Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (43 page)

The mythological view of the
kokutai
came under attack even in military circles. In 1923 Lt. H
riki Y
z
published a book on modern thought and military education in which he argued that “the danger to the state lies not in the intrusion of new thought but in the effort to stubbornly maintain the old state thought.” The end result, he predicted, “will be to invite the misunderstanding that our
kokutai
no longer harmonizes with new ideas.”
⁹⁷
In 1924, when the Army Officer's Aid Society (
Kaik
sha
) solicited essays for its journal
Kaik
sha kiji
on the subject of educating soldiers as to “why the
kokutai
is so dignified and prestigious,” the officer in charge of judging the essay papers, Maj. Gen. Okudaira Toshiz
, complained that “young officers do not take this problem too seriously.”
⁹⁸

Recent evidence suggests a slow, gradual decline, starting around the end of World War I, in the common reference point of the Japanese national identity: the myths that constituted “the fundamental principles of the founding of the country.”
⁹⁹
Many military officers blamed the growing lack of belief in the founding principles on the Taish
democracy movement, just as they blamed “democracy” for the decline of discipline in the ranks, and for the estrangement that had developed between the military and the people.

Studies on the “image of the emperor” in the armed forces dur
ing the interwar decades also suggest erosion in Hirohito's “approval rating” on the part of those who were supposed to have been most committed, by occupation, to dying for him.
¹⁰⁰
The Imperial Army and Navy provided three years of schooling in cadet schools for a select number of young boys from about the age of fourteen or fifteen. Graduates of these schools usually went on to either the Military or Naval Academy.
¹⁰¹
In his study based on contemporary opinion surveys and post–World War II questionnaires given to thousands of former graduates of the service academies and cadet schools—most of whom served in staff positions in Tokyo during the Asia-Pacific War—Kawano Hitoshi determined that during the period from 1922 to 1931, awareness of “service to the emperor” as a motive for choosing a military career grew progressively weaker.
¹⁰²
Kawano also found, in both services (but particularly among the naval elite), that over the entire survey period, from 1922 to 1945, a slow decline had occurred in respect for the emperor and in willingness to die for him.
¹⁰³

To counter such trends the government resorted to repression, lowering the threshold of tolerance for critical discussions of the
kokutai
. The lèse-majesté case of Inoue Tetsujir
, which arose in the last months of Hirohito's regency and was carefully monitored by Kawai and Makino, shows how the
kokutai
, the “legitimizing” concept of the Japanese state, could be used not only to divide Japanese from one another, but even to overturn power relationships in the sphere of civil society.

In October 1926 the Home Ministry had banned a book by Inoue (a member of the House of Peers) after Vice Grand Chamberlain Kawai Yahachi had read and discussed it with Privy Seal Makino, and after it had incurred the wrath of rightists.
¹⁰⁴
Inoue, author of the official commentary on the Imperial Rescript on Education and a conservative critic of Christianity, had analyzed the relationship between the
kokutai
and national morality, seeking rational grounds for legitimizing the imperial institution. His 1925
study criticized “myths” pertaining to the three imperial regalia and the notion of the imperial line “being coeval with heaven and earth.” He also attempted to demonstrate that the official theory, based only on the “myth” of the “unbroken line of imperial succession for ages eternal,” was not acceptable for a modern nation.
¹⁰⁵
According to Inoue the uniqueness of the
kokutai
lay in its “moralistic,” “humane,” and reformist nature. It was the latter that made “democracy” and “the liberation of the working class” part of the traditional spirit of the imperial house.
¹⁰⁶
In staking out these positions, Inoue, after a long career as a political reactionary, was clearly aligning himself with the Taish
democracy current.

Inoue's book had passed the police censors and was being sold in Tokyo bookstores during September 1925. But after coming under attack the following month, it was recalled and banned.
¹⁰⁷
A right-wing pamphlet attacking him (and sent to the Home Ministry and the Imperial Household Ministry) claimed that he had committed lèse majesté against the three imperial regalia, and called for an injunction against the sale and distribution of his book.
¹⁰⁸
Those who initiated the censorship against Inoue, however, were his former colleagues at Dait
Bunka Gakuin, the college whose president he was. Angered by his firing of professors who opposed his school reforms, they went on strike, shut down the institution, and instigated the venerable “leader of patriots,” T
yama Mitsuru, and his rightist ideologues to compose an anti-Inoue pamphlet with the aim of bringing suit against him for expressing skepticism about Japan's ideology of control.
¹⁰⁹
Ultimately both the Inoue lèse-majesté incident and the Seiy
kai's politicization of the Pak Yol affair were signs that the Taish
-era search for some new basis of legitimacy for the imperial state was drawing to an inconclusive end.