JAPAN: The God-Emperor

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As the U.S. pivoted its great war effort from Europe to the Pacific, it came face to face with a startling fact—it was waging war against a god. Its sea armada had already crushed his island outworks. Its planes were pulverizing his cities. Now its armies were preparing to invade the sacred soil of his homeland.

To the god’s worshipers this would be a sacrilege such as the desecration of a church would be to the invaders. Most Americans were unaware of the sacrilege.* To them this god looked like a somewhat toothy, somewhat bandy-legged, thin-chested, bespectacled little man. But to 70 million Japanese he was divine. He was the Emperor Hirohito.

Slowly, as they came to bloody grips with their exotic enemy, Americans were beginning to realize that to the Japanese mind (an entity utterly alien to them in culture and almost as uncontemporary with them as Neanderthal man), the Emperor Hirohito was Japan. In him was embodied the total enemy. He was the Japanese national mind with all its paradoxes—reeking savagery and sensitivity to beauty, frantic fanaticism and patient obedience to authority, brittle rituals and gross vices, habitual discipline and berserk outbursts, obsession with its divine mission and sudden obsession with worldly power.

In this sense, the war against Japan was inevitably a war against its Emperor. In this sense, the great U.S. military redeployment from West to East was aimed directly at the myth of the divine Mikado, ruling a divine nation on the warpath. Grimy U.S. soldiers and marines who were last week digging out their diehard enemy from the caverns of Okinawa and Luzon were just as surely digging out this myth from the dark corners of the Japanese mind.

Who was this man who was also a god?

The Clouds of Time. The Emperor Hirohito’s millennial origins were lost in the clouds of time. In the beginning, say the Japanese history books, Heaven & Earth were one, a primal protoplasm drifting in the void like a jellyfish on water. Then the Universe took form. On the Plain of High Heaven the first gods appeared. The Sky Father, Izanagi, stood upon the Rainbow Bridge to Earth and dipped his jeweled spear into the sea. The drops that fell, as he withdrew the blade, congealed into the Japanese archipelago.

The Sky Father purified himself by bathing in the sea that washed Japan. He washed his nose: the Storm God was born. He washed his right eye: the Moon God appeared. He washed his left eye: lo! resplendent Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, leaped into being.

Later, the Sun Goddess sent her grandson, Prince Rice-Plenty, to govern the Earth. In good time, the Sun Goddess’ great-great-grandson, Jimmu, became Japan’s first emperor. He commanded his descendants to bring all the eight corners of the universe under the one roof of Japan.

Thus, in the year 660 B.C. began the divine dynasty whose 124th scion is the Emperor Hirohito, the Magnanimous-Exalted, the Sublime Majesty, the Imperial Son of Heaven of Dai Nippon (Great Japan), in whose reign the Japanese nation was fated to attempt to carry out the Emperor Jimmu’s command.

Scion of the Ages. Hirohito was born in the lying-in chamber of Tokyo’s Aoyama Palace on April 29, 1901. Japan itself was suffering a rebirth. It was 48 years since U.S. Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry had opened the ports of the Land of the Gods to U.S. trade and western ideas. Four years hence Japan would defeat vast, backward Russia and emerge as a foremost Pacific power.

His grandfather, the reigning emperor, was the bold, shrewd Emperor Meiji, in whose name the nation had resolutely turned toward the West. Hirohito’s father was the ailing Yoshihito, who died insane.

Careful & Colorless. The gods favor obscurity, and Hirohito’s early boyhood was as obscure as a god could wish. He was brought up in imperial privacy, and rarely exposed to the eyes of his future subjects. (A memorable occasion was the day he deigned to visit the zoo.)

He is reported to have been a quiet, rather colorless, careful little boy—the kind of child who in the U.S. always eats his spinach. (Even today, though he is growing a little stout and his uniforms are rather tight in the wrong places, Hirohito is abstemious in his eating and drinking habits and a vigorous respecter of the modern gods of nutrition.)

Though slight and thin-shouldered, he practiced every sport, even wrestling. He was best at swimming. Years later he confessed: “I am not really good at any sport. In swimming, however, I rather think I can hold my own.”

Ferocious Masks. In the quiet and careful seclusion of the imperial boyhood, war and the warrior mind, like the ferocious masks of Japanese No plays, loomed always in the background.

Two of Hirohito’s earliest mentors were the war lords who had made modern Japan a power—stern General Maresuke Nogi, the victor of Port Arthur, and Admiral Heihatiro Togo, who, at Tsushima, had sunk most of Russia’s feckless fleet in one of history’s decisive naval battles.

When the future emperor was ten years old, Emperor Meiji died and General Nogi dramatized the most important element in the boy’s education—Shinto—by an act that startled the world and can scarcely have failed to impress the child.

When the aging General and his wife learned of Meiji’s death, they purified themselves by Shinto rites. Then according to the old Shinto practice of junshi (servants following masters in death), they knelt before their household shrine and with ceremonial swords committed hara-kiri by eviscerating themselves. Later, Americans, shocked and baffled when trapped Japanese soldiers blew themselves to bits with hand grenades, or Japanese civilians drowned themselves rather than surrender, might recall General Nogi’s act, with a shudder.

But to the young Hirohito it must have appeared sublime—the ultimate ritual in a national religion which teaches that war is man’s greatest glory, that unquestioning obedience is his chief purpose in life, that the utter denial of the individual is his greatest peace—a spiritual totalitarianism more primeval and more potent than anything Naziism ever dreamed of. The Way of the Gods. For 1,300 years Shinto (The Way of the Gods) was challenged and eclipsed by Buddhism as the imperial dynasty was eclipsed by the shogunate. But in 1868 it became Japan’s state religion, a cult of the dead based on ancestor worship, and resumed its interrupted task of molding the Japanese people for their divine mission of conquest.

It was Shinto that fostered Japan’s feverish nationalism. It was Shinto that inspired Article I of Japan’s constitution, which says: “The Empire of Japan shall be reigned over and governed by a line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal,” and Article III, which says: “The Emperor is sacred and inviolable.” It was Shinto that taught Japanese law students: “Subjects have no mind apart from the will of the Emperor.” Shinto taught Japanese Army privates: “Those who, with the words ‘Tenno Heika Banzai!’ (May the Emperor live forever!) on their lips, have consummated a tragic death in battle, whether they are good or whether they are bad, are thereby sanctified.”

And it was Shinto that molded the Emperor of Japan into its supreme symbol. Hirohito has seldom, if ever, deviated from its exacting practices.

The Crown Prince. In his adolescence, Hirohito was stirred by the same restlessness and curiosity about the western world that was disturbing many of his future subjects.

The elder statesmen close to the throne were men of western ideas, like astute Prince Saionji, who promoted a Japanese version of parliamentarianism and constitutional monarchy. In 1921, with their support, Crown Prince Hirohito decided to go abroad. Never before had an imperial Heir Apparent left the Land of the Gods. Shinto jingoists threatened to fling themselves in fanatic immolation under the train that bore the Crown Prince to his ship. But Hirohito was not deterred, and this 20th Century form of hara-kiri did not take place.

In Europe, then desperately trying to scramble out of the ruins and the many million graves of World War I, the shy, slack-chinned, bespectacled Prince found himself constantly teetering on the brink of sacrilege. In Paris he went shopping and discovered he needed money, which imperial etiquette forbade him to touch. Iri London’s Guildhall he got entangled in the long scroll of a speech he was reading. The audience, undisciplined by Shinto, found it hard to suppress a titter. Hirohito took a subway ride, incognito, and his entourage was horrified when a brusque Cockney conductor berated him for having no ticket.

The Crown Prince returned to Japan with several western notions. He thought that he would mix more with his subjects. He tried out the idea on a group of university students who were forewarned to dispense with ceremony. The adoring students all but mobbed the Heir Apparent.

Hirohito was more successful when he decided to marry for love. Despite the opposition of the court, he chose a young noblewoman, Princess Nagako of the Satsuma clan, which was then outside the strict circle of families eligible for imperial matches. In due time she bore him five daughters and two sons, the eldest-born being Crown Prince Akihito, now II.

The Emperor. In 1924, Hirohito became Regent. Four years later he formally ascended the throne, with all the pomp and circumstance of ancient, perhaps prehistoric, ceremony.

He donned the ritualistic orange raiment of his forebears. From Tokyo he rode in a crimson carriage to the old capital at Kyoto. There, in a confident, resonant voice, he read his imperial Rescript, announcing his ascension. Alone, save for two attendants, he appeared, once before midnight and once after, at the shrine of his ancestress the Sun Goddess and offered her a sacrifice of holy rice.

Then he buckled down, with clerklike industry, to the job of God-Emperor. As custom decreed, he chose a name for his reign. It was Showa, or Enlightened Peace. He explained his selection: “I have visited the battlefields of the World War, and in the presence of such devastation, I understand the need of concord among nations.”

This understanding did not deter him from sanctifying the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the invasion of North China in 1937, the blow at Pearl Harbor in 1941. The totalitarian forces which had shaped his state shaped his place in it. The westernized elder statesmen and their successors—men like Prince Konoye and Baron Hiranuma—were pushed into the background by swashbuckling generals and admirals, like Kenji Doihara, Hideki Tojo, Isozoku Yamamoto. Hirohito’s most intimate counselors in the Imperial Household, nobles like the Marquis Kido, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, and ex-Grand Chamberlain Kantaro Suzuki (now Premier), were denounced by chauvinistic young officers as bad influences around the throne. Some of them were murdered in the bloody mutiny of 1936.

Model Symbol. In Asia, Japan was making history whose consequences for the world are still incalculable. Through it all, Hirohito remained a model Shinto sovereign—conventional, secluded, aloof, a proper family man as well as national deity. He rose early each morning (6 or 7 a.m.), shaved himself, bowed before the little shrine of his ancestors in his copper-domed Tokyo castle, breakfasted in foreign style on coffee, bacon & eggs, shuffled through the papers on his desk. Thirteen times a year, clad in the white silk robe of high priest, he officiated at major Shinto rites. His wartime frugality set an example to all. He had his underwear thriftily mended, cut imported cigarets and wine from the palace list.

Sometimes there were quiet evenings when he turned to his favorite pastime —the study of biology, particularly the laws of Mendel, under the microscope. (When his third daughter was born and he still had no male heir, he assuaged his disappointment by collecting fungi in the palace park.)

He also composed tankas, the evocative 31-syllable poems of Japan. The theme of peace, like the threnody of frustration, haunted them. While his armies trampled on China and war clouds gathered above Europe, he wrote:

Peaceful is morning in the shrine garden.

World conditions, it is hoped, also will be peaceful.

Sometimes on his white stallion, Shira-yuki, or in his crimson Rolls-Royce, he passed in public parade across the moat around his castle. Almost always his subjects hailed him with traditional banzais and reverential bows. But in 1932 an unidentified assailant threw a bomb at the Emperor’s carriage, slightly wounding two horses of the imperial stables. Hirohito sent eight pounds of carrots to console the animals. No doubt, he pondered the words of his Grandfather Meiji, who had once escaped an anarchist conspiracy:

“Who would take the life of a god? If there is some plot against my person, it must be that I have not perfectly practiced the divine virtues. Unless something was lacking within me, none would have dared it.”

Two Viewpoints. Now, not only the life but the divinity of the Son of Heaven was being weighed in a balance of destiny beyond the control of Shinto. Discussion among the Allies, as they consider what to do with their inevitable victory over Japan, centers on Hirohito. In the process of liquidating Japanese militarism, must Hirohito, too, be liquidated? If so, how will the resultant political vacuum in Japan be filled? These are portentous questions, for the fate of 70,000,000 Japanese, like the fate of 70,000,000 Germans, might well be the key to the future of all the world.

There is still no Allied unanimity on what to do with the Emperor. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Government has made no bones about its wishes. It wants to dispose of Hirohito as Asia’s War Criminal No.1. Acting Premier T. V. Soong has publicly hoped for the Emperor’s destruction by U.S. bombers—”that would make one less embarrassing question to deal with later.” Last week the Chungking press called for Hirohito’s trial, execution and the public display of his body “on Sun Yat-sen Road near Nanking.”

Washington has been less forthright. The last Tokyo Cabinet shake-up brought into office a group of conservatives influenced by such old friends of the Emperor as Prince Konoye and Baron Hiranuma. Is a split developing between the businessmen and nobles, on the one hand, and the Armyj chiefs, on the other? If so, the split is bound to weaken Japan’s war effort. Washington does not want to heal the breach by an overt propaganda attack on the Emperor.

But once Japan is defeated militarily, what then? There are two points of view. One, to which Washington lends an attentive ear, has been best expressed by Under Secretary of State Joseph Clark Grew, who for ten years was U.S. Ambassador to Tokyo. He compares Japanese society to a hive, the Emperor to the queen bee. There comes a time when the queen is thrust out. The hive follows her to its new home. “It was not the queen which made the decision; yet, if one were to remove the queen from the swarm, the hive would disintegrate.”

The implications of this analogy are clear. The Emperor institution (in the form of Hirohito or, if he is too discredited, Crown Prince Akihito) must be retained to save the Japanese nation from disintegration. The Emperor institution must be used to prepare the way for a nonaggressive, nontotalitarian state.

The second school of thought abruptly dismisses the idea that the Emperor can ever be used to further democracy in Japan. Even a divine Rescript cannot bridge the gulf that separates western political liberalism from Shinto totalitarianism.

The system symbolized by Hirohito must be wrecked as thoroughly as Hitler’s Reich. Only utter defeat can destroy the myths of invincibility and divinity. The Allies must carry through the post-victory task of remolding the Japanese mind.

Crucial Question. Clearly, the Japanese mind does not want a change. Rumors of peace bids by Tokyo have been flooding Allied capitals. One, emanating last week from London, reported the Suzuki Government willing to disgorge all Japanese conquests except Korea; in return, there must be no Allied occupation of the main Japanese islands, and presumably no interference with the Shinto system.

The rumors found no public echo in Japan. Radio Tokyo, as defiant as ever, took full responsibility for starting the war in the East, pledged a battle alone “to smash the enemy, to avenge fallen Germany.” An emergency Cabinet meeting drafted an emergency statement: the collapse of the Nazi Reich “will not bring the slightest change” in Japan’s determination to fight to the finish. Emperor Hirohito gave the statement his divine approval.

But though the will of the Shinto mind was strong for a finish fight, time and inevitable history were stronger still. Ancient Egypt, said Elie Faure, died of her desire for immortality. In the 20th Century world, two of whose greatest powers were leagued in overwhelming military force against him, the crucial question facing Hirohito, as the divine symbol of an immortal dynasty, was: how long can an anachronism last?

*When TIME put Hirohito on its cover in 1932, the Japanese made the following request: “Let copies of the present issue lie face upward on all tables; let no object be placed upon the likeness of the Emperor.”