#7234 [2005-06-17 10:24:28]
Japan's Unresolved Questions of Historical Consciousness
by
kitsuno
Emperor, Shinto, Democracy:
Japan's Unresolved Questions of Historical Consciousness
by Herbert P. Bix
June 14, 2005
Japanese archaeologists and historians have long rejected the
government's claim that Japan has had 124 emperors from the mythical
Jimmu, descendant of the Sun Goddess, to the controversial Showa
Emperor Hirohito, whose pre-World War II reign brought havoc to
Asian and Japanese people. The scholars recognize that most sites of
ancient imperial tombs should be treated as objects of scientific
inquiry rather than as religious remnants of discredited State
Shinto. But bureaucrats of the Imperial Household Agency, claiming
to follow the Imperial Household Law, interpret the rules and
control the tombs. They will neither allow the tombs to be treated
as ordinary historical sites for investigation nor release copies of
documents pertaining to them or to more recent emperors. Professing
concern for the peace, calm, and privacy of emperors, but really
fearing public scrutiny of the imperial institution and
its "traditions," they continue to deny permission to excavate the
tombs.
Recently, Toike Noboru, a professor of imperial history at Den-en
Chofu University in Tokyo, invoked Japan's freedom of information
law in his effort to make the numerous imperial tumuli that dot the
Japanese countryside accessible to historical knowledge.[1] At stake
is not only the possibility of writing a more lucid account of the
origins of the Japanese people but also a less idealized history of
the modern imperial house. Blood myths of an unbroken line of
imperial succession for ages eternal" (bansei ikkei) and Japan as
a "divine land" (shinkoku) could be better understood. Indeed, the
entire field of ancient Japanese history would benefit if the oldest
tombs were excavated, and the question of the imperial family's
descent from Korea could be resolved. We might also learn more about
why keepers of the imperial secrets go to such great lengths to
conceal this strong likelihood. Even Emperor Akihito has said that
the mother of the so-called "50th emperor," Kammu, had Korean blood
and "it made him feel a certain closeness to Korea."[2]
But Akihito has never said anything that could offer support to
scholars who call for release of the historical papers of his
deceased father, Hirohito. Apparently the Japanese public lacks the
right to learn more about the activities of its most important 20th
century monarch. For how else to explain the failure to mount a
movement to revise laws and regulations of the Imperial Household
Agency, which were enacted by the Diet and are, presumably, laws
like any other.
Today bold scholarly efforts to pry open the Imperial Household's
sanctuary -- its administration of graves, storehouses, archives,
and other related properties of hundreds of emperors, empresses,
dowager empresses, and imperial family members -- need to be
situated in a larger constitutional and historical context. Only
then can we see behind them the conflict between legacies of the old
and the new imperial order, and ultimately between the principles of
monarchy and democracy. Bring the virtually autonomous "symbol
monarchy" and its high-handed, secretive administrative practices
into the picture, and the tombs issue will also illuminate other
problems of historical consciousness that trouble Japan and disturb
its relations with Asian neighbors.
*
Tomb identification, restoration, and repair marked the first stage
in the construction of Japan's modern monarchy. The costly work was
begun in the early 1860s under Emperor Komei, father of the Meiji
emperor who served as the guiding light for Japan's modern
transformation. For decades the Tokugawa feudal regime had opposed
the identification of such burial sites. Only in its final crisis
years did it suddenly relent and cooperate in the project, which
continued until the Meiji Restoration. The grave of 14th century
Emperor Go-Daigo, one of the few monarchs who actually combined real
power and authority, was the first to be identified. Essentially,
the tombs and mausoleum denoted points of continuity with the
ancestors buried in them, purportedly stretching back in time to the
age of the gods. In that sense they signified exactly what Komei and
the "scholars of National Learning" most wanted to establish:
namely, the permanence of the imperial order, its connection with
the gods, and thus his own divinity.[3]
Following the revolutionary changes that began in 1868, the
resurrection of emperorship continued. More burial mounds were
identified, and this activity became part of a major oligarchic
effort to foster belief in the myth of an unbroken line of imperial
succession. Numerous caretakers and performers of funeral rites
became involved in tomb maintenance, which developed into a major
function of the Imperial Household Ministry, predecessor to the
Agency. By the time of Meiji's death in 1912, the Japanese people
had been bound, in theory, to the emperor and his divine ancestors.
But Japan's bureaucratic elites still worried about the fragility of
their new monarchy, based on hereditary male succession. Their
worries increased during the reign of Meiji's son, the chronically
ill Taisho, of whom few expected anything. Already it had been made
a crime even to say that the emperor was not a living deity. In the
1920s lese majesty laws were tightened and teachings on the national
polity [kokutai], or the meaning of the throne in Japanese life,
further systematized.
When Hirohito, the only emperor ever to be educated under the new
imperial system, ascended to the throne at the end of 1925, the
defining political principles, formalized in the Constitution
(1889), the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890), and kokutai
thought, began to be re-emphasized. But among ruling elites, fear
for the survival of the monarchy persisted.
Meanwhile the number of graves identified as "imperial" kept on
increasing. When Japanese soldiers started dying in Manchuria during
the early 1930s, Yasukuni Shrine, charged with commemorating their
spirits and mobilizing the nation for war, took on new importance;
so too did the emperor's dispatch of emissaries to the grave sites
of his imperial ancestors, but especially to Ise Jingu, shrine for
the spirit of the Sun Goddess, and to Yasukuni.
*
After Japan's defeat in 1945, U.S. officials, with the active
cooperation of Japan's old guard "moderates," reformed and
constitutionally preserved the monarchy, for without constitutional
support it might not have lasted. Unwisely, they kept Hirohito on
the throne. They did, however, transform the emperor into a vague,
ill-defined "symbol" bereft of political power, but left undecided
the question of whether he is the head of state. They also abolished
State Shinto, formally disestablished but did not abolish Yasukuni
Shrine, and wrote a rigorous separation of politics and religion
into the Constitution. Because U.S. occupation officials treated
postwar Yasukuni the same way they treated Hirohito -- keeping him
on the throne and indulgently shielding him from the Tokyo War
Crimes Trial -- the shrine was eventually able to restore its
authority and resume its close connection with the monarchy.
Hirohito paid his first post-occupation visit to Yasukuni in 1952,
his last in 1975. Three years after that final visit, the name-list
of the newly enshrined martyrs arrived at the Imperial Household
Agency. Hirohito learned that fourteen A-Class war criminals,
including former Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuke, an individual who
had not died in the war and whom he blamed for his alliance with
Nazi Germany, had been secretly enshrined. His visits to Yasukuni
abruptly ended, but he continued to send imperial family members to
attend the shrine's spring and autumn rites, a practice that
continues to this day. Akihito has never visited Yasukuni.[4]
For four straight decades, from the mid-1950s through the late
1980s, Japan's economy had grown, holding in check the undemocratic
tendencies of its polity. During that time, Yasukuni, together with
the Central Association of Shinto Shrines, its main support
organization, repeatedly attempted to regain state protection and
revive the practice of official public visits by ministers of state.
A concurrence of crises at the end of the 1980s -- the temporary
weakening of the LDP, Hirohito's death, and the end of the cold war -
- soon altered the political atmosphere in Japan.
Nationalism is once again on the rise throughout East Asia. Japan,
having sent troops to Iraq and accommodated to post 9/11 U.S.
strategic planning, has entered a stage that could produce
irrevocable alterations in its constitutional provisions and image
as a peace state. The ruling conservative politicians have turned to
legal compulsion to force patriotic expression, and increasingly
seek to impart only one subjective meaning to it, which all must
embrace. Singing the national anthem (kimigayo) and raising the sun
flag (hinomaru) during school entrance and graduation ceremonies are
typical examples.
Recent efforts to revise Japan's Basic Education Law also reveal
restorationist impulses that are stirring again beneath the surface
of conservative politics. The present Education Law, for example,
was enacted in 1947, nearly two years after defeat, in reaction to
Emperor Meiji's Education Rescript, which had disavowed universal
ideals and promoted militarism, loyalty, and filial piety. In the
current post-9/11 situation the two leading business federations
(Keidanren and Doyukai) and the leading political parties blame the
Education Law for the ills of society and seek to rewrite it along
with the Constitution. Rather than address real economic problems
and the dissolution of middle class social norms that lie behind the
present tribulations of Japan's school system, conservative
politicians pose as guardians of morality and rush ahead with
revision schemes.[5]
The same restorationist inclination can be seen in the way some of
Japan's elites cling to their old perceptions of the Japan-China War
and Pacific War, ignoring differences with China and Korea. The
behavior of Prime Minister Koizumi well illustrates the problem.
Koizumi follows in the footsteps of former prime minister Nakasone,
but unlike Nakasone he persists in visiting Yasukuni despite
diplomatic protests and demonstrations in China and Korea. The
postwar Yasukuni re-presents the prewar view of Japan's modern wars
and actively combats the results of the Tokyo Trials. Thus Koizumi's
visits highlight the gap in historical consciousness between Japan
and the Asian neighbors it attacked and occupied during the first
half of the twentieth century. His actions carry the danger of
jeopardizing critically important economic ties. Were it not for the
willingness of all sides to keep politics and economics separate,
their respective nationalisms could narrow and spiral out of
control. For Korea and China also remain locked into pre-World War
II images of Japan.
In Japan neo-nationalist views of the lost war have moved into the
mainstream, but public opinion remains divided over Koizumi's stand
on official visits to Yasukuni, with more than half opposing them.
At the same time, the public also strongly supports revision of the
Imperial Household Law to accommodate a future female successor to
the throne. Unfortunately, there has been no public debate, as yet,
over far more fundamental questions: What is the relationship
between the symbol monarchy and Japanese democracy in a time of
rising nationalism? Should the monarchy, predicated on gender
discrimination and inseparably connected with Yasukuni Shrine, be
removed from the Constitution? Should it even continue to exist in
the Twenty-First Century? If it should, then on what grounds, and at
what cost to the constitutional rights and freedoms of imperial
family members?[6]
Finally, if Japan is to protect its democratic institutions and
rebuild political relations with China and Korea, then public debate
over the Security Treaty with the United States must also be
reopened, and the historical legacy of that military alliance
reassessed to prevent Japan's Pentagon ties from undermining its
democratic processes. Mass movements demanding the ouster of all
U.S. bases on Japanese soil could stiffen the will of Japanese
politicians and force them to place relations with Washington on a
new foundation. For U.S. political elites seek to perpetuate Japan's
energy dependency, limit its diplomatic options, and check its
tendency to draw closer to its neighbors in an economic community
that could be of benefit to all peoples of the East Asian region.
Notes
1. See Reiji Yoshida, "New Weapon Wielded in Old Tomb Debate," The
Japan Times, June 4, 2005; Richard Lloyd Parry, "Guardians of
Japan's Forbidden Tombs Resist Bid to Dig Up Past," Times (London),
June 4, 2005.
2. Umehara Takeshi, "Nihon no dento to wa nani ka," Asahi shimbun,
eiseiban, May 17, 2005.
3. Asukai Masamichi, "Kindai tennozo no tenkai," in Asao Naohiro, et
al., eds., Iwanami koza, Nihon tsushi, kindai 2, dai 17 kan (Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten, 1994), pp. 234-35.
4. Yoshida Yutaka, "Yasukuni jinja, gokoku jinja," in Yoshida
Yutaka, Hara Takeshi, Iwanami tenno, koshitsu jiten (Iwanami Shoten,
2005), p. 324.
5. Sato Manabu, "Genba no mirai wa akenai," Asahi shimbun, eiseiban,
March 30, 2003.
6. Okudaira Yasuhiro, "Ima koso 'tennosei' sonomono ni kokuminteki
rongi o 'jotei' ronso ni igi ari," Shukan kinyobi, No. 545 (Feb. 18,
2005), pp. 12-13; Yasumaru Yoshio, "Seido sasaeru josei e fuka
kozoku no jiyu ya jinkaku keisei to wa," Asahi shimbun, eiseiban,
Feb. 16, 2005, p. 13.
HERBERT BIX, author of Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
(HarperCollins, 2000), writes on problems of war and empire. A Japan
Focus associate, he prepared this article for Japan Focus.
[Next #7529]
#7589 [2005-09-02 05:06:47]
Re: [samuraihistory] already posted question....
by
eriel666
I have to thank you again and again!You are so nice Gillian..
just a question...
do you think it is possible to make a research of about 50-60 pages about Takasugi Shinsaku even if those books concern other main charachters?
Cheers
Daniele
Gillian Rubinstein <
gillian@...> wrote:
>Hi Daniele,
This has often been discussed before but I'll give you some names
again:
Choshu in the Meiji Restoration by Albert Craig is excellent. First
published in 1961 it was reissued by Lexington Books in 2000. Plenty
of info on Yoshida Shoin and his pupils. Analysis of the clan structure
and the factors that made Choshu the main clan to challenge the
bakufu.
There is a Yoshida Shoin society in Yamaguchi prefecture which issues
information about him in English and Japanese and if you want it I will
look out their email address.
Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration by Marius B Jensen, also
first published in 1961 (when the Meiji Restoration and bakumatsu
history were hot topics among US historians) and resissued in 1994 by
Columbia U.P. A very good historical biography. Ryoma's life was
dramatic and romantic, he wrote very good letters and died by
assassination too young. What a hero!
Incidentally it's the 170th year anniversary of Ryoma's birth and there
has just been a big exhibition on his life and times in Kyoto. A friend of
mine went to see it and is sending me the catalog.
The Making of Modern Japan (Jansen again: Harvard UP) gives a good
overview of the bakumatsu as well as the Tokugawa state, with some
fascinating illustrations.
Cheers,
Gillian
>
>
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