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Henderson was one of Blyth’s regular contacts, and apparently unwittingly initiated a fateful conversation late in November, when he shared his thoughts concerning the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education, which had been turned into a prop of emperor-centered militarism in the 1930s.
Before peace and democracy could grow, he observed, it was necessary to eliminate false notions of national superiority and imperial divinity.
Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, ordinary Japanese had little or no awareness of the throne, and the imperial house was comparably indifferent to, if not utterly contemptuous of, ordinary people.
arcane.
Fellers, who often emerged as the deus ex machina in MacArthur’s imperial intrigues, could be unusually blunt
International Prosecution Section (IPS)
Reginald Blyth’s point of entree to court circles.26 Whether the book came from that avid British Zen royalist
The English expatriate wrote a memorandum, translated and shown to the emperor on January 13,
“The Emperor must reign, not rule,” Blyth emphasized. “He must show himself really interested in the people not only by words but by coordinated action and speeches, appealing to their pride, their love of country.” More specifically, the emperor should travel around the country, visiting coal mines (the power of picture books!) and farming districts, listening to the people, talking to them, asking questions. He should uncork some feeling, pull out the vox humana stop, and appeal to the Japanese to share their stocks [of food]. . . . He should tell the Japanese that they are still a great
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the emerging emperor-centered modern state.
The emperor’s very unpreparedness for mingling with ordinary people proved to be an immense public-relations advantage. His attempts at conversation were so stumbling and ill at ease that they provoked a wave of popular sympathy
His social ineptitude made him seem all too human,
the emperor’s subjects suddenly learned “that he was short, slight, and round-shouldered, that his coordination was so poor he seemed constantly on the verge of toppling over. He was weak-chinned. His conversation consisted of inanities in a high pitched voice. His face was covered with moles—a Japanese omen of good luck. Apart from a stubby mustache his beard was straggly and he often needed a shave. Thick, horn-rimmed glasses shielded his weak eyes. His clothes were unkempt and his shoes scuffed.
turpitude,
1983, Shattered God (Kudakareta Kami),
Unlike others, he returned empty handed, with no looted military supplies—for which his mother berated him, comparing him unfavorably with the more practical demobilized sons of her neighbors.
It was inconceivable that he would not in some way demonstrate responsibility for and to those who had died following his orders.
he simply could not comprehend why the emperor showed no sense of shame.
Someone, Watanabe noted with approval, said that the only truth in the press was to be found in the obituaries.
fatuous.
upon hearing that the emperor had visited Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to those who died in war for the imperial cause, he wondered how the souls of the dead greeted the sovereign—and then concluded that there could be no such souls, for if there had been, they would already have slain the emperor with their curses.
The man left him two books by the Marxist humanist Kawakami Hajime—a history of modern economic thought and a copy of his old classic Bimbō Monogatari (A Tale of Poverty).
pronunciamentos
How could he even speak about the people’s declining morality when he himself had not yet taken responsibility for the war?
He agreed Pearl Harbor had been wrong, but wondered how people who had dropped atomic bombs could speak so easily of Japan as the “enemy of peace and morality.”
a secret week-long session
“There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest.”
Except for the emperor.
The basic conflict lay between two Western systems of legal thinking. Put oversimply, these experts, well grounded in German legislative and administrative law and a German-style “theory of state structure,” were largely indifferent to American concerns about popular sovereignty and human rights.15
Many, for instance, were happy to jettison emperor worship as enshrined in the Meiji charter.
“The people’s right to live, right to work, and right to be educated shall be assured by concrete facilities.”
There was, the Kempō Kenkyūkai’s proposal pointed out, no single Japanese history or tradition or culture to draw upon in charting the country’s future course.
What this—and other—popular initiatives for a new constitution revealed was the possibility of imagining a past, as well as a future, quite different from that which the old guard was so desperately attempting to enshrine.
Those who venerated the Meiji charter naturally tended to present that document as if it were an expression of emperor-centered values that had been cherished for ages eternal. In actuality, it was less than sixty years old and represented a decision by a tiny elite to turn to Germany for a constitutional model for their emerging nation-state.
Suzuki had devoted himself to studying the thought of the liberty and people’s rights movement.
an indigenous tradition of “democracy” in late-nineteenth-century Japan.
The line between Supreme Commander and Supreme Being was always a fine one in MacArthur’s mind.
leitmotif
Yoshida, who became prime minister in May, later took care to explain to his conservative compatriots that in the circumstances of defeat and occupation, constitutional revision was not an ideal issue of law, but a practical political matter of saving the country, preserving the throne, and hastening the day when the occupation would end.45
steering committee
Rather, she and everyone around her strongly believed they were helping to create the less oppressive society that most Japanese desired but could not obtain from their own leaders.
a common sense of being in an extraordinary position to lift oppression and institutionalize democracy.
the group’s interpretation of its assignment almost always was shaded toward the most generous and liberal construction of what an ideal form of constitutional monarchy might be.
Pantagruel
Kades and his team then went on to make explicit the idea that sovereignty resided entirely with the people. In the Japanese context, this was a revolutionary concept.
The section enumerating “rights and duties of the people” was, and remains, one of the most liberal guarantees of human rights in the world.
The Japan that the Americans reinvented in the Daiichi Building ballroom was not perceived as being a little replica of the United States, however, and Kades later insisted that the U.S. Constitution was not given much attention as the drafting committee cobbled together its new charter.
This was, after all, to be a parliamentary government with a British-style cabinet system wrapped in an imperial dynasty.
the political idealism of American democracy, coupled with Allied pronouncements, left a distinctive ...
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“laws of political morality are universal”—a
no comparable gap existed “between American political ideology and the best or most liberal Japanese constitutional thought.”
