On February 13, General Whitney and three aides visited the official residence of the foreign minister and presented the GHQ draft to Matsumoto Jōji and Yoshida Shigeru, who were accompanied by Yoshida’s aide Shi-rasu Jirō and an official interpreter. The Japanese believed they were meeting to discuss Matsumoto’s recommendations (which had finally been submitted on February 8) and were, to say the least, taken aback when Whitney peremptorily brushed those aside. Despite the presence of an interpreter, Matsumoto, Yoshida, and Shirasu understood English well. Whitney chose his words carefully and spoke with deliberate slowness. He was also ill with influenza and running a fever that day, which might have contributed to the peculiar intensity and sharpness with which he evidently expressed himself.1
“The draft of constitutional revision, which you submitted to us the other day,” he began, “is wholly unacceptable to the Supreme Commander as a document of freedom and democracy.” He then distributed copies of the Government Section draft with the explanation that MacArthur had approved this as “embodying the principles which in his opinion the situation in Japan demands.” A detailed summary of this meeting jointly written immediately afterwards by Whitney’s three aides notes that the Japanese officials were “obviously stunned” and “the whole atmosphere at this point was charged with dramatic tenseness.”2
The Americans withdrew to the garden to leave their counterparts to read the English-language text. When Shirasu joined them outside, Whitney serenely observed, “We have been enjoying your atomic sunshine”—a comment that, in its harshness, provided a shocking reminder of who was the victor and who the vanquished. In his 1956 biography of MacArthur, Whitney recounted this episode with relish, adding that by a happy coincidence a B-29 flew overhead at precisely that moment.3
The general regarded his remark as an effective “psychological shaft” and had several more in his quiver. After Matsumoto and Yoshida had perused the document for about half an hour, the two sides came together again and Whitney let fly his next barbs. He pointed out that acceptance of the provisions of the GHQ draft offered the best possible guarantee of rendering the emperor “unassailable.” Should the government reject this position, he asserted, SCAP was prepared to bring its draft directly to the Japanese people. Although in making this assertion Whitney was exceeding his instructions, MacArthur subsequently endorsed this threat with enthusiasm. As recorded in the minutes written by the American side, Whitney added:
General MacArthur feels that this is the last opportunity for the conservative group, considered by many to be reactionary, to remain in power; that this can only be done by a sharp swing to the left; and that if you accept this Constitution you can be sure that the Supreme Commander will support your position. I cannot emphasize too strongly that the acceptance of the draft constitution is your only hope of survival, and that the Supreme Commander is determined that the people of Japan shall be free to choose between this constitution and any form of constitution which does not embody these principles.
The Japanese, who followed this without using their interpreter, did not conceal their distress. “Mr. Shirasu straightened up as if he had sat on something,” Whitney recalled. “Dr. Matsumoto sucked in his breath. Mr. Yoshida’s face was a black cloud.” As the bringers of bad tidings prepared to take their leave, Yoshida emerged from his dark cloud long enough to urge that these exchanges be kept completely secret.
Whitney offered the Japanese one straw to grasp at in the February 13 meeting. It was not essential that the GHQ draft be accepted in its entirety, he stated, although its basic principles were not negotiable. Matsumoto did grasp at this and it was several days before the hopelessness of his predicament became entirely clear to him. Privately, he initially mocked the “amateur” quality of the draft, calling attention in particular to the impracticality of GHQ’s recommendation that the Diet be made unicameral. This was, as he eventually learned, the one major matter that the Americans were willing to concede as a bargaining chip.4
Before it became absolutely clear that the government had lost all credibility in SCAP’s eyes, both Shirasu and Matsumoto made a final effort to persuade Whitney that the conservative elites did indeed share democratic ideals with the Americans. What was at issue, they argued, was simply a matter of differing approaches. As Shirasu put it in a letter to Whitney, the American way was “straight and direct,” whereas their approach was “roundabout, twisted and narrow.” He even enclosed a sketch, representing the Japanese route between starting point and object as a meandering road through the mountains, while the Americans went directly to the same goal as if by airplane. Whitney, unmoved by this cultural cartography, wrote back to Shirasu that the supreme commander would permit minor changes in the draft, but none “either in principle or basic form.”5
Matsumoto argued that tyranny and misrule result when constitutions do not accord with national circumstances (the tyranny and misrule of Japan’s recent decades apparently did not give him pause on this score). Unbelievably, even when faced with GHQ’s ultimatum, he continued to claim that the Japanese people needed a long, slow, careful political tutelage in the ways of democracy, and that his committee’s draft had to be understood in this light. “Metaphorically speaking,” he wrote Whitney, his draft was “a tablet sugar-coated for the benefit of the masses.” Anything more radical would shock the moderates, provoke the extremists, and precipitate internal upheaval.6
This was a drearily familiar refrain to Government Section’s personnel. No matter what the Americans proposed in the way of reform, the conservatives invariably responded that it would provoke “chaos, confusion, and communism.” They evoked the Red peril so often, Kades later observed, that “we were vaccinated against the threat of communism.” Even the staunch Republican Whitney expressed impatience with this doomsday litany. To Matsumoto, he simply conveyed word that if the cabinet did not act on this matter within forty-eight hours, SCAP would proceed, as promised, to bring its draft directly before the people.7 This was evidently the excruciating moment when Matsumoto finally realized that, although others might have lost the war, he had just lost the Meiji Constitution.
It had been GHQ’s expectation that the meeting of February 13 would precipitate immediate cabinet deliberations. To facilitate this, Whitney and his aides had even handed over fifteen copies of the draft proposal to be distributed as Matsumoto and Yoshida deemed appropriate. The government, however, did not address critical issues in the decisive, collective manner the Americans considered natural. The cabinet was not even informed about the February 13 exchange until February 19, when Matsumoto, pale and shaken, made an initial presentation. General Whitney, he informed his colleagues, had found his draft unacceptable and presented a GHQ draft in its place. Whitney’s position, as Matsumoto summarized it, was that the Americans were not forcing this on the government, but General MacArthur was convinced that this was the only way to protect the emperor’s person (Matsumoto apparently used the English word) from those who opposed him.8
The immediate response of several ministers was that the American position was simply unacceptable. Prime Minister Shidehara agreed, but Ashida Hitoshi, who later would emerge as a key figure in Diet deliberations, offered a persuasive argument for going along. If the cabinet rejected the GHQ demands and the Americans made their draft public, as they were threatening to do, Ashida warned, then an ominous scenario could unfold. The media, being “servile,” would support the Americans; the cabinet would have to resign; proponents of the American draft could be expected to come forward and do well in the impending general elections. The conservatives, in a word, had to beware of being unseated by popular prodemocracy forces.9
It was agreed that the matter should be given further consideration, and cabinet discussion was resumed on February 22, after Shidehara had met for three hours with MacArthur. Printed materials were distributed for the first time in the form of rough translations of the first and second chapters of the GHQ draft, dealing with the emperor and renunciation of war. (Stunned and disoriented, the government did not distribute a full translation until February 26.) Shidehara reported that the supreme commander had not been unreasonable. Declaring himself to be working heart and soul for Japan and emphasizing his deep desire “to keep the emperor safe at all costs,” MacArthur had offered dire intimations on the thinking of such countries as the Soviet Union and Australia—“unpleasant,” as Shidehara put it, “to a degree beyond your imagination.” The prime minister also quoted the general as having expressed his belief “that Japan should take moral leadership [Shidehara conveyed these words in English] by declaring its renunciation of war.”10
Shidehara still held out hope of revisions of substance in the GHQ draft, but Matsumoto discovered the same day that there was no prospect of salvaging even a few portions of the Meiji Constitution. His American tormentors bluntly informed him that using the existing constitution as a basis of revision was “impossible.” When the proud scholar-bureaucrat gritted his teeth and asked, “How many of the articles in the new Constitution do you consider basic and unalterable?” Whitney responded that “the whole Constitution as written is basic. . . . Put in general, we regard this document as a unit.” Lest there be any misunderstanding, Colonel Rowell added: “The new Constitution was written as an interwoven unit, one section fitting into another, so there is no one section or chapter that can be cut out.” At Matsumoto’s request, the Americans did agree to a bicameral Diet, with the stipulation that both houses be elected by popular vote.11
When Emperor Hirohito was briefed about the American draft by Shidehara and a few top officials on February 22, the final deadline Government Section had given for cabinet approval “in principle,” he reportedly responded decisively. Japanese informants told GHQ that he gave the proposed revision his unreserved approval. On this matter, the emperor was perhaps understandably less hesitant than his ministers. He recognized that his “person” was being protected and his position made simpler. Unlike his loyal officials, Emperor Hirohito was free to contemplate changes in the Meiji-style emperor system without having to worry about committing lese majesty. His approval, in any case, eased the conscience of his ministers and enabled them to comply with GHQ’s demands.12
There was a touch of patriotic astrology associated with these various dates. As General Whitney was pleased to note, GHQ’s February 12 deadline for completing its draft had coincided with Abraham Lincoln’s birthday; the deadline given the cabinet for accepting the draft fell on George Washington’s birthday.13 Even after the government bowed to this ultimatum, however, Government Section was informed that the cabinet remained wracked by a “furious struggle.” Narahashi Wataru, a minister without portfolio who simultaneously was serving as chief cabinet secretary, was one of GHQ’s major informants on these matters. He described the backstage struggles in dire terms. According to Narahashi, die-hard defenders of the old emperor system remained numerous among bureaucrats, ex-military officers, and zaibatsu leaders. The bureaucrats, whose power derived partly from their elite status as loyal servants of the throne (rather than as “civil servants,” or servants of the people), feared their authority would be severely diminished. Narahashi also observed that there was genuine fear among more liberal ministers that terrorism and assassination might occur if the emperor’s prerogatives were curtailed.14
These developments coincided with Prince Higashikuni’s shocking public suggestion that Emperor Hirohito should abdicate. The “emperor’s person” and the status of the throne suddenly seemed imperiled as never before, and it was in these circumstances that, on March 4, the cabinet formally presented SCAP with what eventually became known as the “first government draft” for a revised constitution.15 To all outward appearances, this amounted to little more than a Japanese version of the GHQ text. In fact, Matsumoto and his aides had watered down GHQ’s recommendations in a variety of ways, including the use of terminology that altered the intent of the draft.
Matsumoto and his assistant Satō Tatsuo, accompanied by two translators, delivered their text to Government Section at 10:00 A.M. on March 4. In a nice reprise of the February 13 “atomic sunshine” meeting, at which they had been confronted with GHQ’s English draft, they handed the Americans a Japanese text without any corresponding translation. There followed a marathon thirty-hour session during which the two sides translated the Japanese back into English together, with the Americans constantly consulting their Japanese-English dictionaries and comparing the new English version with their original draft. Throughout this long, sleepless ordeal, they fortified themselves with K rations and coffee dispensed from five-gallon containers—an unpalatable sort of sustenance for the Japanese that must have seemed, in the circumstances, depressingly symbolic.
This was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a humorous occasion. Nonetheless, it had moments of almost camp theatricality. Matsumoto and Kades soon found themselves engaged in a heated exchange concerning the relative positions of emperor and cabinet. At one point, the beleaguered royalist accused the New Dealer of trying to reinvent not merely the national polity but the Japanese language as well. Shortly after noon, Matsumoto stormed out in anger, leaving retranslation and revision to Satō and his two interpreters—who had to deal with at least sixteen American officers assisted by Nisei translators and interpreters.
Satō and Kades then had a tense moment when Kades used his fists, one above the other, to illustrate the importance of clearly placing the cabinet above the emperor. satō was less impressed by the concept than by the pugilistic intensity of Kades’ stance. Kades, in turn, concluded that the Japanese could not conceive of anyone being politically superior to the emperor, an approach he found “mystical” and contradictory. On the one hand, as Kades saw it, the Japanese were arguing that the emperor had been essentially powerless under the Meiji Constitution—a crucial argument in divorcing him from any taint of war responsibility. On the other hand, they insisted that his prerogatives as sovereign ruler must remain inviolate.16
Beate Sirota, whose bilingual skills gave her influence in these exchanges, found that old-fashioned favors could further the cause of feminism. At various points, the young “slip of a girl,” as Kades described her, came down in support of Japanese positions. Subsequently, when Satō came to the women’s rights clauses Sirota had originally drafted, Kades adroitly and successfully suggested that since she had been nice to them earlier, the Japanese should now be nice to her. Through this friendly reciprocity, one of the strongest equal-rights provisions in modern constitutional law survived. In another theatrical moment, Foreign Minister Yoshida’s aide, the smooth, British-educated Shirasu Jirō, appeared on the scene and had the pleasure of letting the Americans experience a small psychological shaft. Halfway through the marathon session, well after midnight, he casually produced a rough English version of the Japanese draft which everyone was laboring to translate. He had been carrying it around in his pocket.17
In the course of this exhausting session, the Americans discovered that the Japanese had slipped a number of substantial changes into their “translation.” The English “advice and consent,” for instance, emerged in Japanese as “advice and assistance.” The government’s ostensible translation also dropped the preamble to the GHQ draft in which the “sovereignty of the people’s will” was emphasized, deleted the provision providing for the elimination of the peerage, proposed a House of Councilors that could have restricted the authority of the House of Representatives, and altered provisions on local autonomy in a manner that facilitated greater control by the central government. In addition, they undercut many of the guarantees of human rights, sometimes by reinserting formulaic phrases of the sort associated with the Meiji Constitution. Freedom of speech, writing, press, assembly, and association were now guaranteed only “to the extent that they do not conflict with the public peace and order.” Similarly, censorship was prohibited “except as specifically provided for by law.” The rights of workers to organize, to bargain, and to act collectively were likewise hedged with the phrase “as provided by law.” The government draft also deleted or weakened a number of unusually specific rights, including ones related to foreigners, on the grounds that these were more appropriately covered by legislation outside the constitution.18
In the end, the stalwart Satō, bleary eyed and exhausted, succeeded in persuading the Americans that certain rights were better left to enumeration through extraconstitutional legislation. He also succeeded in maintaining highly nuanced renderings of such critical words and concepts as “people” and “sovereignty.” On such delicate yet fundamental points, politics, ideology, language, and culture came together in ways that rendered the Japanese draft constitution—almost inevitably—a different text from the American one.
This was nowhere more apparent than in the concept of “the people,” which was central to the Americans’ notion of popular sovereignty, with all the evocative historical and cultural connotations of “We the People” that were embedded in the American experience. The Japanese had no comparable tradition of popular sovereignty. The Meiji Constitution spoke of “subjects” (shinmin) rather than “people” as such, and Matsumoto and his aides were faced with the question of what word to use to use for “people” in their adaptation. One possibility was jinmin, the term commonly used in translations of the U.S. Constitution or Abraham Lincoln’s classic formulation of “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” In contemporary usage, however, jinmin had socialist and communist connotations and conveyed a sense of the people resisting authority.
Although an initial government translation of the GHQ draft prepared by the Foreign Ministry rendered “people” as jinmin, Matsumoto and satō discarded this in favor of kokumin, an inherently more conservative term. Written with two ideographs denoting “country” and “people,” kokumin is an everyday word that carries connotations of the people harmoniously merged in the nation. There is no intimation here of a potentially adversarial relationship between the people and the nation, the state, or the highest authorities—including, of course, the emperor. On the contrary, as the government subsequently took care to explain, the concept of kokumin embraced the emperor himself, thus signifying that the emperor and people were one. During the war years, kokumin had been a familiar word in propagandistic sloganeering, essentially synonymous with “the Japanese” or even “the Yamato race.”
Satō Tatsuo was frank in later explaining why kokumin, with its consensual and nationalistic connotations, was chosen for the new constitution. He and his associates, he stated, “adopted kokumin because (I) we wanted to emphasize the sense of the people as members of the state, and (2) we thought that jinmin would convey a sense of the people in exclusion and opposition to the Emperor.” Although advisors to Government Section called attention to the conservative connotations of kokumin, General Whitney and Colonel Kades did not deem the distinction important and allowed the rendering to stand.19
For “sovereignty,” the logical term was shuken. With encouragement from Prime Minister Shidehara, however, a different term—shikō—was substituted in the government draft. Unlike shuken, shikō was an obscure and archaic word. The two ideographs with which it was written literally meant “supreme height,” but the term carried no political weight. Indeed, it is fair to say that it meant little if anything to Japanese living in the mid-twentieth century. That was the point, of course: through such ambiguities, the conservatives desired to blunt and obfuscate the radical thrust inherent in the American notion of “popular sovereignty.” They were aghast at the thought of postulating a sovereignty equal to or higher than the emperor’s.20
In this first week of March, the survival of these deliberately warped renderings through thirty hours of American hammering was a gratifying victory for the government. In the full course of events, however, this victory proved only half as sweet; for shikō did not make it into the draft of the constitution that eventually was adopted by the Diet (shuken replaced it.) The draft that emerged from the marathon session around 4:00 P.M. on March 5 differed in roughly a dozen substantial ways from the version the Japanese had submitted the day before, and in almost every instance these changes brought it back closer to the original GHQ. draft.21
On March 5, while satō was staggering toward the end of his ordeal, the government moved toward a denouement, of sorts, of its own. That morning, Matsumoto, who had never returned to GHQ, addressed the cabinet at length about what had taken place since February 22. The ministers recessed for lunch and reconvened at 2:00 P.M., at which time a small, symbolic, almost ritualistic event took place. Ten English-language versions of the GHQ draft, apparently some of the copies Government Section had handed over weeks previously, were presented to the assembled ministers for the first time. There was nothing to be done with these at this eleventh hour, but they now had in their midst a concrete sign of the foreign power that governed their lives.
Around four-thirty, Shidehara and Matsumoto made their way to the palace to discuss the situation with the emperor and prepare for the release of both the government draft and an imperial rescript the following day. On returning to the cabinet meeting at 8:00 P.M., Shidehara summarized the emperor’s response as being that, “under the present situation, it can’t be helped.” The diary of Kinoshita Michio, the imperial vice chamberlain, makes clearer what a traumatic, almost chaotic moment this was at the court. The emperor was feeling immense pressure to abdicate, he wrote, and the “atmosphere of the world” was “against the imperial system.” MacArthur’s headquarters had become frantic. Repeating the phrase that had made such an impression on the cabinet, Kinoshita noted that if the American draft were not accepted, it would not be possible to guarantee the emperor’s person.22
GHQ had demanded that the cabinet decide that day whether it would accept the version agreed on with Satō. With the emperor’s approval, the assembled ministers proceeded to do so. Before adjourning a little after 9:00 P.M., Shidehara made a brief closing statement, which Ashida Hitoshi recounted in his diary. “Accepting such a draft constitution is an extremely grave responsibility,” the prime minister said, “that in all probability will affect our children and grandchildren and later generations. When we announce this draft, some people will applaud and some will remain silent. But deep in their hearts they surely will hold resentment toward us. Looking at things from a broad perspective, however, in the present circumstances there is no other course to take.”
Hearing this, cabinet members wept while the prime minister himself brushed away tears.23
On March 6, with great fanfare, the new constitution was made known to the public in a manner that gave equal prominence to the emperor and to the ideals of democracy and peace. In the name of the emperor, Prime Minister Shidehara released a detailed “outline” for constitutional revision, accompanying this with a brief but quite eloquent endorsement of the proposed new ideals. Few observers could have guessed that hours earlier the prime minister and his cabinet had been in tears. Emperor Hirohito’s imperial rescript was released simultaneously, tersely announcing the need to revise “drastically” the existing national charter and commanding the government to comply with his wishes. On the same day, General MacArthur announced that this “decision of the Emperor and the Government of Japan to submit to the Japanese people a new and enlightened constitution . . . has my full approval.”24
These three rhetorical exercises set the tone for the ensuing debates on creating a new monarchical democracy. Shidehara typically began with effusive homage to the sovereign, who had been “pleased to grant to the cabinet” an imperial message. “In order that our nation may fall in line with other nations in the march toward the attainment of the universal ideal of mankind,” Shidehara declared, “His Majesty with great decision has commanded that the existing Constitution be fundamentally revised so as to establish the foundation upon which a democratic and peaceful Japan is to be built.”
The prime minister then proceeded to speak movingly of the passage of mankind from war to peace, cruelty to mercy, slavery to liberty, tyranny and confusion to order. In a suggestive turn of phrase, he intimated that the pacifistic nature of the proposed charter could establish a vanguard role for Japan in the world. “If our people are to occupy a place of honor in the family of nations, we must see to it that our constitution internally establishes the foundation for a democratic government and externally leads the rest of the world for the abolition of war. Namely, we must renounce for all time war as a sovereign right of the State and declare to all the world our determination to settle by peaceful means all disputes with other countries.” The prime minister went on to express his faith that all Japanese would honor the benevolent wish of their sovereign, and concluded by noting that the draft constitution was being made public “in close cooperation with Allied General Headquarters.”
Emperor Hirohito’s rescript read in full:
Consequent upon our acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration [sic] the ultimate form of Japanese government is to be determined by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people. I am fully aware of our nation’s strong consciousness of justice, its aspirations to live a peaceful life and promote cultural enlightenment and its firm resolve to renounce war and to foster friendship with all the countries of the world. It is, therefore, my desire that the constitution of our empire be revised drastically upon the basis of the general will of the people and the principle of respect for the fundamental human rights. I command hereby the competent authorities of my government to put forth in conformity with my wish their best efforts toward the accomplishment of this end.
In effect, the emperor was ordering his subjects to support the proposed new constitution—a stance at variance with the idea that he never exercised real authority. From this point forward, the public process of “revising” the constitution remained tinged with old-fashioned pronouncements aimed at reinforcing a sense of imperial benevolence in granting a more democratic national charter.25
Like Shidehara, General MacArthur spoke with a certain grandeur about peace, democracy, and culture. He described the proposed constitution as “throughout responsive to the most advanced concept of human relations ... an eclectic instrument, realistically blending the several divergent political philosophies which intellectually honest men advocate.” He also chose to emphasize rather than minimize GHQ’s close involvement in the drafting process. “This instrument has been drafted after painstaking investigation and frequent conference between members of the Japanese government and this headquarters,” he stated, “following my initial direction to the Cabinet five months ago.” Typically, this was not entirely truthful; but the point was made that SCAP had been closely involved in the drafting process.
On the other hand, acknowledging the draft constitution’s genesis in Government Section was taboo. Japanese officials were not permitted to mention the GHQ draft and the media were not allowed to speculate openly about it. A similar make-believe aura would hang over the Diet proceedings to follow. GHQ kept a close eye on these deliberations from behind the scenes and made clear at various junctures that basic principles—the revised status of the emperor, renunciation of the right of belligerency, and popular sovereignty, as well as the highly idealistic preamble to the constitution—were, much like the emperor under the Meiji Constitution, sacred and inviolable. On occasion, GHQ secretly intervened to promote or repress certain Diet proposals. As one American privy to these activities put it, Government Section personnel “were still members of a bureaucratic agency that worked behind closed doors.”26
This was, once again, freedom in a box. All Japanese knew the box existed, however, and where the constitution was concerned the extent of the American input was an open secret. To begin with, everyone was immediately struck by the night-and-day difference between the “Matsumoto draft” that had been more or less laughed to death on February 1 and the progressive new text the government was now claiming as its own. As the daily Yomiuri put it, “the reactionary Matsumoto draft” had been “blown away.”27 No one imagined that the geriatric Shidehara cabinet had undergone a collective conversion experience. It was inconceivable that these two drafts could have a common authorship.
Beyond this, the Japanese text had foreign fingerprints all over it, not only in its broad principles but also in its awkward style. Contorted syntax consorted with odd phraseology. In the upper house, whose appointed members included a number of scholars, some individuals even took to referring to an official English translation that had been provided them. The very fact that an English text was released simultaneously with the Japanese draft was revealing. The upper-house member Takayanagi Kenzō, a Harvard-trained constitutional law specialist, later observed that “the translation was easier to understand than the text of the [Japanese] original.”28
The task of preventing media discussion of the actual paternity of the new charter fell to GHQ’s Civil Censorship Detachment. “Criticism of SCAP Writing the Constitution” actually became a formal category of impermissible expression in the so-called key log that censors used as a guide, and it was explicitly stipulated that this proscribed any reference whatsoever to SCAP’s role.29 Journalists did, however, attempt to call attention to the draft’s “peculiar Japanese” and “funny language.” One blue-penciled line stated baldly—of the Japanese text—“the translation is not very good.”30 The overworked censors could not catch everything, however, and even generally supportive publications managed to smuggle sardonic observations into their editorial comments. The Asahi, for example, described the government draft as “somewhat ill fitted, like a borrowed suit of clothes.” The Fiji Shimpō compared its initial response to someone who smelled the aroma of Japanese cooking coming from the kitchen and then discovered that Western dishes were being served. It was necessary to put away one’s chopsticks and take up fork and knife.31
In these circumstances, a great deal of cynicism, as well as plain confusion, accompanied public discussion. Still, the proposed constitution held great attraction as a beacon of hope and idealism in a defeated and war-shattered land. The Japanese were told that they were to consider adopting a national charter that embodied the most advanced and enlightened “eclectic” thinking of the mid-twentieth century. In going so far as to renounce war as a sovereign right, the nation, as Shidehara put it, might even see itself as leading the rest of the world. To a proud people told they had become a fourth-rate nation, this was a comforting kind of new nationalism to grasp at.
Popular reactions to the new proposal in any case offered a sharp contrast to the overwhelmingly negative response that had greeted the Matsumoto draft. Only the Communist Party opposed the draft constitution. The party’s position was forthright: continuation of the emperor system was antidemocratic and, though within Japan they had suffered the most overt oppression by the militarists, it was unrealistic and discriminatory to deny any nation the right to self-defense. All the other major political parties endorsed the March draft. The Socialists even claimed that the government’s new position was essentially what they themselves had been advocating.
The two conservative parties that formed the backbone of Shidehara’s coalition cabinet were in no position to criticize the government’s announcement, but even here support was expressed with surprising spirit. The Liberals singled out for praise the three principles they saw as characterizing the draft: preservation of the emperor system, respect for fundamental human rights and democratic principles, and establishing a peaceful country by renouncing war. Even the ultraconservative Progressive Party did a dramatic volte face and declared that it welcomed the new draft “heartily.” Historically, the Progressives now argued, the emperor had never ruled directly and so his status under the proposed new charter actually accorded with both history and reality.32 Stated often enough, such rationalizations easily became a new gospel. Many conservatives clearly voiced their endorsements with heavy hearts, but by mid-March most of them also had come to share General MacArthur’s belief in the new charter’s necessity to protect the emperor and the imperial house at a critical moment.33
As the weeks passed, the public gained a clearer understanding of what the proposed new constitution entailed. The detailed “outline” released by the cabinet on March 6 was still written in the ponderous formal bungotai style. A vernacular or colloquial text replaced the outline on April 17, a week after the general elections. A final version, known as “the fourth government draft,” was formally submitted to the Diet on June 21.
For technical reasons, the new constitution was submitted to the Diet by the emperor as an “amendment” to the Meiji Constitution. To both MacArthur and the Japanese royalists, this was fortuitous: constitution making and emperor saving became part and parcel of the same undertaking. Consequently, the emperor was involved at every key stage in the process. On June 20, in accordance with established procedure, he addressed the opening of the extraordinary Diet session, declaring that he would be submitting a revised constitutional draft along with other bills and expressing hope that the Diet would deliberate on these “in a harmonious spirit.”34 Although the new constitution stipulated that sovereignty resided with the people, it was intimated that this sovereignty actually came as a gift from the emperor himself. “Revolution from above” and “imperial democracy” were fused in the most ceremonial manner conceivable.
By the time the draft constitution came before the Diet, the most ultranationalistic and reactionary politicians had already been purged. The newly elected House of Representatives was a diverse group, including women as well as men. The conservatives who still dominated the lower house were, on the whole, more flexible than their predecessors and also numbered among their colleagues a sizable contingent of liberals and socialists. In the House of Peers, seats emptied by the occupation’s purge had been filled by the appointment of an unusually learned and cosmopolitan group. It could be argued that the legislature was not representative, since its most vociferously conservative voices had been silenced. But it would also be accurate to say that the Diet reflected new voices more or less in tune with the emergence of genuinely democratic aspirations.
To all appearances, the parliamentary deliberations that followed were vigorous and substantial. Discussions in plenary sessions and committee hearings in both houses consumed a total of 114 days. Kanamori Toku-jirō, the minister of state who replaced Matsumoto Jōji as the cabinet’s chief spokesman on constitutional issues, responded to around thirteen hundred formal questions, sometimes at great length. Transcripts of the Diet proceedings in both houses eventually totaled more than thirty-five hundred pages.35
By far the most compelling issue for Diet members was whether the draft constitution altered the “national polity,” particularly as it involved the emperor; and if so, how? Of next greatest concern were the implications of the astonishing “renunciation of war” provisions in Article 9. In due time, however, the legislators turned their attention to every single article. Satō Tatsuo, who had represented the government at the marathon translation session, later conceded that GHQ “seemed to have great respect for the Diet as the supreme representative of the people.” Deliberations in the legislature left “no portion of the draft unprobed,” Satō observed, and he estimated that “80 or 90 percent” of the changes proposed in the legislature—all of which required SCAP’s approval—were allowed to stand.36
The government’s answer to questions about whether the new constitution represented a fundamental change in the kokutai or “national polity” was that it absolutely did not. Both Kanamori and Yoshida Shigeru, the new prime minister, concentrated with an almost vaudevillian energy on this most emotional of issues. Katō Shizue, a near-legendary feminist who had been elected to the Diet, later summarized their act with deft strokes. Yoshida, she said, would loudly exclaim: “The kokutai has been preserved! The minister in charge will explain!” And Kanamori would take the podium and gurgle something roundabout and impenetrable (“guruguruguruguru” in Katō’s rendering).37
This was unkind, but where the emperor and the national polity were concerned Yoshida’s and Kanamori’s explanations were ruled by an emotional logic rather than any legal precision or historical accuracy. Yoshida typically declared that “there is no distinction between the imperial house and the people. . . . Sovereign and subject are one family. . . . The national polity will not be altered in the slightest degree by the new constitution. It is simply that the old spirit and thoughts of Japan are being expressed in different words in the new constitution.” Like participants in a renga or “linked-verse” performance, Kanamori, in turn, carried forward the permanence-amid-change theme by arguing that “the water flows, but the river stays. In this point lies our basic conception concerning the draft constitution.”38
Although such near-mystical affirmations were only to be expected, they caused some consternation within Government Section. Whitney informed MacArthur in mid-July that official arguments that the new constitution involved no change in the national polity were undermining the democratic spirit of the new charter and paving the way for a return to authoritarianism, chauvinism, militarism, and the old mystique of Japanese “uniqueness” and racial superiority. Kades, following up on this, demanded that Kanamori clarify the constitution’s defense of unadulterated popular sovereignty. It was, indeed, at this point that shikō was replaced as the term for “sovereignty” by shaken.39 Still, in the eyes of many members of the parliament, the new constitution was acceptable only because it retained the throne in its transcendent splendor. The final report of the House of Representatives subcommittee on the constitution, headed by Ashida Hitoshi, confirmed and sanctified these sentiments:
The first Chapter of the Revised Constitution expressly provides that the Emperor of one line unbroken through ages is assured of his position as a Monarch who on the basis of the sovereign will of the people unifies them coevally with Heaven and Earth, from eternity to eternity. Thus, it has been possible to confirm the solemn fact that the Emperor, while being in the midst of the people, stands outside the pale of actual politics and still maintains his authority as the center of the life of the people and as the source of their spiritual guidance. This accomplishment the absolute majority of the committee have received with the utmost joy and satisfaction.40
The emotionalism and nationalistic defiance of such reverential statements are evident. For many, however, such arguments became vehicles that enabled them, in good conscience, to travel to positions they would not have dreamed of only months earlier. Once thinking the unthinkable became inescapable, it even became possible to argue that in their new imperial democracy the emperor’s position had been elevated, in that he was now above politics. Shortly after the new constitution came into effect in 1947, Yoshida wrote a personal letter to his father-in-law Makino Shinken, a former keeper of the privy seal, stating that as a consequence of the emperor’s more explicit detachment from politics, his “position within”—presumably meaning his spiritual role—“will become that much more enlarged, and his position will increase in importance and delicacy.”41
Even in the midst of these reverential discussions, however, some ministers and parliamentarians could retain a detached and humorous perspective. Among insiders, for example, the new constitution became known as the yamabuki kempō, or “mountain-rose constitution.” The joke here was that, under the new charter, the emperor now resembled the yamabuki flower (Kerria japonica, sometimes translated as “yellow rose”)—all beautiful blossom, no fruit. Similarly, two witty poems referring to Kanamori were circulated in the Diet during these ostensibly solemn debates, both punning on the homonym of kempō (constitution) and kenpō (the way of the sword). What, one poem inquired, was this strange constitutional method (or school of swordfighting) Kanamori was using? It was, the second verse responded, the two-sword national-polity school, one sword being change and the other no change. In parrying this, Kanamori proved himself an adept fencer. His way was so skillful, he responded in a poem of his own, that one sword looked like two. Whatever their politics, these were clever and agile men.42
At one point during the parliamentary deliberations, Colonel Kades, visiting the House of Peers, told members that GHQ was “rather sorry that more proposals for amendment have not been made in the Diet.”43 He was sincere in this. The Americans spent a great deal of time encouraging legislators to become actively involved in the revision process, which, after all, was supposed to be an example of democracy in action, the manifestation of the Potsdam Proclamation’s noble ideal of creating a government that reflected the “freely expressed will” of the people. The Diet was free to make all the changes it desired—so long as they did not violate GHQ’s fundamental principles.
What was not so apparent where the Diet deliberations were concerned was the long reach of SCAP’s invisible hand and the extent to which revisions proposed by Japanese sometimes reflected secret instructions from GHQ—or, through GHQ, from the Far Eastern Commission, which gave considerable attention to the constitution that summer. The Americans took great care to camouflage their involvement in the day-to-day activities of the two legislative chambers. Instructions were conveyed orally rather than in writing. At SCAP’s insistence, the work of the key House of Representatives subcommittee on constitutional revision was conducted in confidential session, so that American instructions could be clarified in camera; and no references to these interventions were permitted in the stenographic record of these secret meetings. Free discussion of the constitution per se was encouraged, both in the Diet and in the media, but until 1949 all references to SCAP’s decisive shaping of the new charter were suppressed.44
The omnipresence of SCAP’s unassailable authority was captured in a felicitous phrase after the occupation ended. In the words of the Commission on the Constitution, a prestigious Japanese committee that investigated these matters between 1957 and 1964, even when the Americans did not directly intervene in the parliamentary process, their desires were still surmised “by a sort of mental telepathy.”45 One member of the House of Peers, Sawada Ushimaro, a former Home Ministry official, resisted this duress with unusual passion. In announcing why he was voting against adoption of the draft constitution, Sawada declared that the proper time for revision was after the nation regained sovereignty. It made no sense at all, he exclaimed, borrowing the Asahi’s earlier metaphor, to rush to adopt this new charter, “which, in fact, is no better than a borrowed suit of clothes, patched in too many places, and, above all, insufferably misfitting.”46
All told, the Diet made approximately thirty revisions to the government’s June draft.47 Many of the most substantial changes, however, came from SCAP or the FEC. It was pressure from the FEC via SCAP, for instance, that led the Diet to strengthen important democratic provisions such as those pertaining to universal suffrage, predominance of the legislature, and selection of the prime minister and a majority of cabinet members from among Diet members. At the insistence of the FEC, the Diet also added a clause stipulating that all cabinet members must be “civilians.”48
Major changes initiated by the Japanese were, in the end, relatively few in number. In a surprising vote, the Diet approved a motion from the Socialist Party that eliminated the peerage (apart from the imperial family) immediately, whereas the Americans had merely called for ceasing to grant any future patents of peerage. The Socialists, partly influenced by the Weimar and 1936 Soviet constitutions, also successfully introduced provisions that “All people shall have the right to maintain the minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living” and “All people shall have the right and the obligation to work,” with working conditions being regulated by law.49
In an interesting instance of effective grass-roots pressure, a coalition of teachers affiliated with adult-education schools and night schools succeeded in persuading the Diet to eliminate wording that would have limited compulsory education to six years of free elementary schooling. Arguing that education should not benefit only the elites, the teachers directed their lobbying activities at the Ministry of Education and GHQ as well as at politicians. The final provision guaranteed all people “the right to receive an equal education correspondent to their ability, as provided by law,” and became the basis for subsequent legislation establishing the so-called six-three system, entailing nine years of compulsory schooling.50
One of the most truly democratic aspects of the final constitution was also prompted by a grass-roots initiative and affected the very nature of the language in which formal and official texts would be written thereafter. Prior to this time, statutes and documents, including the constitution, had been written in bungotai, an archaic formal style that was more or less inaccessible to ordinary people. After mid-April, the text submitted by the government was written in colloquial Japanese (kōgotai). This was a change of enormous practical as well as symbolic meaning. It signified that the law, and official documents in general, were no longer to be regarded as the domain of a privileged elite. As a consequence, the entire corpus of civil and criminal law subsequently would be converted into kōgotai. The decision to introduce this far-reaching change came entirely from the Japanese side, and had its origins not within the government but among scholars and intellectuals who were lobbying for language reform.51
Using an old vehicle of popular entertainment and education—the kami-shibai or “paper theater”—an attentive street crowd is informed about the implications of the new national charter. The banner and sign announce that this is “commemorating the new constitution coming into effect.”
In a reactionary direction, the government and subsequently the Diet succeeded in eliminating equal protection under the law for resident aliens, thus undermining GHQ’s original intent. The groundwork for this move was laid by satō Tatsuo in the hours immediately following the marathon translation session, when he sent a seemingly trivial request to Government Section requesting permission to delete the article in question on the grounds that it was redundant, given protections guaranteed elsewhere in the draft charter. The Americans approved this, unaware that the language games the Japanese side was playing excluded foreigners from such protective coverage. The key term here was kokumin, the word deliberately chosen to cast constitutional references to “the people” in a more nationalistic context. Essentially, the conservatives used kokumin not merely to weaken the connotations of popular sovereignty, but also to limit the rights guaranteed by the state to Japanese nationals alone. Where the Americans had intended to affirm that “all persons” are equal before the law, and included language in the GHQ draft that explicitly forbade discrimination on the basis of race or national origin, Satō and his colleagues erased these guarantees through linguistic subterfuge. By interpreting kokumin as referring to “all nationals,” which was indeed a logical construction of the term, the government succeeded in denying equal civil rights to the hundreds of thousands of resident ex-colonial subjects, including Taiwanese and especially Koreans. The blatantly racist nature of this revision was subsequently reinforced by “terminological” revisions during the Diet deliberations, and this provided the basis for discriminatory legislation governing nationality passed in 1950.52
To the world at large, the most striking single feature of the draft constitution was its “renunciation of war,” mentioned in the preamble and encoded in Article 9. Unsurprisingly, this drew a barrage of questions in the Diet. In the end, the legislators revised the wording of Article 9 in a way that left no one sure what it really meant. A miasma of ambiguity was created that would survive as one of the most perplexing of the occupation’s legacies: did Article 9 permit or prohibit limited armament for the purpose of self-defense?
As submitted to the legislature, Article 9 read as follows:
War, as a sovereign right of the nation, and the threat or use of force, is forever renounced as a means of settling disputes with other nations.
The maintenance of land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be authorized. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
Did this mean that Japan was pledging itself to be an unarmed state in an unstable world? Many Diet members voiced concern that it did, and that it thereby placed the nation at peril. Others, attracted by the idea of eventual membership in the United Nations, asked whether that might become impossible if the country were unable to fulfill the UN requirement that all members contribute to collective security. To the direct question “does Article 9 prohibit armament even for self-defense?” the government usually answered yes, but sometimes responded no. When these convoluted proceedings were completed, it would be possible to go back over the record and exhume a quotation to bolster whatever position one wished to uphold.
On April 4, before submission to the Diet, Matsumoto Jōji addressed a confidential session of the Privy Council and was explicitly asked if renouncing the “right of belligerency” prohibited a war of self-defense. He answered that it did not. “ ‘The right of belligerency’ implies a declared war,” Matsumoto stated, “but does not purport to prohibit acts of self-defense.”53 In the opening sessions of the parliament, on the other hand, Prime Minister Yoshida said the opposite. On June 26, he indicated that Article 9 entailed renunciation of the right of self-defense as well as the right of belligerency. All aggressive wars, including Japan’s recent aggression beginning in 1931, he observed, were waged in the name of self-defense.
Two days later, the prime minister had occasion to elaborate on this when Nosaka Sanzō challenged the wisdom of such a constitutional restraint. It was necessary, the Communist leader declared, to distinguish between just and unjust wars, and when this was kept in mind it became obvious that every nation had the right to self-defense. Yoshida, who prided himself on being a “realist,” found himself arguing the realism of idealism. “It has been suggested that war may be justified by a nation’s right of legitimate self-defense,” he retorted, “but I think that the very recognition of such a thing is harmful.” Japan would rely for its future security on an international peace organization. In one form or another, Yoshida reiterated this interpretation of Article 9 for several years thereafter.54
In the final stages of its deliberations, the House of Representatives adopted a change in the wording of Article 9 proposed by its influential subcommittee on constitutional revision, chaired by Ashida Hitoshi. Approved by the upper house, this became the final wording in the new constitution:
Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
As was required with all such proposed changes, Ashida had first cleared the new wording with GHQ, where both Colonel Kades and General Whitney approved it right away. The three men apparently did not discuss the reasoning behind the revision.55
In subsequent years, the so-called Ashida amendment was used to argue that, in its final form, Article 9 did not prohibit rearmament for self-defense. The first paragraph, this argument went, established maintenance of international peace as the article’s objective; this being the case, the clause that now introduced the second paragraph (“In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph”) indicated that the “war potential” being renounced referred to maintaining a capacity for aggressive war that would disturb international peace. Ashida himself later claimed that it had been his purpose from the outset to open the door to future armament for self-defense through this change. This never emerged in the Diet discussions, however; and the secret records of Ashida’s subcommittee, which remained classified for many decades, reveal that neither he nor his fellow committee members ever explicitly discussed their revision in terms of allowing “self-defense,” nor was there any evidence of an implicit understanding that this is what was being done. As in much of the discussion that took place in the Diet generally, the air was full of phrases flying in all directions—and often impossible to follow coherently. At one point, Ashida actually explained that he was simply trying to make Article 9 a less “passive” affirmation of Japan’s commitment not to maintain war potential.56
As the final draft headed for a vote, key spokesmen for the government confirmed that Article 9 prohibited maintenance of any war potential whatsoever. When Kanamori, who took part in some of the secret discussions in the lower house, was called on to explain the new wording of the article to the House of Peers special committee on the constitution, he stressed the categorical renunciation of all armaments. “The first paragraph of Article 9 does not renounce the right of self-defense but this right is renounced as a matter of fact under the second paragraph,” he told the committee on September 14. Rephrasing this, he stated that “the practical effect of the second paragraph is that even a defensive war cannot be conducted.” Former prime minister Shidehara, addressing the same committee, similarly declared without equivocation that, under the second paragraph, it was “very clear that Japan cannot possess any war potential to fight a foreign country.”57
At this juncture, the Far Eastern Commission intervened in a way that struck many legislators as bizarre. In July, the FEC had urged General MacArthur to have an article added to the constitution stipulating that only “civilians” could hold cabinet positions. The general ignored this request, but on September 21 the Chinese representative to the FEC, sitting in Washington, took note of the new wording of Article Nine and pointed out that such ambiguous language might indeed leave an opening for some form of future rearmament. Instead of urging that the Article 9 language be tightened, however, the FEC again demanded that cabinet members be constitutionally limited to civilians. MacArthur and GHQ felt that to avoid FEC censure they must comply.
This belated change, introduced in the House of Peers on September 26, caused understandable confusion: for if Article 9 prohibited an army, navy, and air force, then it seemed logical to assume that there could be no professional military establishment from which cabinet members might be drawn. Was it possible, legislators asked, that the proposed stipulation was intended to prevent former military personnel from assuming cabinet positions? That would certainly discriminate against the young men who had served the country in the recent war. An upper-house committee set up specifically to look into this request concluded that such a provision was not necessary. MacArthur, in turn, sent word that it was necessary to make the FEC happy. The peers then had no choice but to turn their attention to inventing a new word which would correspond to the English “civilian.” Some seven or more possibilities were considered before a newly coined compound, pronounced bunmin, was selected.58
Whatever the FEC may have intended, the strange bunmin provision, which became Article 66 of the new charter, had the unintended effect of weakening the argument that Article 9 prohibited the maintenance of any military potential whatsoever. After all, excluding military personnel from the cabinet assumed their existence as a functioning part of the body politic. This ambiguity was compounded when in explaining the new draft in confidence to the Privy Council on October 21, Kanamori offered an interpretation quite different from the one he had given the House of Peers a month earlier. The minutes of this elite body (slated to be abolished under the new constitution) recorded that Kanamori “interprets the keeping of arms as being allowed for the maintenance of international peace.”59 In a publication entitled Interpreting the New Constitution published on November 3, the day the new charter was promulgated, Ashida Hitoshi publicly offered this same interpretation for the first time. “In reality,” he stated, Article 9 “is meant to apply to wars of aggression. Therefore, its provisions do not renounce war and the threat or use of force for purposes of self-defense.”60 GHQ did not challenge this view, but neither did it become a clearly held government position.
For years afterwards, in fact, Prime Minister Yoshida spoke in a very different voice. In January 1950, he stated unequivocally, “The right of self-defense in Japan’s case will be the right of self-defense without resorting to force of arms.” In an extemporaneous comment to the House of Councilors (which replaced the House of Peers) that same month, Yoshida went so far as to exclaim, “If we hold somewhere in the back of our minds the idea of protecting ourselves by armaments, or the idea of protecting ourselves by force of arms in case of war, then we ourselves will impede the security of Japan.” True security, the elderly prime minister suggested, lay in earning the confidence of other nations.61
There was certainly an element of grandstanding in such statements, for Yoshida was persuaded that the best way to hasten the end of the occupation and the country’s reacceptance in the world community was to emphasize the thoroughgoing nature of its renunciation of militarism.62 At the same time, however, Article 9 also possessed a compelling psychological attraction to a shattered people sick of war and burdened by the knowledge that much of the world reviled them as inherently militaristic and untrustworthy. The renunciation of war—the prospect of becoming a pure embodiment of Kellogg-Briand ideals—offered a way of retaining a positive sense of uniqueness in defeat.
Three and a half decades after these events, Charles Kades looked back on the contradictions in Japanese interpretations of Article 9 and was reminded of the observations of a fifteenth-century English judge: “The Thought of Man shall not be tried for the Devil himself knoweth not the Thought of Man.”63 Where Article 9 was concerned, confusion initially arose less from Machiavellian subterfuge than from the article’s poor drafting. Under the circumstances of continued occupation, moreover, the issue of self-defense was hardly a pressing concern—until June 1950, that is, when rearmament was initiated in the wake of the outbreak of war in Korea. Then the conservatives and the Americans alike found their loophole in the murky language of the Ashida amendment, and the opponents of remilitarization rallied around the ideals of disarmed neutrality that they believed to be firmly embedded in their “peace constitution.” Article 9 became the touchstone for a controversy that would wrack the body politic for decades to come.
The “renunciation of war” ideal was illustrated with this soon-famous graphic in a booklet titled The Story of the New Constitution, which was issued by the Ministry of Education in 1947 and used as a text in middle schools for several years.
Diet members were free to vote against the draft constitution, but in the end very few did so. In the House of Representatives, the vote for adoption was 421 to 8. In the House of Peers—where adoption meant immediate abolition of the peerage itself—the new charter was adopted overwhelmingly by a standing vote (GHQ counted 2 negative votes out of 300). Most of the Diet votes against adoption came from Communist Party representatives.
Cynics would say that this near-unanimous embrace of the conqueror’s principles merely confirmed what condescending American and British analysts had been arguing all along: that the Japanese had an “ingrained feudalistic tendency” to follow authority—that, as the State Department’s George Atcheson had put it at the beginning of 1946, this was the dawn of “the age of Japan’s imitation of things American—not only of American machines but also American ideas.”64
For some, this may have been the case; both Japanese skeptics and worried liberals said much the same thing at the time. The political and ideological dynamics of the situation, however, were too complex to be explained away by such simplistic notions of mass psychology. To a substantial degree, the solid vote to adopt the new constitution reflected neither conformist nor feudalistic “Japanese” values, but rather a familiar feature of democratic party politics everywhere: maintaining party discipline. With the exception of the Communists, party leaders across the political spectrum supported the revision; and party members fell into line.
Many pragmatic conservative leaders also believed that, although at the moment they had little choice but to go along with the conquerors, at a later date it would be possible to undo much of what had been done. Adopting a democratic and pacifistic national charter would hasten the day the occupation was terminated; and once independence had been regained, the constitution could be revised. Yoshida Shigeru later ruefully explained that this had been his philosophy regarding the American reformist agenda in general. “There was this idea at the back of my mind that, whatever needed to be revised after we regained our independence could be revised then,” he confided. “But once a thing has been decided on, it is not so easy to have it altered.”65
On November 3, 1946, the ninety-fourth anniversary of the Meiji emperor’s birthday, Emperor Hirohito announced the promulgation of the new constitution; it was to go into effect six months later. (When it came to patriotic dating, the vanquished were as diligent as the victors.) Celebratory ceremonies were held nationwide. In Tokyo, one hundred thousand people gathered in front of the imperial palace to commemorate the occasion. As added evidence of imperial largesse, the emperor decreed an amnesty terminating the penal sentences of 330,000 individuals. This was his final grand exercise of sovereign authority.66
One month later, it was announced that Japan would continue to reckon time in accordance with an emperor-centered calendar. On December 5, in response to a question in the Diet, the government stated that the “gengo system” would be maintained, meaning that the years would continue to be numbered in accordance with the era name associated with the reigning emperor, coupled with the year of the emperor’s reign. By this way of counting, the constitution was promulgated in the year Shōwa 21. This was a consoling conservative victory and a brilliant everyday way of reiterating that, because of their emperor system, the Japanese were unique and operated in realms not shared by others. Every time any one looked at the date on a publication, they would be reminded of the imperial presence.67
May 3, 1947, the day the constitution came into effect, could be remembered almost any way one chose. A Japanese brass band performing in the plaza before the imperial palace celebrated the occasion by playing The Stars and Stripes Forever.68 Shimizu Tōru, who had tutored Emperor Hirohito on constitutional law and served as the last head of the Privy Council, the final body to vote approval of the new charter, was so distraught by the democratization of the imperial system that he committed suicide several months later.69 The emperor’s youngest brother Prince Mikasa, on the other hand, sent a remarkable commentary to a newspaper put out by Tokyo Imperial University, chastising the emperor and the government for the undemocratic manner in which they had conducted the day’s ceremonies. He had been ill and unable to attend, but several aspects of the ceremony disturbed him. Why was his invitation addressed to him alone, and not to his wife as well; and why did it mention only the emperor and not the empress? It was no wonder, Prince Mikasa commented, that Japanese women, so recently elected to the Diet for the first time, felt they faced a difficult struggle.
He had listened to the ceremonies on the radio, the emperor’s brother added, and was struck by the continued use of the distinctive, honorific language reserved only for the imperial family. If a genuine democratization were to be effected, language, too, would have to be democratized; and the proper place to begin would be to reform the special language hitherto reserved for the throne. The prince also was struck by the fact that Emperor Hirohito was not present from the outset, but rather made a grand entrance; and he was taken aback by the fact that Prime Minister Yoshida greeted the sovereign’s appearance by calling out “Long Live the Emperor!” (Tennō Heika Banzai!) three times in succession. This might be appropriate for something like an enthronement ceremony, Mikasa observed, but it did not seem very suitable to a ceremony in which, presumably, sovereignty was being transferred to the people.
This was droll and iconoclastic, and it is no wonder that Emperor Hirohito, when musing on the possibility of abdicating, had dismissed his youngest brother as a possible successor, even as regent for the crown prince. Indeed, Prince Mikasa was not finished with his ruminations. It might have been more appropriate, he ventured—and the reader could easily imagine him chortling here—had the planners of the ceremony instead arranged to have the emperor lead a cheer along the lines of “Long Live All the Japanese People!” (Zen Nihon Kokumin Banzai!). Or the prime minister might have led all the people, including the emperor, in such a cheer. Or on behalf of the new peace-loving Japan, the emperor might have been asked to lead a banzai for all the peoples of the world. In any case, he concluded, democratizing the imperial household would be the beginning of the true task of democratizing Japan.70
The adoption of the new constitution propelled both GHQ and the government into a flurry of activity. Civil laws, criminal laws, the code of civil procedure, family law, the laws governing the imperial household—all were subjected to substantive revision and redrafted in more colloquial Japanese. At the same time, a massive educational campaign was launched. On the very day the new constitution came into effect, the government issued 20 million copies of a pocket-size booklet entitled Atarashii Kempō, Akarui Seikatsu (New Constitution, Bright Life). This astonishing number was supposed to ensure a booklet for every household in Japan.
Atarashii Kempō, Akarui Seikatsu was only thirty pages long: a one-page send-off by Ashida Hitoshi (the chairman of the lower-house subcommittee on constitutional revision), a radiant thirteen-page introduction that included several illustrations, and the full text of the constitution itself. It was issued at the insistence of GHQ and so, like the constitution itself, was a text written under duress. It also conveyed an idealism embraced by many Japanese. Although revision of the “MacArthur Constitution” became an ardent nationalistic cause in certain conservative circles even before the occupation ended, the simple, optimistic rhetoric of “new constitution, bright life” retained enough popular appeal to thwart all attempts at revision over the decades that followed.
Ashida began his brief preface with a plain but moving statement: “The old Japan has been cast in the shadows, a new Japan has been born.” People would now respect each other on the basis of their human qualities. They would practice democracy. Relations with other countries would be conducted in the spirit of peace. The constitution’s bold declaration that “we will not do war any more” expressed a high ideal for humankind and was the only way for Japan to be reborn.
The introductory text itself began by speaking of May 3, 1947 as the birthday of a new Japan, and immediately went on to declare that the greatest “gift” of the constitution was democracy, which entailed “government by the people, for the people, and of the people.” The emperor was no longer a god, but rather a symbol of the unity of the people—much in the same way that Mt. Fuji symbolized the physical beauty of Japan, cherry blossoms the gentleness of Japanese spring. The national charter was described as being a pledge never to wage war again (a point accompanied by an illustration of a trash can filled with artillery, bombs, tanks, military planes, and warships—along with a dead fish and two buzzing flies). Equality, human dignity, happiness, and the “joy of freedom” were emphasized. It was important to live in accordance with one’s own conscience. Men and women were equal. (This point was illustrated by a romantic sketch of a young couple kneeling and holding hands, with overlapping valentine hearts and an exclamation point above their clasped hands. A startled old couple lurked in the background). Officials were now public servants. The Diet was the voice of the people. The court was the guardian of the constitution. The essence of the new constitution was “people’s government and international peace.”71
This was, without question, propaganda demanded by the conquerors and expressed at an extremely simple level; and it struck a popular chord. The full measure of the compelling power of the constitutional fait accompli, however, lay in the fact that even high officials who originally had been staunch supporters of the Meiji Constitution came in time to endorse many of the fundamental principles of the new charter. The former government spokesman Kanamori Tokujirō was a fair example of this ideological sea change. Before GHQ’s “constitutional convention,” Kanamori had helped draft the Liberal Party’s conservative proposed constitutional revision. As Prime Minister Yoshida’s minister in charge of constitutional affairs, he was reluctantly compelled to present the adapted GHQ draft as the government’s own handiwork. Two years after these arduous labors were done, Kanamori took it on himself to write a children’s book, “The Story of the Constitution for Boys and Girls” (Shōrten to Shōjō no tame no Kempō no Ohanashi). He still romanticized the emperor but also wrote with power about the great ideals of peace, popular sovereignty, and fundamental human rights. Amending the constitution, Kanamori told his young readers, should only be done with extreme care. His concluding words were these: “We must, without fail, respect and defend the constitution. And, though the road is long, let us walk steadily, step by step, toward the light of these ideals.” These were not words that he had been compelled to utter.72
Kanamori’s predecessor as minister in charge of constitutional affairs, Matsumoto Jōji, did not adjust so graciously to the fait accompli. A decade after his humiliation, by then in his eighties, he defiantly declared that he had never even condescended to read the final version of the new constitution.73 On the other hand, former prime minister Shidehara, who had tearfully told his ministers that they could only expect contempt from subsequent generations, came in later years to claim proudly that he himself had first mentioned the ideal of renouncing war to General MacArthur. This was in all likelihood just the mistaken recollection of an elderly man—but, whether fact or fiction, his sincere embrace of the “no war” ideal gave credibility to the argument that, when all was said and done, the new constitution had indeed reflected Japanese ideals.74
Emperor Hirohito’s intimate thoughts about the new constitution are unknown, but Colonel Kades and several members of his staff were royally thanked. Each received a small silver cup, embossed in gold with the sixteen-petal imperial chrysanthemum crest and engraved with a notation that this gift commemorated the introduction of the new constitution.75
