Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (44 page)

Hirohito's entourage monitored the Inoue incident but appears to have paid little attention to the various subcurrents of heterodox, fundamentalist thought (such as the Shinto-based religion known as
motoky
) that ran beneath the main currents of debate and con
tributed to making Japanese nationalism “ultra.” Unable to understand the moral viewpoint of people attracted to the messages of the millenarians, high court officials ignored them in their diaries, though they may have tracked them through police reports. Hirohito probably took no notice of them. If they have a place in his story it is only because they influenced politics in late Taish
and helped prepare the soil for relaunching the monarchy on more nationalistic lines at the start of the Sh
wa era.

One particularly influential form of millenarian
kokutai
thought that flourished during the 1920s was expounded for urban, middle-class audiences by nationalist groups within Nichiren Buddhism. Tanaka Chigaku, the spiritual leader of one of these groups, was deeply hostile to Taish
democracy. Tanaka linked Nichiren to the expansion of the Japanese empire and made “clarification of the
kokutai
” his lifelong theme. A man whose fundamentalism was xenophobic but not radical, Tanaka worked to ingratiate himself with the imperial court and to make the Nichiren faith the state religion of Japan. In 1914 he renamed his main proseltyzing organization “Kokuch
kai” (Pillar of the state), wherein “pillar” denoted the
kokutai
, and began to lecture on its “clarification.”
¹¹⁰
Like many other conservatives who took democracy as the enemy during the 1920s and 1930s, Tanaka added hatred of Jews to his agenda, and for the remainder of his life often referred to the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a czarist police tract that was the main doctrinal source of Japanese—as well as much European—anti-Semitism.
¹¹¹
Through the activities of the Kokuch
kai, and his own lectures and voluminous writings preaching partnership with the imperial state in a grand project of global unification, Tanaka made an impact on popular sentiments in the Taish
era.

From the ranks of Kokuch
kai emerged military officers whom Hirohito promoted to important positions, such as Ishiwara Kanji, who had joined the organization in April 1920, after graduating from the War College, and occasionally lectured under its auspices.
Ishiwara went on to become a prophet of world war and the chief plotter of the 1931 Manchurian Incident. It was not only fear of the threat to Japan's interests in Manchuria, posed by Nationalist China and the Soviet Union, that drove Ishiwara to act but the millenarianism of Tanaka's Kokuch
kai. Honjo Shigeru, Ishiwara's colleague and commander of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria at the time, was also a Nichiren believer. Kita Ikki had no direct connection with Tanaka's Kokuch
kai, but his family belonged to the Nichiren sect, and his own spiritual development made him a Nichiren believer.
¹¹²

The nationalistic Nichiren movement thus figures as an important catalyst in generating the phenomenon of Japanese ultranationalism. Not only did the sect influence many military men who participated in the politics of the interwar period, it also became part of the context in which the idea of Japan's national mission to unify the world was revived during the course of Hirohito's formal enthronement.