Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (40 page)

During the regency the
t
suiken
became, for the first time, an
ideology of organizational self-assertion and a device for the military to keep civil officials and party politicians at bay. Military men still remembered that the Meiji emperor had originally empowered them. They took pride in the way he had exercised his direct command over them, and they credited Japan's victory in 1905 over numerically greater Russian forces to the superiority of their supreme command authority. But not until Yamagata's death in 1922, and the rise, starting in 1924, of governments headed by party cabinets, did they come to revere the very words “supreme command” and to react wrathfully against any politician or civil bureaucrat who interfered in the emperor's exercise thereof.

Forced to confront growing public criticism, declining respect for the imperial institution, and party cabinets that practiced strict fiscal austerity, the army especially bore down hard on the “independence” of the
t
suiken
. This meant the denial of cabinet participation in matters of military command, and the denial also of the principle of “civilian control” over the armed forces—in effect, a military independent of all civilian authority.
⁶⁸
The issue of civilian control first arose in October 1920 when Finance Minister Takahashi proposed in a letter to Prime Minister Hara that the Army and Navy General Staff Offices, among other institutions, should be abolished.
⁶⁹
Thereafter the army began studying how best to defend itself against civilian control.
⁷⁰
On November 5, 1925, Army Minister Ugaki used a special imperial lecture to influence Hirohito against civilian control.
⁷¹
Rather than alter militarism institutionally when popular sentiment might have supported such action, Hirohito, on his own, rejected the notion of civilian control of the military and embraced the theory of the supreme command's “independence” from cabinet interference.

This was definitely not an instance of Hirohito's following tradition, for in the mid-1920s the army and navy were making an entirely new departure by their unqualified emphasis on “independence.” According to this new doctrine, not only were the army and
navy directly subordinated to the emperor rather than the cabinet, but whatever affected their institutional interests was far more important than the fate of any particular government and its financial constraints, let alone any other organ of state. Military officers influenced by such thinking were bound to hold the civil government in contempt.
⁷²
As political parties continued to gain power, that attitude of contempt made it easy for military officials to believe that party cabinets were to blame for all the social discontent generated by economic hard times, and for the problems Japan was confronting in China. Nevertheless, during the regency, senior military leaders were more interested in strengthening the imperial system and introducing military education into the public school system than in political reform of the state.

In 1925 Army Minister Ugaki secured Hirohito's assent to posting active-duty officers in the nation's middle schools and universities to provide military training. This move was unpopular with professional educators and soon led to clashes between civil and military officials. But in chief aide General Nara's view, it at least “had the good medicinal effect of quieting down the military.”
⁷³
It is tempting to imagine that Hirohito viewed the move as a way of igniting student passion to serve the country and himself, while spreading knowledge of how the military worked, but no documents reveal what he really thought about it.

The year 1925 was also noteworthy in terms of Hirohito's own increased military duties, his travels in connection with them, and his slow awakening to serious factional problems in the army. On August 10 he and Prince Takamatsu sailed from Hayama aboard the battleship
Nagato
, accompanied by four destroyers, to
domari port in Karafuto (southern Sakhalin) for a one-day tour of the empire's northernmost colony. Some sixty thousand Japanese settlers greeted him as he came ashore. Traveling by motorcade, he inspected a wood-pulp factory and a school but spent most of his time viewing local flora.
⁷⁴
When he returned to Tokyo, he went to
see his parents in Nikk
. On October 11 he attended the last phase of the grand army maneuvers in the T
hoku region, but after two weeks in the field “came down with a fever due to constipation” and had to return to Tokyo.
⁷⁵
Shortly afterward he was promoted to army colonel and navy captain.

By this time Hirohito had become aware of opposition to Army Minister Ugaki within certain army circles. Perhaps Nara told him that the mood of displeasure and indiscipline among young and middle-echelon army officers was a reaction to the antimilitary mood of the times, but also to the ongoing defense cutbacks. He appears to have taken this information in stride. At twenty-four Hirohito lacked the experience to imagine where such unrest could lead and failed to see in it any portent of future trouble for himself. By his support for sending active duty officers into the classrooms, he inadvertently endorsed the egoistic assumption of military officers that they were ideally fitted to be the moral leaders of society. In the process, he sanctioned a major step forward in preparing the nation for the mobilization of all its resources in the event of war.
⁷⁶

V

In a time of political fluidity and challenge to established institutions from below, Hirohito accumulated military experience and observed how Makino worked to strengthen the independence of the court from party cabinet control. This was exactly what Makino and Saionji had wanted after Hara's death. Neither of them believed the regent was yet mature or knowledgeable enough to intervene in politics on the basis of his own judgment. Thus Hirohito witnessed but was not consulted on the five cabinet changes that occurred between 1921 and 1926. He also observed the activities of seven regular sessions of the Diet: the forty-fifth to the fifty-second. The first three prime ministers of his regency—Takahashi Korekiyo, Kat
Tomosabur
, and Yamamoto Gonbei—had all been chosen by
the
genr
.
But in July 1924 the
genr
Matsukata Masayoshi died, leaving only Saionji Kinmochi to undertake the role of recommending the next prime minister. When the Yamamoto cabinet resigned to take responsibility for the Toranomon incident, Hirohito followed the advice of Prince Saionji (considered a great “constitutionalist”) and ordered Kiyoura Keigo, president of the privy council and a sworn enemy of party cabinets, to form the next, nonparty, government.