When ordinary Japanese were asked directly whether they wished to retain the emperor and the imperial institution, an overwhelming majority answered affirmatively. Initially, most were thunderstruck simply at being asked, for the question itself (not to speak of a negative response) would have been treasonous prior to October 1945. Subsequent polls continued to indicate strong support for retaining the throne, but this was misleading if interpreted—pace Fellers—as revealing widespread enthusiasm or deep awe and veneration comparable to that of the war years. In a curious way, the emperor’s surrender broadcast punctured emperor worship. When the holy war ended, so also did the worship of its high priest and erstwhile “manifest deity.” In place of this, to judge from police reports and other impressionistic evidence of the times, a great many people came to regard the throne as if they were just spectators to its fate.
Put in Japanese terms, the emperor worship that so mesmerized Fellers and other Western analysts appeared to have been in large part tatemae, a facade. Once defeat came home and the military state collapsed, the honne or true sentiment of ordinary Japanese revealed itself to be closer to mild attachment, resignation, even indifference where the imperial system and the vaunted national polity were concerned. This detachment emerged in secret reports prepared in the Home Ministry during and immediately after the war. Police files prior to the surrender revealed mounting concern that incidents of lese majesty were increasing as the situation deteriorated. Even children, it was suggested, were becoming the bearers of incipient sedition. In one incident, the police apprehended a youngster who had cut a photograph of the emperor out of the newspaper and hung it from his neck in imitation of the boxes containing ashes of the war dead. Another nervous entry in the police dossiers, recorded shortly after the air raids over Tokyo began, noted that little children were blithely singing a jingle anticipating the imperial palace burning down.1
These presentiments were unnerving not simply in and of themselves, but also because the conservative elites were aware that history was not on their side. The Japanese had discarded their feudal shogunate and the samurai-led social structure on which it rested in the mid-nineteenth century, cast them off like worn-out garments after almost eight centuries of exalted existence. They had experienced less than a century of modern imperial rule, beginning with Hirohito’s grandfather, the Meiji emperor, in 1868. No other regime in their history, no other leader, had ever presided over such devastation and disaster as Hirohito. No one else had opened the door to a conquering army from abroad. These were not reassuring matters to contemplate.
The cosmopolitan royalists were also aware of the high mortality rate of monarchies generally in the twentieth century. The Chinese imperial system, which was said to reflect the “mandate of heaven” and traced its origins back two millennia, had fallen in 1911. World War I witnessed the collapse of once-powerful and presumably revered imperial systems in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Turkey. While the Japanese pondered the fate of their imperial institution, the monarchy in defeated Italy hung in the balance. In June 1946, the House of Savoy, which claimed to be the oldest ruling house in Europe (and to rule “by the grace of God and the will of the people”), was repudiated in a popular referendum. Looking abroad as well as within, to the past as well as at the present situation, royalists saw sufficient reason to fear that defeat might precipitate, if not active antagonism to the throne, at least popular indifference to whatever happened to the remote figure in the imperial palace.
The thought police continued to operate for many weeks after the victors set up shop, and their internal reports for August, September, and early October gave ample indication that although fears of large-scale antagonism toward the throne had been off the mark, indifference was another matter entirely. This is not to say that the old fears were dispelled quickly and entirely. Early in September, a secret report of the Kempeitai (the military police) anticipated “ideological confusion” arising in many forms, including “popular-sovereignty ideology” and a “mercenary ideology” stimulated by Western liberalism. Police in Shiga Prefecture reported that “just before the conclusion of the war, and afterwards, the general public’s distrust and antipathy toward the military and those who govern intensified, and words and deeds against the emperor especially have tended to increase, so we are trying to control this.” A September report dealing with popular responses to Prime Minister Higashikuni’s statement that Hirohito was not responsible for the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor concluded that informed opinion was skeptical of this. People found it difficult to reconcile this picture of the emperor’s nonresponsibility with either the imperial order under which the country went to war or the then-current hoopla about the emperor’s crucial role in the decision to end hostilities.2
The voluminous police reports also itemized rumors about the emperor. He had died of anxiety after delivering the surrender broadcast. He had taken to bed with a facial tic. He had committed suicide. There were reports of his abdication, some replete with detail. As the person responsible for the war, he had stepped down in favor of the young crown prince, Akihito, who had already gone to the United States to study. In his absence, Hirohito’s brother Prince Chichibu was serving as regent. A gallows was being erected in front of the imperial palace, obviously intended for the emperor. More striking yet, in the vast majority of surveys of popular sentiment the emperor was invisible, a non-presence. There was no indication that ordinary people were giving him much thought. If they did, it was with the casualness of bystanders. A gallows in front of the imperial palace? What next?3
Although the police reports expressed concern about widespread “grave distrust, frustration, and antipathy toward military and civilian leaders,” the emperor was in fact only rarely included in such denunciations. Even Socialists and Communists displayed restraint, not to mention respect, when it came to the sovereign.4 To royalists obsessed with preserving the “national polity,” the situation was thus simultaneously hopeful and ominous. Popular “hatred of the military” (another police-dossier phrase) made it easy and natural to do precisely what Fellers and his aides advocated: drive a wedge between the emperor and the “gangster militarists.” At the same time, the swift descent of parts of the populace into greed, antisocial behavior, and fatalism suggested that the Japanese really might be thoroughly “situational” in their allegiances. Even honest homeless people had moved into shrines and temples and were said to be hanging diapers in the holiest sanctuaries.5 Although they may not have been about to repudiate the throne, anyone inclined to paranoia might see precious little sacred ground left.
Some field-level American analysts offered similar appraisals of the situation. In mid-December 1945, an intelligence unit in metropolitan Tokyo came to this conclusion: “With regard to the Emperor system, it is the opinion of observers especially as far as the middle classes are concerned that the Allies are unduly apprehensive of the effect on the Japanese if the Emperor were removed. It is claimed that at the most there might be demonstrations, particularly in the rural districts, but they would soon pass. People are more concerned with food and housing problems than with the fate of the Emperor.” On December 29, two days before the emperor’s “declaration of humanity,” the same unit reported that “informed sources claim that many people have reached a state where it is almost immaterial to them whether the Emperor is retained or not.” Four days after the New Year’s Day rescript, they observed that “generally the people are grasping the idea that the Emperor is simply a human being. Reports are being received that the better educated younger generation are not regarding him with the same degree of dignity as formerly, and that he has even become the ‘point’ of many jokes in the past three months.” Shortly after this, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey conducted a survey asking Japanese what their feelings had been when they heard Japan had given up in the war. In a striking demonstration of the extent to which ordinary people had become bystanders where the emperor was concerned, only 4 percent checked off “worry about Emperor, shame for Emperor, sorrow for him.”6
Jokes about the emperor and flippancy in speaking of him were another small sign that awe toward the sovereign was not so great as the royalists or Fellers and MacArthur insisted. After the famous photograph of the general and the emperor appeared, Hirohito even emerged as the butt of the most salacious riddle of the occupation period. This rested on a hitherto unmentionable pun: the fact that the imperial “We”—pronounced chin—was a homonym to a slang word for penis (or “prick”). Why was General MacArthur the belly button (heso) of Japan? Because, the rude joke went, he was above the prick/emperor.7
Other developments at the popular level also indicated that the emperor might be less than irreplaceable. In February, for instance, SCAP’s local intelligence people reported a rumor current in the Shimonoseki area to the effect that the emperor’s ancestors came from India, and that he therefore “was not Japanese.” As a result of this “revelation,” which was said to be verifiable by records in a temple in Shimane Prefecture, “some Shimonoseki residents have expressed their preference for a Japanese president rather than an Emperor of Indian ancestry.”8
This was entertaining or unsettling depending on where one stood, as was true also of one of the more widely publicized developments of the period: the emergence of a dozen or more individuals, each of whom claimed to be the legitimate heir to the throne or a genuine descendent or incarnation of the sun goddess Amaterasu. Contemplating this parade of imperial pretenders and daughters of heaven became one of the small amusements by which people lightened the hardships of these times, and they had a motley assortment of would-be royals and goddesses to contemplate. “Emperor Sakamoto” surfaced in Okayama, “Emperor Nagahama” in Kagoshima, “Emperor Sado” in Niigata, and “Emperor Yokokura” in Kōchi. Aichi Prefecture produced not one but two pretenders, “Emperor Tomura” and “Emperor Miura.”
The most intriguing claimant to the chrysanthemum throne first brought his case to GHQ in September 1945 and saw it emerge as a topic of public interest in January. He was a fifty-six-year-old variety-store proprietor from Nagano named Kumazawa Hiromichi, who attracted particular interest because his claim rested on a genuine genealogical dispute tracing back to the early fourteenth century, when the imperial line had split into fiercely contentious “northern” and “southern” courts. Hirohito belonged to the northern line, but there were serious grounds for arguing that the southern line—from which Kumazawa claimed descent—was the more legitimate and should have carried on the imperial tradition.
The fact that three of Kumazawa Hiromichi’s relatives each soon claimed that he was the true family head gave this challenge added zest, and the very durability of the story in the media seemed to reveal one more way in which Hirohito’s authority was eroding. Kumazawa Hiromichi toured the country, gathering a small number of supporters and a considerable amount of curiosity. His celebrity status, coupled with his spirited public statements, certainly suggested that some Japanese, at least, were less enamored of the current occupant of the throne than were the victors ensconced in the Daiichi Building. “I consider Hirohito a war criminal,” the pretender was quoted as saying—to which he immediately added (whether as shrewd politician or true believer is unclear): “MacArthur is heaven’s messenger to Japan.” Among other things, Kumazawa’s claim cast serious doubt on the vaunted ideology of bansei ikkei (“ten thousand generations in a single line”) by which the modern imperial institution claimed unbroken descent from time immemorial.9
This myth of an unbroken imperial line tracing back to the sun goddess—around which many of the emperor’s unique sacerdotal activities revolved—was soon challenged at the grass-roots in other ways. The directive disestablishing Shinto as the state religion opened the door to a resurgence of popular religions. Some that had been repressed under the prewar Peace Preservation Law, often on the specific grounds of lese majesty, reemerged as vigorous centers of spiritual attraction. Sōka Kyōiku Gakkai was reestablished as Sōka Gakkai, Ōmotokyō as Aizenen, Tenri Hondo as Honmichi. In one form or another, various Shinto-affiliated organizations that had been marginalized also resumed independent activity, among them Risshō Kōseikai (which split off from the prewar Reiyūkai) and Seichō no Ie.
Dynamic as many of these revived religions were, they paled in terms of immediate media appeal before two postwar religions founded by women who claimed special connection to the sun goddess and promised their devotees this-worldly benefits. The Jiu religion was established by Nagaoka Yoshiko, who called herself Jikōson, claimed to be the reincarnation of Amaterasu, and predicted that a series of natural calamities would occur to correct a world in disarray. Jikōson tapped a traditional strain of “world renewing” millenialism and numbered among her devotees Futabayama, a near legendary former sumo grand champion, and Go Seigen, a celebrated master of the board game go. Her new religion became a journalist’s delight in 1947 when the police raided its facilities on the grounds that illegal foodstuffs were stored there and were tossed around by Futabayama.
The second of these new religions, called Amaterasu Kōtai Jingūkyō (Religion of the Great Shrine of Amaterasu), was founded three days before the war ended by Kitamura Sayo, a housewife in a farming family in Yamaguchi prefecture. Claiming that something had entered her body in 1944 and placed her in receipt of direct messages from the sun goddess, Kitayama preached through songs and promoted an ecstatic “selfless dance.” She spoke harshly of all authorities including the emperor, and attracted upward of three hundred thousand followers within a few years.10
In Japanese parlance, this efflorescence of postsurrender religions eventually became known as “the rush hour of the gods.” The royalists continued to insist that the throne was the unshakable center of the national belief system, but countless numbers of people were finding spiritual solace elsewhere.
The campaign to dress Emperor Hirohito in new clothes and turn him into a symbol of peace and democracy was conducted on several fronts. Immense care was taken to exempt him from indictment in the impending showcase war-crimes trials in Tokyo. Although his formal exoneration from war responsibility did not actually come until June 1946, well before that date the emperor cast aside his commander-in-chief’s uniform, donned a Western suit, and embarked on a series of tours that eventually would take him to almost every prefecture in the country. Suggestions that the emperor abdicate, some of them emanating from court circles, were quickly suppressed. The emperor’s constitutional status was drastically revised, depriving him of formal power; and in a single deft declaration, he managed to satisfy many of his foreign critics that he no longer claimed divinity.11
The last of these acts was accomplished in the form of a “Rescript to Promote the National Destiny” printed in newspapers nationwide on New Year’s Day. This was the emperor’s first formal address to his subjects since August 15, but its greatest impact was among foreigners. Popularly known as his “declaration of humanity” (ningen sengen), it was immediately hailed by the Americans and the British as the emperor’s “renunciation of divinity,” a clear sign that he had sincerely repudiated the pretense to divine descent that had constituted the core of prewar emperor worship and ultranationalism.12
The idea for the declaration came not from among the emperor’s top-level advisors or SCAP’s high planners, as might have been expected, but from an expatriate British aesthete and a middle-level American officer. As a communication in the Japanese language, moreover, it fell considerably short of being the sweeping “renunciation of divinity” Westerners wishfully imagined it to be. Through the use of esoteric language, Emperor Hirohito adroitly managed to descend only partway from heaven. Largely thanks to his personal intervention in the drafting process, the rescript seized the initiative for the throne by identifying it with a “democracy” rooted neither in the reformist policies of the victors nor in popular initiatives from below, but in governmental pronouncements dating back to the beginning of the reign of Hirohito’s grandfather, the Meiji emperor. The New Year’s Day declaration offered an excellent preview of what a many-colored raiment the emperor’s new clothes would prove to be. How he would be seen depended largely on the eye of the beholder.
To Westerners, Christians in particular, the notion of “emperor worship” was blasphemous. To speak of the emperor as the Son of Heaven, as he was commonly termed in English, seemed perilously close to equating him with Christ, the Son of God. Americans devoted a great deal of attention to this issue. The prolific missionary writer Willis Lamott discussed the need for the emperor to renounce his divinity as early as 1944, in his popular book Nippon: The Crime and Punishment of Japan. Analysts in the U.S. Office of War Information came to a similar conclusion before the war ended. Experts consulted in a Columbia University poll likewise concluded that “emperor worship” somehow had to be eliminated. In November 1945, Otis Cary, a young Japanese-speaking officer with a missionary background in the country, met the emperor’s brother Prince Takamatsu on a social visit and boldly offered his personal suggestion that the emperor publicly deny he was a god. In mid-December, another young specialist from a missionary family prepared a memorandum in the State Department devoted to this same theme. Edwin O. Reischauer, later a distinguished Japan scholar and ambassador to Japan, recommended that the supreme commander “should exert every effort to influence the emperor voluntarily to demonstrate by word and deed to his people that he is an ordinary human being not different from other Japanese or from foreigners, that he himself does not believe in the divine origin of the imperial line or the mystical superiority of Japan over other lands, and that there is no such thing as the ‘imperial will’ as distinct from government policy.”13
Issues of church and state, sacredness and authority, were in the air in other ways as well. SCAP’s directive prohibiting the propagation of Shinto as a state religion referred explicitly to “the perversion of Shinto theory and beliefs into militaristic and ultra-nationalistic propaganda designed to delude the Japanese people and lead them into wars of aggression.” Such pernicious ideology included the belief that “because of ancestry, descent, or special origin” the emperor was superior to the heads of other states, just as the people of Japan were superior to the people of other lands.14 Although the Shinto directive struck at the heart of ultranationalistic emperor ideology, it provoked no criticism—and indeed, no great interest—among the populace. Court circles naturally were more keenly attentive to its implications. On December 22, the emperor and a small number of intimate associates listened to a presentation by a Japanese scholar who informed them that using this-worldly words to try to talk about the “other world,” as the directive did, was like “cutting smoke with scissors.” This helped to persuade the emperor that issuing a statement defusing the question of imperial divinity would be useful for foreign consumption.15
A small group of individuals had already been at work for weeks on such a statement, a project that had its beginnings in a casual conversation between Lieutenant Colonel Harold Henderson, an American special adviser to the Civil Intelligence and Education (CI&E) section, and Dr. Reginald H. Blyth, a British citizen. Both men were Japan specialists with a scholarly interest in literature and culture. Henderson, born in 1889, had lived in Japan in the 1930s, studying its language and art. He had taught Japanese at Columbia University, published a well-regarded introduction to haiku poetry (The Bamboo Broom), administered a Japanese language program for the government in the war years, and participated in the preparation of propaganda leaflets urging Japanese soldiers to surrender in the New Guinea and Philippine campaigns.
Nine years younger, Blyth had spent two years in prison as a conscientious objector during World War I. He first became involved with things Japanese in 1926, when he took a teaching position at the Japanese colonial university in Seoul, Korea. Fluent in Japanese, he had divorced his British wife and married a Japanese woman, published a highly original comparative literary study (Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics), and spent the war years in detention in Japan. In his 1941 book, Blyth had referred to Henderson’s haiku anthology as “a little masterpiece.” The two men obviously had a great deal in common. In October, Blyth appeared at CI&E to explore the possibility of working as an interpreter or translator. Soon, however, he found a more interesting niche as a teacher at Tokyo’s prestigious Gakushūin, or Peers’ School, and also as a liaison between court circles and GHQ.16
Japanese officials relied heavily on informal contacts with GHQ personnel to ascertain which way the occupation winds were blowing. This was as true for the imperial household as it was for other agencies and ministries, and CI&E, which dealt with the democratization of ideology and ideas, was a major focus of the court’s intelligence gathering and lobbying. Sometimes the line between exchanging views and obtaining American support through lavish entertainment and valuable presents became blurred. Much of this interaction was aboveboard, however, and no individual proved more valuable to court circles in this capacity than Blyth.17
It was Blyth’s practice to visit CI&E once or twice a week, always driven in a government car. Henderson was one of Blyth’s regular contacts, and apparently unwittingly initiated a fateful conversation late in November, when he shared his thoughts concerning the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education, which had been turned into a prop of emperor-centered militarism in the 1930s. Before peace and democracy could grow, he observed, it was necessary to eliminate false notions of national superiority and imperial divinity. Perhaps, he mused, this could be accomplished by a new imperial rescript.
The following week, Blyth returned to CI&E with the unexpected announcement that he had conveyed this proposal to his contacts and had received word that the emperor was anxious to comply. These contacts, however, desired further advice on exactly what it might be appropriate to say. Brigadier General Ken R. Dyke, the head of CI&E, was absent at the time, and at Blyth’s insistence Henderson agreed to draft a sample statement himself. This he did during his lunch break in his room at the Daiichi Hotel—lying on a bed with a pad and pencil imagining that he was the emperor of Japan renouncing his divinity. There were no witnesses to this creative moment, but the wonderful American presumption and casualness of it all rings true.
Henderson and Blyth both regarded this hasty lunch-break text as an entirely unofficial suggestion. To Henderson’s astonishment, however, Blyth returned a day or two later with both a “silly” request and a bombshell. First, at the request of the head of the Imperial Household Ministry, Henderson and Blyth burned Henderson’s draft. Then Blyth produced a draft of his own, which followed Henderson’s quite closely on key points, and asked Henderson to show this draft to his superiors. Henderson took it to General Dyke, who immediately brought it to MacArthur. Both generals expressed surprise and pleasure that court officials were contemplating such a statement, and Blyth hastened back to convey their favorable response to his contacts. For all practical purposes, Henderson and Blyth had become the emperor’s ghost writers—but a great deal more was to come.18
Blyth’s draft was translated into plain vernacular Japanese by his Peers’ School contacts, and this became the basis for secret Japanese deliberations on an imperial “declaration of humanity.” Until the end of the year, when the entire cabinet was convened to comment on the proposed rescript, no more than a dozen people, ranging from the head of the Peers’ School to the emperor himself, were involved. Their sense of secrecy, prompted by fear of violent ultranationalistic protests, was acute. At one point, in a moment even sillier than the burning of the Henderson memo, then—foreign minister Yoshida Shigeru clandestinely received a copy of the working draft of the declaration in the men’s room reserved for members of the cabinet. No one seems to have questioned the appropriateness of such a locale for an exchange involving the emperor’s divinity.19
The imperial rescript released on January 1 was a distinctly Japanized rendering of the Blyth draft. It retained the essence of what Henderson and Blyth had proposed, but in a submerged, sublimated, adroitly altered form. The subtlety of the final statement becomes apparent when it is set against initial versions based on the Blyth draft. Blyth’s text began with hopes for “a new world with new ideals, with Humanity above nationality as the Great Goal.” In its second paragraph, it renounced the emperor’s divinity in a passage apparently taken almost verbatim from Henderson’s draft. “The ties between us and the nation,” it stated, “do not depend only upon myths and legends” and “do not depend at all upon the mistaken idea that the Japanese are of divine descent, superior to other peoples, and destined to rule them. They are the bond of trust, of affection, forged by centuries of devotion and love.”
In its third paragraph, Blyth’s draft emphasized that loyalty within family and nation “always has been the great characteristic of our nation in all our religious and political belief.” It then went on, “Just as our loyalty to the nation has been greater than that to the family, so let our loyalty to humanity surpass our loyalty to the nation.” A fourth paragraph acknowledged present-day hardships and looked forward to Japan’s reconstruction as a free nation that would make a “unique contribution to the happiness and welfare of mankind.” In conclusion, Blyth’s text stated unequivocally that “His Majesty disavows entirely any deification or mythologizing of his own Person.”20
It is easy to see why this text by the two foreigners was received positively in court circles. The affirmation of “centuries of devotion and love” existing between sovereign and subjects differed scarcely at all from imperial myths popularized in the 1930s. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, ordinary Japanese had little or no awareness of the throne, and the imperial house was comparably indifferent to, if not utterly contemptuous of, ordinary people. Blyth’s praise of loyalty as the supreme and eternal Japanese virtue was similarly fallacious historically, although it is easy to see why he chose to emphasize loyalty as a means of calling for a “loyalty to humanity” that would transcend mere nationalism.
While court circles could hardly have hoped for a more encouraging signal of SCAP’s good will at a time when the emperor’s status was officially still undecided, this did not prevent them from revising the Blyth draft in substantial ways. The final version retained Blyth’s references to traditional loyalty to family and nation and went on to speak of the necessity of extending this spirit to a “love of mankind.” In this way, much of the sentiment of the English text was retained, but with a subtle reservation. Loyalty to the nation was no longer explicitly subordinated to an obligation to humanity.
In addition, the draft was revised to warn against falling prey to what had only recently been called “dangerous thought” but now went under the rubric of “confusion of thought” (shisō konran). The emperor came down strongly on this. “The protracted war having ended in defeat, our people are liable to become restive or to fall into despondency. The extremist tendencies appear to be gradually spreading, and the sense of morality is markedly losing its hold on the people. In effect, there are signs of confusion of thought, and the existing situation causes me deep concern.” This was not in the Blyth draft, but it was uppermost in the minds of the royalists.
In the most dramatic revision, the New Year’s Day rescript opened by quoting in its entirety the five-article “Charter Oath” proclaimed by the youthful Meiji emperor at the beginning of his reign in 1868. This, Meiji’s grandson now declared, would be the basis for discarding “old abuses” and creating a new Japan devoted to the pursuit of peace and the attainment of an enriched culture. (There was no mention of democracy in the rescript.) For many conservatives, this was the very heart and soul of the New Year’s Day proclamation. The Charter Oath would become a touchstone, a talisman, a comforting historical and psychological anchor by which they could claim that the “new Japan” was firmly grounded in the past.21
It was at the emperor’s personal instigation that the entire focus of the statement was shifted from “renouncing divinity” to emphasizing the Meiji-era oath.22 By this simple revision he accomplished many things. He obscured the autocratic, theocratic, and imperialistic nature of the Meiji state. He gave the emerging postwar system a peculiarly Japanese (and mid-nineteenth-century) patina. He ignored (apart from a vague mention of “old abuses”) the repression and virulent emperor-centered indoctrination, rooted in his grandfather’s time, that had characterized his own reign. He aligned himself publicly with the “moderates” and “old liberals” of the school represented by Shidehara, Shigemitsu, and Yoshida (just as he had once publicly aligned himself with the militarists). Most important, he undercut the ostensible purpose of the rescript, the renunciation of divinity. In the process, the emperor made himself a champion of the Charter Oath—which, for the preceding two decades of his reign, he had rarely mentioned and certainly never had exalted as a touchstone of the national polity.
In the emperor’s later words, this affirmation of the ideals of the Charter Oath was the “primary object” of his declaration, and the issue of divinity only a “secondary matter.” His emphasis was not only endorsed but made stronger by MacArthur. As Hirohito told the story, it was his intention simply to begin the rescript by alluding to the oath, which was familiar to all educated Japanese. When MacArthur was shown a draft to this effect, however, Hirohito was informed that the general had not only praised the Meiji emperor (fourteen years old when the oath was promulgated) for “having done such a splendid thing,” but also urged that the five-article oath be reproduced in its entirety.23
With the Charter Oath now at the beginning of the rescript, the “declaration of humanity” was buried in the text. With the emperor’s intimate involvement, the text was also reworked to eliminate language in the early vernacular translation of the Blyth draft that referred unequivocally to the “deification” (shinkakuka) of the emperor as well as language that clearly repudiated the belief that both the emperor and the Japanese people were “descendants of the deities” (kami no shison in the initial draft, kami no sue in interim drafts). The formerly key paragraph was, in the final statement, tucked three-quarters of the way through and read as follows in the official English version:
I stand by my people. I am ever ready to share in their joys and sorrows. The ties between me and my people have always been formed by mutual trust and affection. They do not depend upon mere legends or myths. Nor are they predicated on the false conception that the Emperor is divine, and that the Japanese are superior to other races and destined to rule the world.
The emperor minimized the importance of this “renunciation of divinity” because, he said, it essentially amounted to little more than a semantic game necessary to mollify the Westerners. He was never a “god” in the Western sense of omnipotence and omniscience, he argued when the issue arose late in 1945, nor was he ever a kami or “deity” as Japanese understood this admittedly ambiguous concept. Yet he had certainly never before taken issue with being treated as divine. Tailors never touched his august body, for example, nor did ungloved physicians or anyone else except, presumably, his consort. He had literally been a man devoid of ordinary human contact. Virtually every daily act had signaled his transcendence.
Typically, the emperor now chose to discuss this with his advisers only in the most oblique of ways. He turned to second-hand anecdotes, especially the case of an early seventeenth-century emperor, Go-Mizunoo. It was a simple, bordering on simplistic, tale he had heard from the scholar who offered him advice on the Shinto directive. Go-Mizunoo contracted chicken pox, but as a reigning “manifest deity” (akitsumikami) he was not permitted to be treated with moxibustion, a popular remedy that involved cauterizing the skin with tiny points of burning substance; and so he abdicated. (One of many comparable anecdotes in the imperial canon involved an emperor who abdicated so that he could indulge his taste for soba, or buckwheat noodles, instead of subsisting primarily on the “sacred” white rice ruling monarchs were required to eat.) Hirohito apparently repeated the Go-Mizunoo story to both Prime Minister Shidehara and Education Minister Maeda Tamon in justifying his endorsement of the Henderson-Blyth initiative. It was appropriate, he opined, to put such absurdities to rest.24
What all this meant was, of course, more complicated than poxes and noodles. In practical terms, however, the issue was not terribly arcane. The emperor was willing to deny that he had ever been a “god” in the Western sense or even in the more ambiguous Japanese sense, but he was unwilling to deny that he was a descendent of the sun goddess as the ancient eighth-century mytho-histories had set forth, as the Meiji emperor’s own constitution had proclaimed, as the entire cycle of rituals he performed as a Shinto high priest had indicated, and as twentieth-century ideologues had reiterated ad nauseam.25
This issue came to a head two days before the New Year’s Day declaration had to be submitted to the press. In addition to recommending inclusion of the full text of the Charter Oath, MacArthur made a single, precise editorial change in the English-language draft shown him, which contained reference to “the mistaken idea that the Japanese are of divine descent.” The reference here, the supreme commander said, should be not to “the Japanese” but to “the emperor.” Now, at virtually zero hour, those around the emperor had to consider the vocabulary by which this should be expressed. More cutting smoke with scissors, as it turned out, was required.
To this point, revisions of the Blyth draft had retained rather straightforward language denying that the emperor and Japanese were “descendants of the gods” (kami no shison; kami no sue). To Kinoshita Michio, the emperor’s vice chamberlain, however, this was intolerable. On December 29, he persuaded the emperor that, although it might be acceptable to deny that the people were descendants of the kami, it was absolutely unacceptable to say that imperial descent from these deities was a “false conception.” To get around this, he proposed that they resort to more esoteric language and deny that the emperor was a “manifest deity” or “kami in human form” (akitsumikami). The emperor agreed wholeheartedly to this revision.
The more literal “descendant of the gods” language that had survived earlier drafts was now deleted. The final version simply denied that the Japanese were “superior” to other peoples, or that the emperor was an akitsumikami, or manifest deity. Akitsumikami was not an entirely obscure term, but neither was it an everyday word. It was certainly more esoteric than the plain word “divine” that was used in the official English translation. Wartime ideologues had used this archaic compound (the three ideographs literally mean “visible exalted deity,” and the phonetic reading is totally idiosyncratic) to deify the emperor, but even well-educated people had difficulty identifying the term when confronted with it in writing, or explaining it if asked to do so.
Kinoshita’s lively diary, for example, contains an indignant entry in which Foreign Minister Yoshida is dismissed as an imbecile for failing to know what akitsumikami meant. The vice chamberlain also observed with dismay that when the near-final version of the rescript was submitted to the cabinet on December 30, a phonetic reading (furigana) was written alongside the ideographs for akitsumikami so that the ministers would be able to grasp the reference. In Japanese, in short, the “renunciation of divinity” was far more obscure than was apparent in the official translation—or than had been the case in earlier drafts. Neither on this occasion, nor later, did the emperor unequivocally repudiate his alleged descent from the gods. He could not do so, for his entire universe rested on this mythological genealogy.26
The emperor did not broadcast the New Year’s Day rescript. It appeared in the press accompanied by a commentary by Prime Minister Shidehara. While the text was intelligible to educated readers, the final version had typically been worked over by a scholar of classical language and was couched in the stiff and formal prose reserved for imperial pronouncements. The prime minister’s gloss, on the other hand, was in the vernacular and, following the usual practice, was regarded as the official interpretation of the emperor’s words. It, too, was an example of cutting smoke with scissors, for the prime minister dwelled exclusively on the prior existence of democracy in Meiji Japan. “Upholding the imperial message,” he concluded, “we can construct a new nation of thoroughgoing democracy, pacifism, and rationalism, and thus hope to ease the Emperor’s mind.” His emphasis was a familiar one: until now, the people had failed to live up to the sovereign’s expectations. The prime minister did not make even passing reference to the emperor’s divinity or renunciation thereof.27
American responses to the January I declaration were extremely positive. The New York Times editorialized that with this rescript Emperor Hirohito “made himself one of the great reformers in Japanese history” (and, in the process, dealt the “jungle religion” of Shinto “a blow from which it can scarcely recover”). General MacArthur was equally extravagant. He informed the world that by this declaration the emperor “undertakes a leading part in the democratization of his people. He squarely takes his stand for the future along liberal lines.” In a single stroke, the supreme commander had identified Hirohito as a leader of democratization, and indicated that he would continue to be so “for the future.”28
Privately, some loyal subjects who had sincerely believed what they were told during the war were shocked by the emperor’s new clothes and felt betrayed. There was not, however, a single instance of the right-wing violence that the drafters had feared. Education Minister Maeda was astonished to personally hear only one complaint, from an elderly man who came to see him.29 By and large, most people seemed to take the “declaration of humanity” in stride as a matter of less than momentous interest. The media were now free to comment on the sovereign’s personality in a manner hitherto impermissible, and in this way Hirohito did indeed become accessible to the public in more intimate and “human” ways.
Many readers probably found more meaning in the emperor’s “New Year poem” than they did in his New Year’s Day rescript. In heralding the advent of each new year, the court customarily assigned a thematic topic on which members of the imperial household as well as ordinary people would compose thirty-one-syllable waka, with commoners invited to submit their verses for evaluation by experts assembled by the court. Early in the new year, the best poems would be published alongside waka by the emperor and other eminent figures—a high honor indeed for an amateur poet. In October of that year of bitter defeat, it was announced that the theme for the coming year’s poem would be “snow on the pine,” a classic image of beautiful endurance. The emperor’s own poem, widely disseminated in the media on January 22, was as follows:
Courageous pine—
enduring the snow
that is piling up,
color unchanging.
Let people be like this.30
This was an exquisite expression of defiance, and few who read it could have missed its meaning. When all was said and done, the sovereign had not changed his color. Neither should his subjects.31