Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (11 page)

During the years that Japan's elites hyped the suprahuman virtues of Meiji, justified the post–Russo-Japanese War status quo, and rewrote the textbooks to promote emperor worship, Hirohito was attending the elementary course at the Peers' School, which he entered in the spring of 1908, at the age of seven. Located in Yotsuya, Owari-ch
, near the front gate of the old Akasaka Palace (about a twenty-minute walk from his K
son Palace), the Peers' School had been established thirty years earlier, under the aegis of the Imperial Household Ministry, to educate all children of the imperial family (
k
zoku
) and the old court nobility. After the Peerage Act of 1884, the children of newly titled peers (
kâzoku)
could also attend, and the school expanded. The Meiji emperor had appointed General Nogi, a hero of the Russo-Japanese War, as the school's tenth president and charged him with educating his eldest grandson.

General Nogi favored a strict military-style education and was a firm believer in Confucianism,
bushid
, and the precepts of Zen. He refused to pamper the little princes. On his instructions they were made to walk to school every morning, escorted by a medical attendant and two employees of the Imperial Household Ministry. As passersby looked on, they marched along in single file, with little Hirohito resolutely in the lead, Chichibu behind him, and Takamatsu in the rear. On rainy days they were allowed to ride in carriages; Hirohito rode alone while his brothers rode together and behind—the only exception being when one was sick.
⁴⁰

Because Hirohito was not a robust child, the teaching staff at the school focused, on Nogi's orders, on physical education and health as much as on deportment and academic achievement. At the same time they sought to implant the virtues and habits Nogi considered appropriate for a future sovereign: frugality, diligence, patience, manliness, and the ability to exercise strong self-control
under difficult conditions. Devotion to duty and love of the military stood equally high in Nogi's vision of the ideal monarch. Under Nogi's tutelage Hirohito came to an early recognition of his physical weakness, and the need to overcome it by dint of hard work. From this experience as a child, he may also have come to feel that with the right education one could overcome all shortcomings.

Nogi was aware that the armed forces of modern Japan had been since their inception the armed forces of the emperor, and that they were supposed to be directly commanded by him.
⁴¹
Since the little prince would one day be in charge of the nation's military affairs, exercising the prerogative of supreme command in a way his grandfather had never been trained to do, the instructors at the Peers' School were told to “pay careful attention to guiding him in military matters.”
⁴²
In 1910 Meiji issued Imperial Household Regulation Number 17, requiring military training and service experience for the male members of the imperial family.
⁴³
This law completed a process of compulsory militarization of the imperial family that had been going on for more than thirty years. For young Hirohito, however, military matters at this stage merely denoted training in horsemanship, which he began as early as the fourth or fifth year of elementary school, and the playing of war games (reenacting battles of the recent war) with his brothers and classmates.
⁴⁴

In formulating his spartan curriculum, Nogi must have borne in mind the failures experienced in trying to educate Hirohito's father. Crown Prince Yoshihito had had so many chief tutors and general supervisors of his education (including It
Hirobumi and Gen.
yama Iwao) that no one could ever tell who was really in charge of educating him.
⁴⁵
Nogi, however, benefited from an established system of ideological indoctrination and his own intense, overpowering character. When Nogi insisted that the boys salute and address him every morning as “Excellency,” Hirohito and his brothers readily complied.
⁴⁶

Throughout his years at the Peers' School, Hirohito passed his
winter school term and vacations in Numazu, Shizuoka prefecture, and his summers in Ikaho, Gumma prefecture, and in Hayama, Kanagawa prefecture. He had frequent contact with his brothers but was more often in the company of his specially selected classmates—thirteen boys, later reduced to nine. Already he received instruction in Shinto rituals from court nobles serving as “ritualists” within the Imperial Household Ministry. Hirohito would be the high priest of state Shinto—a religious as well as a political monarch.
⁴⁷
Ancestor worship was also implanted early, before his character began to crystallize, by his performance of Shinto rituals. While he and his brothers lived in the K
son Palace, every morning on rising, after splashing water and soap, and then toweling, they were taught to pray in a small, two-mat room by bowing in the direction of the Grand Shrine of Ise and the Imperial Palace.
⁴⁸
As Hirohito grew older his visits to shrines and imperial mausoleums deepened his sense of the importance of his ancestors.
⁴⁹
The religious identity that worked its way into his thought was one of the main results of his early childhood upbringing.

The central component of this identity was Hirohito's strong sense of moral obligation to imperial ancestors, who were the source of his being, his authority, his household fortune, and indeed whatever sustained both him and the nation. The creed of the ancestors bore on Hirohito, as the future head of the patriarchal imperial family. He was obliged to learn to perform solemn rites for them.
⁵⁰
This relationship to tradition and the essence of his public obligation was summed up in the expression
k
s
k
s
(”the imperial founders of our house and our other imperial ancestors”).
K
so
denoted his mythical forebears, starting with the sun goddess, Amaterasu
mikami, and continuing through Emperor Jimmu.
K
s
meant “our other imperial ancestors,” or the line of historical emperors who had succeeded to the throne over time.
⁵¹
K
so k
s
thus linked Hirohito directly to mythology and to the artificially constructed imperial tradition as a whole. It served as one source of
his moral viewpoint and as the basis for his later assessments of the state.
K
so k
s
,