The Emperor in an Age of War

In the previous installment, we saw how the Meiji Restoration lifted the emperor to the center of a modern nation-state. Under the Constitution of the Empire of Japan, the emperor was held to combine in himself the rights of sovereignty, placed in a position sacred and inviolable.

Yet that modern state would, in time, step into a century of war. What this installment traces is the question of where the emperor stood in that age.

A word of caution at the outset. The subject treated here contains many points on which judgment remains divided to this day. On the question of war responsibility above all, views differ sharply depending on where one stands. This piece takes no particular political position; it sets several views side by side as fairly as it can, and proceeds while avoiding flat assertions. Without inflaming and without glorifying, it seeks only to follow the course of history quietly.

From Taisho to Showa: the beginning of an unsettled age

Emperor Meiji passed away, and the era shifted to Taisho, in 1912. The Taisho period saw the spread of party politics, and a free-spirited mood that would later be called Taisho Democracy is said to have taken root.

But Emperor Taisho’s health failed, and from 1921 Crown Prince Hirohito, the future Emperor Showa, served as regent. Then in December 1926, upon the passing of Emperor Taisho, the throne passed on, and the Showa era began. Based on the provisions of the Constitution of the Empire of Japan and the old Imperial House Law, the new emperor became the 124th emperor, and was held to be the grand marshal commanding the army and navy.

In this age, the world was deeply unsettled. The recession after the First World War, the Great Kanto Earthquake, and then, after Showa began, the Great Depression. As social anxiety deepened, disillusionment with party politics spread, and the military steadily strengthened its voice. Although the constitution held that the emperor combined the rights of sovereignty, actual politics moved through institutions such as the cabinet, the military, and the bureaucracy, and how far the emperor’s personal will directly drove politics would later become a major point of contention.

The rise of the military, and the difficult matter of command

In the early Showa years, a serious weakness is said to have lurked within the structure of politics. That was the problem of the supreme command.

Under the Constitution of the Empire of Japan, the power of command over the military was held to belong to the emperor, and it came to be interpreted as an independent domain into which the cabinet could not easily intervene. As this interpretation spread, the military gained room to act apart from the cabinet’s control, and a deep rift opened between politics and the armed forces.

The Manchurian Incident of 1931, then the May 15 Incident of 1932 and the February 26 Incident of 1936, brought a run of episodes in which parts of the military sought to move politics by force. It is well known that during the February 26 Incident, Emperor Showa strongly demanded that the revolt be suppressed. From such scenes comes a view that the emperor harbored misgivings about the military’s recklessness. On the other hand, how to judge the fact that the country as a whole nevertheless drifted toward war is a matter on which opinions are divided.

In time Japan stepped into the quagmire of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and in 1941 came to the opening of war against the United States and Britain. Why could the nation not stop the war? To this question many factors are intertwined: the military’s runaway course, the absence of political leadership, the tension of the international situation, and more, and it is said there is no simple answer. As for the emperor’s role too, interpretations of the course of events surrounding the decision to open war differ among researchers.

The sacred decision: the resolve to end the war

The war situation gradually worsened, air raids on the home islands continued, and matters reached the point where atomic bombs were dropped on two cities. With the very survival of the nation in question, the judgment of whether to end the war reached its final phase.

In August 1945, an imperial conference gathered the leaders of government and the military. Accept the Potsdam Declaration and surrender, or fight on still? Opinion at the conference split clean in two, and the discussion is said to have grown heated. Those who argued for acceptance and those who, on conditions such as preserving the national polity, opposed it to the last clashed fiercely.

With the deliberation unable to reach a conclusion, acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration was ultimately decided in the form of seeking the judgment of Emperor Showa. This is what is called the sacred decision. And at noon on August 15, the Jewel Voice Broadcast announced to the people that the war had ended.

War responsibility: a question that continues even now

After the war, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the so-called Tokyo Trials, was held, and the war’s leaders were judged. But Emperor Showa was not indicted, nor did he abdicate. How to receive this fact remains a matter of debate to this day.

As for the background to the emperor not being indicted, the explanation is widely known that there was a policy judgment to carry out the occupation smoothly. That is to say, the decision not to indict was less a settling of whether historical responsibility existed than a choice made within the reality of occupation. For this reason, it is often pointed out that not being indicted did not bring the debate over responsibility to an end.

The very phrase ‘war responsibility’ must also be handled with care. Legal responsibility, political responsibility, moral responsibility, these belong to separate dimensions, and depending on which sense one speaks of, the debate takes on an entirely different character. When the discussion proceeds with this distinction left vague, it is said that the for and against tend to talk past one another and run on parallel lines.

Why has this question lasted so long? As we saw earlier, the structure of rule itself held both ‘immense authority’ and ‘the constraints of constitutional monarchy’ at once, and the word ‘responsibility’ spans several domains, and these are said to be the reasons the debate does not easily come to rest. This piece sides with neither position. It wishes only to affirm that this is not a subject to be pronounced upon lightly, but a question to be looked upon, with respect and care, again and again.

The war ended. Yet that defeat would come to change, from its very foundations, what the existence of the emperor was. In the next installment, let us look at the new image of the emperor born under the Constitution of Japan: the birth of the symbolic emperor.