TAISHŌ: AN ENIGMATIC EMPEROR AND HIS INFLUENTIAL WIFE

Hara Takeshi

Introduction

The Taishō Emperor was born in 1879 and died in 1926 at the age of forty-seven. His personal name was Yoshihito, and his childhood name was Haru no Miya, or Prince Haru. By the traditional count, the Taishō Emperor was the 123rd ruler of Japan. He was the third son of the Meiji Emperor, and his biological mother was the imperial concubine Yanagihara Naruko. His reign lasted from 1912 to 1926. Unfortunately, he suffered from poor health, and in 1921, when his brain disease worsened, his son—Crown Prince Hirohito (later the Shōwa Emperor)—was made regent, and the ailing emperor withdrew from public life. At the end of his life, various stories about his bizarre behavior circulated. The most famous of these was the so-called ‘tele- scope incident,’ according to which the emperor, at the opening of the Imperial Diet, rolled up the sheet of paper on which his speech was written, and instead of reading it, simply stared at the assembly through the roll. This story contributed to the creation of an image of a mentally deranged emperor. However there is no evidence that this incident ever took place. After his death, the Taishō Emperor was interred in the Tama Imperial Mausoleum in Hachiōji, western Tokyo, becoming the fi rst Japanese emperor to be buried in Tokyo. The wife of the Taishō Emperor, Sadako, known posthumously as Empress Teimei, lived from 1884 to 1951. She was the fourth daugh- ter of Kujō Michitaka, head of the Kujō branch of the aristocratic Fujiwara clan. After their marriage in 1900, Sadako gave birth to four sons: Hirohito, Chichibu, Takamatsu, and Mikasa. It was with Sadako that monogamy was effectively established in the imperial family: there was no more need of concubines as the empress herself bore four boys. Unlike Haruko, the wife of the Meiji Emperor (known posthumously as Empress Dowager Shōken), who had involved herself in causes different from those of the emperor, Sadako usually accompanied her husband, demonstrating a modern type of conjugal unit. When the 228 hara takeshi emperor’s health deteriorated, she became absorbed in kannagara no michi (‘the way of the gods,’ i.e., Shinto), and clashed, on the matter of the Shinto rites, with her son Hirohito. Sadako was an active patron of various philanthropic causes—lending her support to sufferers of leprosy and other disadvantaged members of society. After her death, she was buried next to her husband in the Tama Imperial Mausoleum in western Tokyo.

Sickly Childhood and Marriage

The Taishō Emperor was born in the Aoyama Palace in Tokyo on 31 August 1879, and received the name of Haru no Miya Yoshihito. He was the third son of Emperor Meiji, however all of his brothers died young, and he was the only son to survive. At the time of his birth, he had a rash over his entire body, and the following year he contracted meningitis. As was the palace custom, he was entrusted upon his birth to the care of the seventy-year-old Nakayama Tadayasu, the maternal grandfather of Emperor Meiji, who had also raised Emperor Meiji himself. In 1885, at the age of six, he was sent back to the palace, but was brought up without any direct contact with his parents. It was some years, in fact, before he learned that Haruko, the wife of the Meiji Emperor, was not his real mother. Despite his sickly disposition, at the age of eight, Yoshihito was offi cially adopted by the empress and, albeit belatedly, entered the Gakushūin, or Peers School. In 1889, at the age of ten, he was desig- nated crown prince. During the 1890s, a number of imperial retreats were built in Numazu, Hayama and Nikko where he could rest and recuperate. As his health did not enable him to keep up with his classes, he withdrew from school in 1894 and continued to study at home with private tutors. These tutorials made him even more socially awkward and less interested in studies. He was often sick, and in 1895 even became seriously ill. However, there was one subject in which he did show interest: a course in Chinese classics, given to him by his tutor Mishima Chūshū. Unlike Motoda Nagazane, the personal tutor to the Meiji Emperor who had concentrated on teiōgaku, or training a crown prince to become an emperor, Mishima placed greatest emphasis on Chinese poetry. The Taishō Emperor ended up being better at com- posing Chinese poetry than Japanese waka, unlike any emperor before him.