Hirohito the Showa Emperor in War and Peace. Ikuhiko Hata.Pdf
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00 Prelims H:Master Testpages Enigma 6/6/07 15:00 Page i HIROHITO: THE SHO¯ WA EMPEROR IN WAR AND PEACE 00 Prelims H:Master Testpages Enigma 6/6/07 15:00 Page ii General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito photographed in the US Embassy, Tokyo, shortly after the start of the Occupation in September 1945. (See page 187) 00 Prelims H:Master Testpages Enigma 6/6/07 15:00 Page iii Hirohito: The Sho¯wa Emperor in War and Peace Ikuhiko Hata NIHON UNIVERSITY Edited by Marius B. Jansen GLOBAL ORIENTAL 00 Prelims H:Master Testpages Enigma 6/6/07 15:00 Page iv HIROHITO: THE SHO¯ WA EMPEROR IN WAR AND PEACE by Ikuhiko Hata Edited by Marius B. Jansen First published in 2007 by GLOBAL ORIENTAL LTD P.O. Box 219 Folkestone Kent CT20 2WP UK www.globaloriental.co.uk © Ikuhiko Hata, 2007 ISBN 978-1-905246-35-9 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the Publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library Set in Garamond 11 on 12.5 pt by Mark Heslington, Scarborough, North Yorkshire Printed and bound in England by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead, Tyne & Wear 00 Prelims H:Master Testpages Enigma 6/6/07 15:00 Page vi 00 Prelims H:Master Testpages Enigma 6/6/07 15:00 Page v Contents The Author and the Book vii Editor’s Preface ix Author’s Preface to the English Edition xix Chapter 1: Emperor Hirohito and the February 26 Army Uprising 1 Chapter 2: The Decision to End the War 44 Chapter 3: Schemes for Survival of the Imperial Line 88 Chapter 4: One Thousand Letters that Saved the Emperor 160 Chapter 5: Emperor Hirohito is Not to Abdicate 181 Chapter 6: The Emperor Hirohito in War and Peace – Confrontation with MacArthur 215 Index 263 v 00 Prelims H:Master Testpages Enigma 6/6/07 15:00 Page vi 00 Prelims H:Master Testpages Enigma 6/6/07 15:00 Page vii The Author and the Book rofessor Ikuhiko Hata, born in 1932, is Professor of History at PChiba University* and a leading historian of contemporary Japan. After graduation from the University of Tokyo, he continued his studies at Harvard and Columbia, after which he served successfully as researcher at the Defence Agency, instructor at the Defence Institute, Chief Historian of the Financial History Research Division of the Ministry of Finance, and Professor of Takushoku University before accepting his present position. He has been Visiting Fellow at Columbia and Princeton universities. His books published in Japan include ‘Studies of Sho¯wa Military Fascism’, ‘The Sino-Japanese War’, ‘The Nanking Incident’, ‘The Rearmament of Japan’ and ‘The Enigmas of Sho¯wa History’. He has also compiled reference dictionaries and directories of the Imperial Army and Navy, the pre-war Japanese bureaucracy and a compendium of the political institutions, politics and leaders of major countries during the twentieth century. Individual chapters of this book appeared in various historical periodicals in Japan between 1979 and 1983. They were published as a book by Kodansha in 1987, entitled Hirohito Tenno¯ itsutsu no ketsudan (‘Five Decisions by Emperor Hirohito’). It was subsequently republished (1994) by Bungei Shunju as Sho¯wa Tenno¯ itsutsu no Ketsudan (‘Five Decisions by Emperor Sho¯wa’) in order to conform with the emperor’s posthumous name, and with a new introduction, but the text continued to use the name Hirohito. Professor Hata commented on an early draft of the translation, but he has not seen this final version or the substantive notes. Citations and specific references are from the original book by the vii 00 Prelims H:Master Testpages Enigma 6/6/07 15:00 Page viii Hirohito: The Sho¯wa Emperor in War and Peace author, but substantive notes that help to place the material in historical and historiographic contexts have been added by the editor. The basic translation was done by David S. Noble, then at Princeton University, with financial support from the Sasakawa Peace Foundation of Tokyo. I have edited freely, re-grouping some of the material in Chapter 3, and providing the English original for quotations the author supplied in Japanese. MARIUS B. JANSEN Princeton, 1995 * Today, Ikuhiko Hata is Emeritus Professor of History at Nihon University JAPANESE NAMES This book follows the Japanese convention of putting family name first, followed by the given name, except in the case of the author, which follows Western convention to facilitate general reference, including bibliographic databases. viii 00 Prelims H:Master Testpages Enigma 6/6/07 15:00 Page ix Editor’s Preface s Emperor Hirohito’s end approached, his life and times Aexercised increasing fascination for Japanese readers. Few countries have experienced more dramatic changes than Japan underwent during his reign of sixty-two years, and it is safe to say that no individuals have undergone the dizzying succession of roles that were his: symbol of early twentieth-century liberalism as a young monarch in the 1920s; divine ruler and focus of intense and emotional reverence, carefully nurtured in school and barracks, in the 1930s; supreme generalissimo reviewing one of the twentieth- century’s great armies on his white charger during the Second World War; then, supplicant loser whose ancient black limousine threaded its way to the victorious enemy general’s headquarters through the pot-holed streets of his once-proud capital; gradually emerging again as exhorter to democracy and exponent of family values for a newly-urbanized middle class, and ending finally as representative of one of the world’s great capitalist powers in royal visits to the Western countries – so recently his sworn enemies. Earnest young man to demi-god, victorious chief to fallen symbol, hesitant visitor to serene patriarch: Hirohito mirrored in his life the vulnerability and strengths of his people. In the emperor’s closing days, the struggle to appraise his place in history began to take shape.1 It was an inquiry long delayed, and one confronted by formidable difficulties. Pre-war and wartime nationalist mythology required that he be kept ‘above the clouds’. Everything was done in his name, and yet nothing was done by him, lest he become capable of error. This squared in ironic ways ix 00 Prelims H:Master Testpages Enigma 6/6/07 15:00 Page x Hirohito: The Sho¯wa Emperor in War and Peace with the needs of General Douglas MacArthur’s Occupation headquarters (SCAP). Once the decision had been made to maintain and use the imperial institution and Hirohito, enlisting his prestige and aura to reinforce and validate the radical social and economic reforms that the Occupation made, it was best to avoid close scrutiny of the emperor’s role in what had gone before. The convenient fiction that he had been powerless and manipulated by ministers who misinformed him about the disasters they were bringing on their country served to insulate him from the scrutiny of the International Tribunal that met from 1946 to 1948 to allocate responsibility for the aggression and behaviour of Japan’s military masters. Even after the verdicts were announced in 1948, when he was no longer as essential to American purposes, General MacArthur’s fierce resistance to the idea of abdication served to keep him on the throne. Thus, a course that may have been a personal preference for the emperor was closed off by others. By the time of the resumption of Japan’s sovereignty with the San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1952, even Kido Ko¯ichi, former Lord Privy Seal and once the emperor’s closest adviser, wrote from prison to urge court officials to counsel abdication. Nakasone Yasuhiro, then a young member of the House of Representatives, advocated the emperor’s abdication in a Diet interpolation.2 But by then Hirohito was presiding with success over a reconstructed state. It seems clear that the position he was more or less forced to take in early post-surrender days restricted his room for manoeuvre thereafter. The emperor’s personal thoughts and inclinations remain shrouded in considerable ambiguity. In the immediate post- surrender days when he broke precedent by responding to four questions posed by a New York Times reporter, he seemed to place responsibility for Japan’s failure to declare war before striking at Pearl Harbor on General To¯jo¯ by saying that that had not been his intention. The suggestion that he was avoiding responsibility by placing it on his official advisers caused so much consternation that the Home Ministry tried to prevent publication of that response in Japan. Two days later, on 17 September 1945, when the emperor first visited General MacArthur, he took a different position by accepting full responsibility for everything that had been done in x 00 Prelims H:Master Testpages Enigma 6/6/07 15:00 Page xi Editor’s Preface his name. That account, however, has as its only source MacArthur, whose memoirs which were not published until 1964, and the general’s account, which is not calculated to harm his own image in history, is marred by several questionable and some mistaken government decisions. This accords with the testimony of the many diaries of court officials that have appeared in recent years. True, the Meiji Constitution of 1889 had given the emperor exclusive control as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but those forces, too, were structured and bureaucratized.