Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (75 page)

Many of the army's leaders, wanting to have things entirely their own way, opposed Minobe by resurrecting a constitutional theory of divine right that sharply counterposed “sacred” and “inviolable.” They found the explanation of Article 3 that they were seeking in the writings of Uesugi:

Uesugi's interpretation triumphed because it neither assumed Western-style constitutional monarchy nor infringed on the army's independence of command authority. Moreover, his view, which highlighted the emperor's absolutist position, was much closer to the truth of the 1889 constitution than Minobe's, which sought to justify the transition from rule by the Satsuma-Choshu oligarchy to rule by party cabinets.

However, many extreme rightist believers in “
kokutai
clarification” were really seeking to abolish the practice of constitutional interpretation per se. While Minobe was suffering for not succumbing to the lunacy of this
kokutai
debate, and campaigns against him and Okada (considered to be too moderate because he too was unwilling to implement radical reform) were spreading, demagogic attacks on the court entourage also increased. Earlier, anonymous allegations of improper behavior by high court officials had forced the resignations of Imperial Household Minister Ichiki and his secretary, Sekiya. Kawai had also resigned his post and assumed the job of chief of the Imperial Household Accounts Office. Kido, the most politically competent member of the palace entourage, had stayed on as Makino's secretary and in August 1933 had assumed the additional post of president of the Board of Peerage and Heraldry, with jurisdiction over the imperial family. Now the two “
kokutai
clarification” movements, one from above and the other from below, precipitated a further reshuffling. Makino resigned at the end of 1935; a few months later Hiranuma obtained his wish of succeeding to the presidency of the privy council in place of Ichiki.
²⁶
Ultranationalists, however, were not contented with this shakeup of the palace entourage and weakening of the Okada cabinet. Until the army's voice in national affairs was further strengthened, and the use-value of the emperor pushed to its peak, they refused to allow the situation to stabilize.

When Chief Aide-de-Camp Honj
informed Hirohito of the spreading attacks on the Okada cabinet and the Diet debates on
constitutional theories, the emperor—then thirty-four—made no attempt to intervene and end the crazy furor in which he personally was never mentioned. Privately he told Honj
that “the monarchical sovereignty argument” was “better.” But in a country like Japan, “the emperor and the state are, generally speaking, the same. So it doesn't matter which [theory] prevails.” Decades of effort to define a system of parliamentary governance under the Meiji constitution were at stake in this “debate,” yet Hirohito was indifferent to its implications. On the other hand, Honj
also alleges in his diary that Hirohito told him: “[I]n dealing with international matters such as labor treaties and debt problems, the organ theory is convenient.”
²⁷

These inconsistent statements reveal Hirohito's attitude: protect members of the entourage, such as Ichiki Kitokur
, but avoid commitment to specific constitutional interpretations of his role in governance. After the war, when discussing the attack on Minobe's rationalist interpretation of the Meiji Constitution, Hirohito observed that:

In fact the state was not for Hirohito an entity with an independent life of its own, capable of meeting the needs of ruled and rulers alike. It had to have an emperor who functioned as its “brain.” In this respect Hirohito always stood midway between the modern,
rationalist theory of the state propounded by Minobe and the absolutist theory of Uesugi, which, under army pressure, became the official orthodoxy from 1935 onward. Hirohito also found the myth of the living god to be helpful for amplifying his voice in the policy-making process and for strengthening loyalty to himself in the military. Moreover, banning Minobe's theory was a way of checking any further attempt to revise the Meiji constitution by reinterpretation. So he allowed Minobe—who had denied the absoluteness of the imperial will and taught that the Diet could freely criticize laws and ordinances sanctioned by the emperor—to be purged from public life.
²⁹
And the Japanese people were encouraged to behave as if they thought the emperor was a living deity.

Yet Hirohito was by no means personally comfortable with a movement that sought to deprive him of his freedom. He realized, too, that the participation of commoners in antigovernment debates on the clarification of the
kokutai
could undermine faith in the nation's privileged elites and diminish his own charismatic authority. Nevertheless he did nothing to stop the chattering cult that surrounded the throne from reaching new levels of fanaticism. If Hirohito ever thought his military rightists were thinking and acting wrongly, he never let them know it. What his sardonic exchanges with Honj
mainly showed was his eclecticism, his irritation with the army's attacks on his entourage, and his belief that the constitutional order contrived under his grandfather was compatible with any form of authoritarian government. He had been educated to play an active role in political and military decision making; he intended to do so, and he knew that many of the people denouncing Minobe's theory wanted to deny him precisely that.