Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (8 page)

I

In the year 1901 Tokyo's population was reaching nearly 1.5 million.
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Though by no means wholly modern any more than the country itself, the city was bursting with energy. Emperor Meiji, for instance, lived not too distant from Hirohito's birthplace in a still new, sprawling palace consisting of three dozen wooden buildings, joined by a
single corridor—which he never allowed to be wired for electricity.
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His huge, stone-wall-enclosed Imperial Palace compound was encircled by a moat and spread over some 240 acres—a green island of emptiness and stillness amid the bustle that surrounded it. On one side were the Marunouchi and Kasumigaseki sections of Tokyo, where the nation's leading financial, business, and governmental institutions were just beginning to cluster. Between these future core business districts, which included the new Diet building and the office headquarters of the Mitsubishi Company, lay Japan's first Western-style park—Hibiya Park. To the east of the vast Imperial Palace grounds lay the head of Tokyo Bay, along which, on both sides, light and heavy industry were already concentrating.

Hirohito was brought up to believe that the entire history of modern Japan centered on his grandfather and the small group of talented officials who had assisted him. Virtually unknown beyond Kyoto when he had succeeded to the throne at age fifteen, by the time of his first grandson's birth, Meiji was revered all over Japan. In that interim not only had the monarchy evolved and gained political, economic, and military power, but the Japanese people themselves had acquired a new national identity as his “loyal subjects,” or
shinmin
. The ideology of virtuous subjecthood implied a special type of conduct: absolute loyalty and service to the emperor, conceived ideally as the parent (both father and mother) of an extended family that included the whole nation as his “children.” The entire family of subjects was expected to value hard work and competition, to honor the stories of the origins of the state, to subscribe to state Shinto, and to put service to the state and duty to the emperor ahead of private interests and pleasures. Hirohito was reared within this same imperial ideology, but viewed from the other side, as the one to whom all loyalty and service were owed.

An official cult of the emperor was also firmly in place at Hirohito's birth. Repressive laws governing speech and writing critical
of the emperor had been enacted in 1893, 1898, and 1900. Restrictive publication and newspaper laws soon followed.
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The mass media reported on the emperor and his family in a uniform way, using special terms of respect. Police regulations also governed the taking of his picture.

Of the many highly ambiguous legacies of the Meiji era, the constitutional system and the ideology of rule bequeathed by Meiji to Hirohito were by far the most important. Through the constitution Hirohito inherited political traditions of autocratic rule combined with an ethos of restraint in its exercise. Later, when he began to be educated to take over, he learned that no laws or imperial ordinances could be made unless the emperor gave his assent first.
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Court and cabinet had been joined formally by the emperor himself—in whom the two worlds came together. But the structural division of court and government could easily lead to problems of communication. As Hirohito grew older he would experience this division, and be confronted constantly by the confusion that the architects of the constitutional order had institutionalized at the highest level.
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Although the constitution specified that the emperor was to share the exercise of legislative power with the Imperial Diet, Meiji and his advisers assumed that the Diet would reflect only the “imperial will,” never its own. In case of a conflict between the emperor and the Diet, the emperor possessed a veto power by withholding his sanction. The constitutional order, codified by this great imperial “gift,” was already undergoing change on the eve of Hirohito's birth. In 1900 It
had founded a new political party, the Rikken Seiy
kai, or “Friends of Constitutional Government,” to build parliamentary support for the oligarchic government and to help make the constitution work.

The Seiy
kai—representing mainly the preferences of large landlords and industrialists—came to dominate party politics in the Diet.
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The
genr
persuaded Emperor Meiji to acknowledge this
new reality of party politics, even cabinets in which party men participated. Once again It
played the key role in getting Meiji to abandon his opposition. He did so, however, only by promising that his new party would leave the appointment and dismissal of the prime minister and other ministers of state entirely to the discretion of the emperor.
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By yielding to the emperor's autocratic prejudices, It
denied the key parliamentary principle that cabinets should be organized by the head of the majority party in the elected lower house of the Diet.

In general Meiji was indeed an autocrat, and the constitution by no means changed his view on that. He continued to support the military in disputes within the cabinet. And the
genr
continued to admonish him to restrain his exercise of despotic powers and to operate within the confines of a system of consensus. While the emperor could appoint and dismiss prime ministers and other high officials in a way he had been unable to before the constitution, It
and the other
genr
retained their exclusive power to nominate the prime minister.
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