Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (78 page)

Later that day Kawashima met with the Supreme Military Council, an informal group of high-ranking army officers, most of whom were sympathetic to the rebels. Among those in attendance and controlling the meeting were the Imperial Way generals Araki,
Mazaki, and Yamashita and their supporters, including Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko and Lt. Gen. Prince Asaka Yasuhiko. The council decided to try persuasion on the rebel officers before conveying the emperor's order to them, which was precisely the opposite of what Hirohito had demanded. According to the historian Otabe Y
ji, “the army minister's instruction” was issued from the palace to the rebel officers at 10:50
A.M
., five hours and fifty minutes after the start of their mutiny. It declared that “(1) Your reason for rebelling has reached the emperor; (2) We recognize your true action was based on your sincere desire to manifest the
kokutai….
(5) Other than this, everything depends on the emperor's benevolence.”
⁴¹
This “instruction,” expressing informal upper-echelon approval of the uprising and intimating to the rebels that the emperor might show leniency, was conveyed to the ringleaders by Tokyo martial law commander General Kashii.

On the evening of the first day of the uprising, when the ministers of the Okada cabinet came to court to submit their resignations, Hirohito again refused to permit it, telling them to stay on without their prime minister until the mutiny ended.
⁴²

Early on the morning of the second day, February 27, Hirohito declared “administrative martial law” on the basis of Article 8 of the Imperial Constitution, pertaining to emergency imperial ordinances. Formally he was invoking his sovereign governmental power to handle the crisis.
⁴³
In reality he was backing his orders to suppress the rebellion in his capacity as commander in chief by freeing himself from any obligation to obtain the consent of any cabinet ministers for his actions.

Hirohito displayed unusual energy in working to crush the rebellion. At short intervals throughout the second day and into the early morning hours of the twenty-eighth, the third day, Hirohito sent chamberlains scurrying down the long corridors of the Meiji Palace to summon Honj
for repeated audiences. Each time he demanded to learn whether the rebels were being suppressed.
When he did not like Honj
's replies, he threatened to lead the Imperial Guard Division himself. But (as Hata notes) Honj
was equally stubborn in his defense of the rebel's actions: Indeed, Honj
's own diary account of this period shows him a virtual traitor to the emperor.
⁴⁴

During the uprising Hirohito met Prince Chichibu, who had just returned from his post in distant Hirosaki and with whom his relations were not always amicable. After their meeting Chichibu is alleged to have distanced himself from the rebels and ended his relations with the young officers and the Imperial Way generals.
⁴⁵
Nevertheless, rumors of the prince's sympathy for them never ended, and two years later Prince Saionji twice revealed (to his secretary, Harada) his fear that sibling rivalry in the imperial family could someday lead to murder.
⁴⁶
Also on the second day two senior naval officers distinguished themselves by their show of loyalty to the emperor: Rear Admiral Yonai and his chief of staff, Inoue.

By the morning of the fourth day of the uprising, February 29, the emperor had firmly maintained his authority, the troops were returning to their barracks, and most of the ringleaders were in custody. Court-martialed in April, secretly and without benefit of defense lawyers, seventeen of them were executed in July by firing squad. Shortly afterward, around the time of the Buddhist
obon
festival for the spirits of the dead, Hirohito is alleged to have ordered one of his military aides (who happened to have been on night duty at the Palace when the mutiny occurred) to secure seventeen
obon
lanterns. The aide later hung them somewhere in the palace. Hirohito said no more about the lanterns, which had to be kept secret because he could not be perceived as condoning mutiny. Perhaps this action made him feel more at ease with himself. Even after having sanctioned death sentences in order to extinguish threats to his entourage, he could still feel that he was living his belief in compassionate concern for his subjects.
⁴⁷

When the military investigated the February uprising, it discov
ered that the rebels' sense of crisis had been magnified by the general election held on February 20, in which voters had expressed antimilitary sentiments by supporting left-wing candidates. Further, despite the rural roots and populist rhetoric of the ringleaders, most had not become revolutionaries because of the agricultural depression, and their ultimate goals had little to do with agrarian reforms, as many contemporaries imagined. The aim of the insurgent leaders was to further the good of the
kokutai,
as they understood it, by accelerating Japan's rearmament. The military portion of the national budget had increased steadily since the start of the Manchurian Incident, going from 3.47 percent of GNP in 1931 to 5.63 percent in 1936. During that period the navy had steadily increased its tonnage; both services had begun to develop air forces; but the army had not expanded significantly and still totaled about 233,365 officers and men organized in seventeen divisions.
⁴⁸
The insurgent officers blamed the political system, not economic conditions, for limiting military budgets in a time of national emergency.
⁴⁹

Interestingly, in their concept of total war the thinking of the ringleaders and their senior commanders in the Army Ministry and the Army General Staff was strikingly similar: Both wanted state control of industrial decision making and production in order to fully mobilize the nation's resources. Beyond their common ignorance of what “total” war really required, the rebel leaders were as disunited in their thinking as they had been in their actions throughout the uprising. Only the idea of a “Sh
wa restoration” to reform the management of the state seems to have been widely shared. Notions of what such a “restoration” would mean in practice varied from individual to individual.
⁵⁰
For Isobe, perhaps the most extreme of the ringleaders, it denoted “[s]tate consolidation of the economy together with completing the Meiji restoration and developing it into a world restoration.”
⁵¹

The February mutiny confirmed Hirohito's belief in the consti
tution's importance for securing his powers of military command. So rigidly did he heed that lesson that when General Ishiwara Kanji later drafted a plan to establish a separate, independent army air force, Hirohito would not even consider it for fear that an air force, not provided for in the constitution, might elude his control.
⁵²
Ultimately the entire experience strengthened his sense of the enormous power he had when performing as a military commander. He seems to have resolved never to appear indecisive when confronted with decisions to act; and he began to move closer to the Control faction of the army, and to feel justified in sanctioning large military spending increases. Yet he never overcame the memory of this incident, and tended to infer from it that the throne was more insecure than it really was.

After World War II, when Hirohito was particularly concerned to play down his role as supreme commander, he offered a deliberately distorted account of the February mutiny: