JAPAN: Back to the Shogunate?

Back to the Shogunate

Greatest phrasemaker in Japan is Premier Prince Fumimaro Konoye, who invented Japan’s vague rationalization for the war in China, “New Order in East Asia.” A few months ago he minted another: shintaisei, “new structure.”

Every tongue in Japan rolled this Konoyism with great relish, though no one knew precisely what it meant. It was variously used as a sales slogan, an expletive, a philosophic concept, even as an excuse for nonpayment of debts. But the most common interpretation — the one on which Prince Konoye rode to the Premiership in July — was as a promise of a one-party political system, vaguely like that of Germany or Italy. Last week, speaking before the Preparatory Com mittee for the New National Structure, Prince Konoye dispelled that illusion and made one thing very clear: he intends to bring about a peaceful revolution — on strictly Japanese terms.

From the days of Japan’s first Emperor, Jimmu (one of whose female descendants had the wonderfully prescient name Jingo), the Imperial Throne has had its ups and its downs. At present the position of the Son of the Sun is at highest noon. Richer than all the Caesars, robed in 2,000 years of resplendent (if slightly manipulated) tradition,worshiped as a God by 72,000,000 emotional people, Hirohito is the earth’s rarest vessel of authority.

But the Emperor does not rule; others rule in his name. In the past this delegation of authority has meant that the Emperor had wealth and power only of mystic sorts. For most of Japan’s modern history — from 1185 to 1868 — the real power in Japan was held by military dictators called Sei-i-tai-Shogun (“Barbarian-subduing Generalissimo”). The most astonishing degree of delegation came in the 13th Century, when a titular Emperor’s functions as a figurehead were usurped by an abdicated Emperor, while temporal power was supposedly held by a hereditary Shogun, who left actual authority to the Shogun’s hereditary adviser.

In 1868 Japan was still feudal, backward, timid abroad and slack within. A revolution in that year returned the Emperor Meiji to great prestige and broke ground for the industrial revolution which suddenly made Japan a world economic peril if not power. The last of the Shoguns, Keiki, too international-minded to keep Japan bottled in tradition, resigned and abolished the office. Japan adopted Western institutions: parliaments, premiers, political parties, elections. In recent months Japan has experienced a wave of such intense nationalism and such intense national hardship that sentiment has grown for casting out Christianity (see p. 37} and for throwing over democratic ways, reverting to something much stronger, more Japanese—i.e., the military Shogunate or something very much like it.

Paving the way for just that, Prince Konoye last week got down to specific cases on his long-promised new structure (TIME, July 22). First the Premier condemned the Nazi single-party system on the ground that it was un-Japanese. He then laid down objectives in significant phrases: “concentration and unification of the nation’s entire power … a national movement … a central organ . . .

perfection of national-defense structure.” The aim which gave the key to his purpose was to hitch Army and Government into a harness in which they would pull together. It was to be a military-dominated structure, as was the Shogunate.

But the most interesting admonition to the men who will plan Japan’s new structure was that shintaisei, whatever form it might take, should be permanent, “rendering possible the pursuance of any policy when necessity arises.” If Fumimaro Konoye was to have his way, it looked as if Cabinets might change no more in Tokyo, and the Premiership (or at least the powerful military shadow behind it) might become permanent—hereditary, like the Shogunate and like the Throne. The only man who ever dared say no point-blank to Emperor Hirohito happens to be Fumimaro Konoye. He refused the Imperial Command to form a Cabinet in 1936.