Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (37 page)

Thousands of people lined the heavily guarded route of their carriage procession after it had crossed over Nij
bashi (double bridge) and proceeded back to the Akasaka Palace. Hirohito and Nagako bowed to the crowds that cheered their arrival at the crown prince's residence, decorated with red-and-white bunting, then proceeded into the palace for further marriage rituals and a dinner that lasted late into the night.

Forty-seven military airplanes flew over the capital on their marriage day, dropping small parachutes with messages of congratulations. There was a 101-gun salute from the Army General Headquarters and a 21-gun salute from the battleship
Nagato
, anchored at the Yokosuka Naval Base. The
Osaka Mainichi
reported that the imperial house was using the occasion to bestow monetary awards on distinguished individuals, including about 258 Japanese settlers who had made contributions to society in each of the colonies. It also announced Emperor Yoshihito's pardon and commutation of sentences for criminals, his bountiful funding of social projects at home and abroad, and his grant of imperial property to Tokyo and Kyoto for public parks and museums.
⁴³

Thus the young couple, on Makino and Saionji's recommendation, used their wedding to obtain political support for the throne and to strengthen the groom's image as a benevolent prince. Imperial almsgiving on this and many other occasions was a way to recover the emperor's declining authority and to bring the imperial house closer to the people. Income from corporate stock dividends was now occupying an ever-larger part of imperial finances, and as the economic
power of the throne increased, so too did Hirohito's bestowal of benevolence money and resources, along with other giftgiving connected to his enhanced diplomatic activities.
⁴⁴
Though the giving of charity was a standard way for monarchs to diffuse their authority, what remains unclear, even today, is whether Hirohito's benevolence was paid for by his subjects' taxes or by his own imperial house assets.

Seven months after their wedding, when the nation had begun to recover from the great earthquake, Hirohito and Nagako departed the capital for a month-long retreat, a honeymoon of sorts, in the countryside. After two nights in Nikk
they journeyed to Inawashiro Lake in Fukushima prefecture, where they stayed at Prince Takamatsu's country villa. They played tennis, went fishing, climbed in the mountains, and enjoyed moonwatching.
⁴⁵

In December 1925 Hirohito became a father. He ordered Makino to arrange a series of court lectures for him and Nagako on child rearing and child psychology. Four years before, on becoming regent, Hirohito had put Makino on notice that someday he and Nagako intended to rear their children in the palace and not entrust them to servants.
⁴⁶
His mother, Makino, and
genr
Saionji had resisted, but by persisting Hirohito had gotten his way, making clear to Makino and others that he had no higher priority than his own “household.” He now had the satisfaction of seeing Nagako breastfeed their own children, starting with daughter Teru no miya, and raise them until the age of three.
⁴⁷
And because the wedding had been used as the occasion to reform the old system, whereby women of the inner court household lived in the palace instead of merely serving there during the day, Nagako was not surrounded by uneducated ladies-in-waiting who Hirohito feared might exert a harmful influence on her, not to mention leaking to outsiders any improper remark he might make.
⁴⁸

In this way Hirohito secured a sphere of private life free of constant surveillance. This achievement came about through his total ending of the practice of imperial concubinage and cutting back the
number of ladies-in-waiting. These actions did not make him a court reformer, however, any more than his public performances during the regency made him a “child of Taish
democracy.” Even in his young manhood Hirohito was a champion of nationalism and tradition against Taish
democracy. This was true also in his attitude toward the three wars Japan had fought since 1894. Though proud of the victories, he was open to the viewpoints of those in his entourage who had attended the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the Great War, and understood the dangers of renewing a naval race and expanding too vigorously in China.

III

The regency period saw Japan's foreign policy shift focus to reliance on multilateral treaties, the League of Nations, and the “peace code” embodied in the Covenant of the League.
⁴⁹
To appreciate the boldness of this move away from an international order based on militarism, imperialist spheres of interest, and bilateral treaties, one need only recollect that during World War I Japan's leaders had secretly embraced “Asian Monroeism.”
⁵⁰
Led by the navy and supported by Prime Minister
kuma and his Anglophile foreign minister, Kat
K
mei, they had resolved to participate in the European war by expelling the German military from Tsingtao, one of China's most important ports, even before the British government requested that they do so.
⁵¹
At different times while World War I unfolded, Kat
and the high command—acting in opposition to some of the
genr
—had formulated secret and grandiose war aims that anticipated Japan's strategic expansion during the late 1930s: All of China was to become a Japanese protectorate, the Russian sphere of interest in northern Manchuria was to be pushed back, the resource-rich Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) were to be wrested from Dutch colonial control, and the West was to be put on notice that Asia should be controlled by Asians (that is, Japanese).
Although Japan was allied with Britain, Japan's army strategists had hoped that the Western powers would be sufficiently weakened by their internecine strife as to be unable to oppose Japan's aims in postwar Asia. These war aims had to be set aside, however, when Germany was defeated and the United States, on which Japan depended for imports of capital, steel, and raw materials, put pressure on it to respect American and Allied rights and interests in China. But they offered a good foretaste of the future policies Japan would implement in the 1930s.