of state institutions that
Meiji had bequeathed the nation, Hirohito's educators, military and civilian alike, dispensed with this Tokugawa tradition, focusing instead on the monarch's need for secular education and knowledge of statecraft to make the system work. Thus they acted on the premise that even though the monarch had inherited the throne, he still had to be initiated into its rites and procedures and made technically fit to rule. For the imperial throne, situated at the very apogee of power in all its forms, had to function as an integrating and legitimating center, the keystone in the arch that held in place all the other institutions of the state: the cabinet, the separate bureaucratic ministries, the Diet, the privy council, the military, and the parties.
The men who were to “make” Hirohito into a suitable monarch for operating in this system of rule were mostly middle-of-the-road academics associated with Tokyo Imperial University and the Peers' School. They were a hybrid of the old unchanging Japan and the new, changing everywhere as it followed blindly the path of modernization. As pedagogues who worshiped the Meiji emperor, they constructed an orthodoxy of what the ideal monarch ought to be and do. They always tried to avoid forcing Hirohito to choose between the conflicting moral visions and norms contained in the Confucian model of the virtuous, peace-loving ruler and the Japanese
bushidmodel of the ideal warrior. Both norms would be attractive to Hirohito, and he would seek to act in ways that conformed to both.
In short Hirohito was the product of a hybrid education, and no serious portrait of him can neglect the tension that this produced. The late-Meiji invention of tradition, grounded in Restoration ideology, gave him his sense of identity and his basic orientation. Clashing with that tradition was modern scientific learning. The tension between these two worldviews lay at the heart of everything Hirohito did.
I
Hirohito became fascinated with nature in his tenderest years. While attending the Peers' School, under the guidance of a chamberlain who delighted in collecting seashells and insects, Hirohito opened his eyes to the natural world. In 1913, at age twelve, he had made his own insect specimen book, illustrating with butterflies and cicadas the symbiotic relationship between plants and insects.
5
It was an early step in the development of his capacity to assess objects critically and rationally.
From 1914 to 1919, when Hirohito was in middle school, Professor Hattori Hirotarbecame his teacher of natural history and physics. Hattori remained his servant in scientific pursuits for more than thirty years, cultivating Hirohito's childhood fondness for insects and helping him to develop a keen, lifelong interest in marine biology and taxonomy.
6
Under Hattori's guidance Hirohito read Darwin's theory of evolution as interpreted by the popular writer Oka Asajir, whose book
Shinkaron kwa
(Lectures on evolution) was published in 1904. He may also have read a Japanese translation of Darwin's
Origin of Species
. Around 1927 he was given a small bust of Darwin, which thereafter adorned his study alongside busts of Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon Bonaparte.
In September 1925, during the fourth year of his regency, Hirohito had a small, well-equipped biological laboratory established within the Akasaka Palace. Three years later, during the second year of his reign, he built, within the Fukiage Gardens, the Imperial Biological Research Institute, consisting of a greenhouse and two large laboratories, each with specimen rooms and libraries. Hattori became associated with this laboratory and for the next four years lectured before the emperor once a week on basic science. Until 1944 Hattori and other aides also accompanied Hirohito to his personal marine research facilities in Hayama three or four times a year. There, using two rowboats and a larger, remodeled fishing vessel, they would dredge for sea specimens. Years later
Hattori edited
Sagamiwan sango erarui zufu
(Pictorial specimens of marine life in Sagami Bay), while Sanada Hiroo and KatShirdid the colored drawings, Baba Kikutarwrote the accompanying explanations. Because the re-formed Imperial Household Agency held the copyright,
7
the book was ascribed to Hirohito. Nowhere in the book, however, did the emperor's name appear, which raised the question, How much of its research had actually been done by him?
8