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The great campaign to drive the wedge, demonize the military, make the emperor a pacifist, and construct an imperial democracy, on the other hand, was eminently public. Both the Japanese and the Americans used the mass media to advance their ultimately convergent positions. On September 21, for example, MacArthur told the United Press that “untold savings in American life, money, and time” had resulted from retaining the emperor.
The most significant of these responses, which had actually been drafted in Shigemitsu’s Foreign Ministry, had the emperor asserting “that he had had no intention of having his war rescript employed as former Premier Hideki Tojo had used it when Japan launched her sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. He said that he had expected Tojo to declare war in the usual, formal manner, if necessary.”
In a complementary article, Kido Kōichi, the emperor’s most intimate advisor, was paraphrased as stating that “Hirohito knew nothing in advance about the Pearl Harbor attack, learning about it later from the palace radio.”29
What the emperor had not expected was merely what no one, including Tōjō himself, had anticipated: that the attack on Pearl Harbor would be launched before the U.S. government received a note from the Japanese embassy in Washington formally breaking off relations. The message had not been delivered on time because of an absurdly human faux pas: an embassy staff member took too long typing it. Apart from this unforeseen development, which without question made the surprise attack seem especially “treacherous,” Hirohito was well briefed on the Pearl Harbor strategy, right down to the reason for
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This was the setting in which the entire country was confronted with The Photograph—the most famous visual image of the entire occupation period, which appeared in the same newspapers. This overshadowed accounts of the emperor’s “interview,” appalled the Home Ministry’s censors (a banner day indeed for the watchdogs), and was another reason that they attempted to recall those press runs. The photo depicted MacArthur and the emperor standing together in the general’s quarters, and there was no mistaking who possessed greater authority. The supreme commander, wearing an open-necked khaki shirt
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Be that as it may, the idea for the photograph was MacArthur’s, and his decision to make it public revealed the deft touch of a man who had spent much of his career practicing public relations. The photo established MacArthur’s authority for all to see, while simultaneously demonstrating his receptivity to the emperor.
On such slender margins, the moment of a shutter’s blink, often rest our renderings of compelling events.
The photograph is often said to mark the moment when it really came home to most Japanese that they had been vanquished and the Americans were in charge.
This famous photo taken at the first meeting of General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito on September 27, 1945, created a sensation when published in the Japanese press. In a single stroke, it established both MacArthur’s authority and the fact that he would stand by the emperor.
The spokesman went on to emphasize that General MacArthur “expressed the opinion that the smooth occupation was really due to the Emperor’s leadership.” This was duly reported in the Western press and never repudiated by GHQ.36
For, as it happened, detailed minutes written immediately afterwards by Okumura, the emperor’s interpreter, eventually did see the light of day three decades later. They tend to confirm the Home Ministry’s version of events. In this confidential reconstruction, the emperor is never quoted as offering to assume responsibility for the war, whereas the supreme commander emerges almost as a fawning courtier awed by his proximity to “Your Majesty” and extraordinarily solicitous in his comments.
Prior to this meeting, intimate court sources tell us, Hirohito had been tense and uncertain. Bowers noticed that he was trembling when he arrived (the New York Times interviewer of a day earlier had made a similar observation). He left the meeting buoyed in spirit, visibly more relaxed and confident—obviously with good reason. The emperor immediately told Kido Kōichi about the compliments MacArthur had paid him, and Kido was immensely relieved. As he later noted, if this meeting had not occurred, it would have been exceedingly difficult to defend the emperor against charges of war crimes. On
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On October 1, MacArthur received through Fellers a short legal brief that made absolutely clear that SCAP had no interest in seriously investigating Hirohito’s actual role in the war undertaken in his name. The brief took as “facts” that the emperor had not exercised free will in signing the declaration of war; that he had “lack of knowledge of the true state of affairs”; and that he had risked his life in attempting to effect the surrender. It offered, in awkward legalese, the one-sentence “Conclusion” that “If fraud, menace or duress sufficient to negative intent can be affirmatively
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The attitude of the Japanese toward their Emperor is not generally understood. Unlike Christians, the Japanese have no God with whom to commune. Their emperor is the living symbol of the race in whom lies the virtues of their ancestors. He is the incarnation of national spirit, incapable of wrong or misdeeds. Loyalty to him is absolute. Although no one fears him, all hold their Emperor in reverential awe. They would not touch him, look into his face, address him, step on his shadow. Their abject homage to him amounts to a self abnegation sustained by a religious patriotism the depth of which
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In effecting our bloodless invasion, we requisitioned the services of the Emperor. By his order seven million soldiers laid down their arms and are being rapidly demobilized. Through his act hundreds of thousands of American casualties were avoided and the war terminated far ahead of schedule. Therefore having made good use of the Emperor, to try him for war crimes, to the Japanese, would amount to a breach of faith. Moreover, the Japanese feel that unconditional surrender as outlined in the Potsdam Declaration meant preservation of the State structure, which includes the Emperor. If the
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A Gallup poll conducted six weeks before the war ended indicated that 70 percent of Americans favored executing or harshly punishing the emperor. The Senate joined this clamor on September 18, and on October 16 MacArthur was instructed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to “proceed immediately to assemble all available evidence of Hirohito’s participation in and responsibility for Japanese violations of international law.”
Near the end of October, Fellers went so far as to remind a well-connected Japanese general that the problem of the emperor’s responsibility for the attack on Pearl Harbor was still the “most important and critical” issue on the American side, urging him to come up with a good “general defense” of the emperor that would help MacArthur override public opinion in the United States and elsewhere.
Yet in the end their collaboration proved remarkably effective in dressing the emperor in new clothes, ensuring his personal security, and redefining the throne as the centerpiece of the new democracy. In the process, a striking relationship of open social fraternization between court circles and the upper echelons of the occupation staff was cultivated. The imperial household took the initiative in this, quickly revealing a genius for grasping the Americans’ love of aristocratic pomp and pageantry. Invitations were regularly extended to high occupation officials to participate in the court’s
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General MacArthur himself never deigned to participate in these or any other such affairs, but his wife and young son Arthur joined in happily. So did the president of the Tokyo war-crimes tribunal and the American head of the prosecution staff, who were in the process of hanging or incarcerating some of the emperor’s most devoted servants.
For many Allied officers and high civilian officials, the imperial duck hunt was the most memorable moment of their fleeting interlude as nobility in a foreign land. On these or other occasions, they might even hope to receive a small gift embossed with the sixteen-petal imperial chrysanthemum crest. While the media in the United States were chuckling and enthusing over the “Americanization” of Japan, the Japanese were quietly and skillfully Japanizing the Americans. It was all part of the challenge of conquering the conqueror.
In a curious way, the emperor’s surrender broadcast punctured emperor worship. When the holy war ended, so also did the worship of its high priest and erstwhile “manifest deity.”
The Japanese had discarded their feudal shogunate and the samurai-led social structure on which it rested in the mid-nineteenth century, cast them off like worn-out garments after almost eight centuries of exalted existence. They had experienced less than a century of modern imperial rule, beginning with Hirohito’s grandfather, the Meiji emperor, in 1868. No other regime in their history, no other leader, had ever presided over such devastation and disaster as Hirohito. No one else had opened the door to a conquering army from abroad.
The cosmopolitan royalists were also aware of the high mortality rate of monarchies generally in the twentieth century. The Chinese imperial system, which was said to reflect the “mandate of heaven” and traced its origins back two millennia, had fallen in 1911. World War I witnessed the collapse of once-powerful and presumably revered imperial systems in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Turkey. While the Japanese pondered the fate of their imperial institution, the monarchy in defeated Italy hung in the balance. In June 1946, the House of Savoy, which claimed to be the oldest ruling house
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After the famous photograph of the general and the emperor appeared, Hirohito even emerged as the butt of the most salacious riddle of the occupation period. This rested on a hitherto unmentionable pun: the fact that the imperial “We”—pronounced chin—was a homonym to a slang word for penis (or “prick”). Why was General MacArthur the belly button (heso) of Japan? Because, the rude joke went, he was above the prick/emperor.7
In February, for instance, SCAP’s local intelligence people reported a rumor current in the Shimonoseki area to the effect that the emperor’s ancestors came from India, and that he therefore “was not Japanese.” As a result of this “revelation,” which was said to be verifiable by records in a temple in Shimane Prefecture, “some Shimonoseki residents have expressed their preference for a Japanese president rather than an Emperor of Indian ancestry.”8
The directive disestablishing Shinto as the state religion opened the door to a resurgence of popular religions.
Although his formal exoneration from war responsibility did not actually come until June 1946, well before that date the emperor cast aside his commander-in-chief’s uniform, donned a Western suit, and embarked on a series of tours that eventually would take him to almost every prefecture in the country.
The emperor’s constitutional status was drastically revised, depriving him of formal power; and in a single deft declaration, he managed to satisfy many of his foreign critics that he no longer claimed divinity.11 The last of these acts was accomplished in the form of a “Rescript to Promote the National Destiny” printed in newspapers nationwide on New Year’s Day. This was the emperor’s first formal address to his subjects since August 15, but its greatest impact was among foreigners. Popularly known as his “declaration of humanity” (ningen sengen), it was immediately hailed by the Americans
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To Westerners, Christians in particular, the notion of “emperor worship” was blasphemous. To speak of the emperor as the Son of Heaven, as he was commonly termed in English, seemed perilously close to equating him with Christ, the Son of God.
Before peace and democracy could grow, he observed, it was necessary to eliminate false notions of national superiority and imperial divinity. Perhaps, he mused, this could be accomplished by a new imperial rescript.
Henderson agreed to draft a sample statement himself. This he did during his lunch break in his room at the Daiichi Hotel—lying on a bed with a pad and pencil imagining that he was the emperor of Japan renouncing his divinity. There were no witnesses to this creative moment, but the wonderful American presumption and casualness of it all rings true.
Blyth’s draft was translated into plain vernacular Japanese by his Peers’ School contacts, and this became the basis for secret Japanese deliberations on an imperial “declaration of humanity.”
At one point, in a moment even sillier than the burning of the Henderson memo, then—foreign minister Yoshida Shigeru clandestinely received a copy of the working draft of the declaration in the men’s room reserved for members of the cabinet. No one seems to have questioned the appropriateness of such a locale for an exchange involving the emperor’s divinity.
The imperial rescript released on January 1 was a distinctly Japanized rendering of the Blyth draft. It retained the essence of what Henderson and Blyth had proposed, but in a submerged, sublimated, adroitly altered form. The subtlety of the final statement becomes apparent when it is set against initial versions based on the Blyth draft.
imperial myths popularized in the 1930s. 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.
In the most dramatic revision, the New Year’s Day rescript opened by quoting in its entirety the five-article “Charter Oath” proclaimed by the youthful Meiji emperor at the beginning of his reign in 1868. This, Meiji’s grandson now declared, would be the basis for discarding “old abuses” and creating a new Japan devoted to the pursuit of peace and the attainment of an enriched culture. (There was no mention of democracy in the rescript.) For many conservatives, this was the very heart and soul of the New Year’s Day proclamation. The Charter Oath would become a touchstone, a talisman, a
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It was at the emperor’s personal instigation that the entire focus of the statement was shifted from “renouncing divinity” to emphasizing the Meiji-era oath.22
In the emperor’s later words, this affirmation of the ideals of the Charter Oath was the “primary object” of his declaration, and the issue of divinity only a “secondary matter.” His emphasis was not only endorsed but made stronger by MacArthur. As Hirohito told the story, it was his intention simply to begin the rescript by alluding to the oath, which was familiar to all educated Japanese. When MacArthur was shown a draft to this effect, however, Hirohito was informed that the general had not only praised the Meiji emperor (fourteen years old when the oath was promulgated) for “having done
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“The new Japanese Constitution, with Prussian tyranny as its father, and British representative government as its mother, and attended at its birth by Sat-Cho [Satsuma and Chōshū] midwives,” the guide declared, “was a hermaphroditic creature.”
Regendering this hermaphroditic creature in 1946 involved casting aside the authoritarian German legal model on which it was based (and in which most Japanese legal specialists continued to be trained), and replacing it with a charter rooted in basic ideals from the Anglo-American legal tradition. On March 6, 1946, a draft outline of a new constitution was presented to the public as the government’s own handiwork and subsequently submitted to the Diet for deliberation and adoption. In actuality, it had originally been written in English by members of GHQ’s Government Section in a secret
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No modern nation ever has rested on a more alien constitution—or a more unique wedding of monarchism, democratic idealism, and pacifism; and few, if any, alien documents have ever been as thoroughly internalized and vigorously defended as this national charter would come to be.
The Americans were ordering the Japanese to adopt democracy by their “freely expressed will” through constitutional revision. They were acting, moreover, as if the postsurrender conservative cabinets actually represented the will of the people—which no one, including SCAP, the populace, and or the rapidly revolving governments themselves believed for a moment.
Despite the vagueness of his official position, Konoe was a man of exceptional influence and personal charisma. He had served as prime minister on two separate occasions in the critical period between 1936 and 1941, which enhanced his prestige immensely but ultimately was to prove his undoing. It was during Konoe’s premiership, in 1937, that Japan launched its “war of annihilation” against China. He also was prime minister in 1938 when Japan declared a “New Order” in East Asia, and it was his government that brought Japan into the Axis Pact with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in 1940. The
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The prince himself did not live to see the game played out. On December 6, his name appeared on an official list with those of eight others as an accused Class A war criminal. Ten days later, on the night he was to go to jail, he killed himself by taking poison.7
To establishment figures such as Shidehara, Matsumoto, and Yoshida, constitutional revision was a frivolous notion, one more bee in the American bonnet, and initially they did not take MacArthur’s statements about it very seriously. Privately, Shidehara told both Konoe and Kido Kōichi that revision was neither necessary nor desirable. In his view, it would be sufficient to simply develop a more democratic interpretation of the Meiji charter.
The name of Matsumoto’s “Constitutional Problem Investigation Committee” was deliberately worded to avoid mention of “revision” or “amendment,” and he took care to make sure no one missed the innuendo. “The Committee does not necessarily aim at the revision of the constitution,” he announced. “The purpose of its investigation is to determine whether any amendment may be necessary, and, if so, what are the points to be amended.”10 This was not mere bravado. A few years after these events had played their course, Matsumoto ruefully confided that “we thought we could handle the matter as we
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But here was the nub of the problem: what really made democratization possible was neither the old constitution nor the “moderate” old civilian elites, but the new reformist overlords, the alien Americans; and in their view, there were no constitutional protections to prevent the system from clamping shut again once they left town. This was what the Japanese conservatives utterly failed to comprehend.
The naiveté and elitism of the Matsumoto committee proved to be, from its own perspective, a disaster. The committee left its name to history as a woeful example of insular complacency and myopic expertise.
Matsumoto attempted to persuade occupation authorities that fundamental differences between East and West were at issue here. “A juridical system is very much like certain kinds of plants, which transplanted from their native soil, degenerate, or even die,” he wrote in a memorandum to GHQ. “Some of [the] roses of the West, when cultivated in Japan, lose their fragrance totally.”
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
