Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (35 page)

II

From the start of the regency, government and Imperial Household Ministry officials experimented with new ways of making the throne more responsive to Japanese society. In their efforts to recover lost authority, they relaxed the legal restrictions that before World War I had kept the press from photographing the monarch. In 1921 all the print and visual media of the period—newspapers, magazines, and film—were harnessed as the crown prince became de facto monarch. Photographic equipment soon was coming into Japan on a scale that rivaled the import of electric machinery and cotton textiles. An advertisement in the
Tokyo Nichi Nichi shinbun
, using a picture of the regent Hirohito and Princess Nagako together, was allowed to pass without question.
¹⁶
Books containing previously banned pictures of Hirohito's autograph and the imperial seal were published without incident.

Under Makino's direction the Imperial Household Ministry dispatched the crown prince on his first “experimental tours” to Kana
gawa prefecture, and to the home island of Shikoku, in preparation for a later journey to the colony of Taiwan.
¹⁷
These tours did not draw on the precedent of Meiji's six imperial excursions, undertaken annually between 1872 and 1877, long before the establishment of the “emperor system.”
¹⁸
Meiji's tours had carried the message that he was a living deity engaged in the project of national unification. Hirohito's first domestic tours, by contrast, carried no ideological message but were designed primarily to allow court officials to witness his performance and make suggestions for improvement. Secondarily, however, it was hoped that the tours would bring the imperial house closer to the people and, in that way, restrain the Taish
democracy mood that Hirohito's own father was inadvertently assisting simply by being passive, nonperforming, and often disoriented.

Makino wrote:

After the Shikoku trip, a more reassured Makino wrote (December 4, 1922), “We feel better now about him. Prudence and
meditation will enhance his virtue. He seems more aware of his role and this gives us more confidence for the future.”
²⁰

On April 12, 1923, Hirohito departed from the Yokosuka naval base aboard the warship
Kong
, bound for Taiwan, a colony governed outside the Meiji constitution, where the Japanese population was a distinct minority and the climate, customs, and sentiments of the people were unlike those of Japan. His tour, another rite of passage, took him to the island nearly four years after the powerful Hara Kei cabinet had abolished the system of colonial government by the military and placed day-to-day decision making in the hands of a civilian governor-general.

This change had been carried out partly to placate anti-colonial movements in the Japanese colonies and partly to improve Japan's image by bringing it into apparent line with Western colonial practice in Asia. The military, however, had continued to rule in Taiwan just as in other Japanese colonies, though not so harshly as in Korea.

Hirohito's visit had two aims: first and foremost to remind the people at home that the moral source of all their worldly achievements was the imperial house, now represented by him; and second to reaffirm Japan's possession of Taiwan by putting his own seal on Meiji's colonial legacy. His imperial motorcade went first to “the place where the Japanese expeditionary force initially landed on Taiwan and Imperial Prince Kita Shirakawa, commander of the Imperial Guard Division, had died from malaria.” In other words the regent began by demonstrating concern not for the colonized population but for his own imperial family, one of whom had died in the conquest, and whose spirit was enshrined in all but ten of the island's sixty-eight Shinto shrines.
²¹
In the 1930s Japan would compel Taiwanese (and Koreans) to worship at such shrines under the pretext of pursuing an assimilationist policy, but in this period it followed a less harsh program.

Apart from his visits to shrines, a number of military facilities, and a Japanese sugar refinery, Hirohito targeted the youth of the
colony by visiting thirteen Japanese-built schools. In another symbolic gesture of benevolence, he reduced the prison sentences of 535 political prisoners who had been arrested in 1915 for plotting an armed uprising against Japanese rule.
²²
But he had undertaken the tour mainly to reinforce belief in the monarchy and to project an image of exemplary moral perfection; and this aim he achieved simply by the dignified way in which he displayed himself and by the press's extremely detailed coverage of his visit.

When he arrived at the governor-general's headquarters in Taipei, for example, the
Tainichi shinbun
reported that a band played “Kimigayo” (the Japanese national anthem) as his train entered the Taichu station area. The stationmaster opened the train door and “onto the platform stepped the bright, glorious, splendid figure of the prince.” Guided by numerous officials, and their accompanying military and civil attendants, they all formed a line on the left side of the platform. Hirohito “advanced and saluted the recipients of imperial accolades, Japanese and Taiwanese alike. Then he drove off with his grand chamberlain in a car emblazoned with a shining golden chrysanthemum seal.” Military police and civil police chiefs guarded him in front, while the governor of the colony led the procession of cars that followed.
²³

The order in which the imperial entourage and the colonial bureaucracy arranged themselves here vis-à-vis the crown prince was characteristic of
all
public imperial functions and not specifically intended to reflect the special relationship of hierarchical inequality between Japan and its colonies, which had been forced on them without their consent.

In the May–June 1923 issue of
Taiwan jipp
, after Hirohito's departure from Taiwan, Chief of General Affairs Kaku Sakatar
affirmed the regent's importance as a model of morality and benevolence for the entire Japanese empire. “I believe,” Kaku declared, that:

Hirohito's tour had helped Kaku to communicate the image of the imperial house as the source of the nation's morality and the emperor as the “model of morality for the common people.” Kaku's emphasis on “filial piety” and the prince's amicable relations “with his brothers” was premised on the expectation that the Chinese population of Taiwan would respond enthusiastically if addressed in such terms of Confucian family relationships. But however one interprets the regent's performance, Kaku's language attempted to justify to the Chinese people a colonial order that had already become questionable as a result of rising demands for national self-determination and nationhood.

Hirohito sailed home from Taiwan as he had traveled there, departing Keelung on April 27, 1923, aboard the
Kong
. Two days out to sea he celebrated his twenty-second birthday. Ahead of him lay his long-postponed marriage to Princess Nagako, continued academic study at court, and more tours and ceremonies as required by the new policy of bringing the imperial house closer to the people.

On his return to Tokyo, two events occurred that were to have an unforeseen impact on Hirohito's later life. One was the discovery in June 1923 of the newly formed, illegal Japanese Communist Party, the first group in Japan's modern history to call for the abolition of the monarchy; the other, which followed his first experience of a cabinet change, ranks among the worst natural disasters of the twentieth century.