Imperial Japan at Its Zenith

The Wartime Celebration of the Empire's 2,600th Anniversary

Kenneth J. Ruoff

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780801471810
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Japanische Geschichte

In 1940, Japan was into its third year of war with China, and relations with the United States were deteriorating, but it was a heady time for the Japanese nonetheless. That year, the Japanese commemorated the 2, 600th anniversary of the founding of the Empire of Japan. According to the imperial myth-history, Emperor Jimmu, descended from the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, established the "unbroken imperial line" in 660 BCE.

In carefully choreographed ceremonies throughout the empire, through new public monuments, with visual culture, and through heritage tourism, the Japanese celebrated the extension of imperial rule under the 124th emperor, Hirohito. These celebrations, the climactic moment for the ideology that was central to modern Japan's identity until the imperial cult's legitimacy was bruised by defeat in 1945, are little known outside Japan.

Imperial Japan at Its Zenith, the first book in English about the 2, 600th anniversary, examines the themes of the celebration and what they tell us about Japan at mid-century. Kenneth J. Ruoff emphasizes that wartime Japan did not reject modernity in favor of nativist traditionalism. Instead, like Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, it embraced reactionary modernism. Ruoff also highlights the role played by the Japanese people in endorsing and promoting imperial ideology and expansion, documenting the significant grassroots support for the cult of the emperor and for militarism.

Ruoff uses the anniversary celebrations to examine Japan's invention of a national history; the complex relationship between the homeland and the colonies; the significance of Imperial Japan's challenge to Euro-American claims of racial and cultural superiority; the role of heritage tourism in inspiring national pride; Japan's wartime fascist modernity; and, with a chapter about overseas Japanese, the boundaries of the Japanese nation. Packed with intriguing anecdotes, incisive analysis, and revelatory illustrations, Imperial Japan at Its Zenith is a major contribution to our understanding of wartime Japan.

1

THE NATIONAL HISTORY BOOM

In 1939, Shiki Seiji (1894–1964), president of the Newspaper’s Newspaper Company (Shinbun no shinbunsha), decided to build in his home prefecture of Nagano a “2,600th Anniversary Culture Dome” to mark this august anniversary. The 2,600th Anniversary Culture Dome was one of thousands upon thousands of mnemonic sites constructed, in the period centered on 1940, to commemorate the 2,600th anniversary of the imperial dynasty and to celebrate historical examples both of virtuous rule by the unbroken line of emperors and of the people’s loyalty to the throne. Many of these mnemonic sites survive today, and the 2,600th Anniversary Culture Dome would not merit attention except for one detail. Shiki decided to bury under the dome a time capsule containing items informing future generations about that special year in Japan’s history.

Along the same lines as the documentary film “Revering the Founder’s Work,” the time capsule was intended to commemorate for eternity the 2,600th anniversary year. Unlike the film record of the anniversary celebrations that was commissioned by the government, however, the time capsule was a private undertaking. Shiki specified that the time capsule should be opened in 100 years. The dome survives today, as does the unopened time capsule. Shiki’s descendants are honoring his wish, and it will not be opened until 2040.1

Once he had decided on his plan, Shiki advertised widely throughout the empire to solicit donations of representative newspapers, magazines, books, posters, catalogs, photographs, drawings, recordings, samples of calligraphy by elite figures, and other items that documented his country at the time of the celebrations. In order to recognize the thousands of donors who displayed generosity beyond the parameters set by Shiki, the Newspaper’s Newspaper Company published a catalog of all items received. The catalog indicates that Shiki succeeded admirably in preserving a record of Japan at the time of the 2,600th anniversary celebrations.2

So voluminous and rich are the sources in the time capsule that this historian, if it were not a violation of private property, gladly would have unearthed it with his bare hands to avoid the years of work and considerable expense involved in tracking down at used bookstores throughout Japan and libraries throughout the world many of the same sources listed as being enclosed in the capsule. In addition, the time capsule includes some particularly desirable items that seem to survive nowhere else, notably ephemera such as record jackets, exposition catalogs, posters, and travel brochures.

In scanning titles from the lists of books, brochures, posters, and records as well as the advertisements that appear in the catalog of items stored in the time capsule, one is informed about the extent of the imperial history craze sparked by the 2,600th anniversary. A small sample of titles, translated into English, includes “Emperor Jimmu,” “Divine Japan,” “The Spirit of the Founding of the Nation and Contemporary Ideological Problems,” “Newly Annotated Version of the Kojiki,”3 “2,600-Year History of Japan,” “Mt. Takachiho,”4 “A General National History,” “Research on Kusunoki [Masashige],”5 “Catalog of the Exhibition on 2,600 Years of History [sponsored by the Asahi Newspaper Company],” “Pilgrimage to Sacred Imperial Sites,” and “Dictionary of National History.”

Even as the catalog provides a sense of the national history boom, it does not convey its full extent because Shiki did not solicit donations of the most recent forms of media, such as films and radio programs. Film was an immensely popular medium at the time and productions such as “Fatherland” (Sokoku) sought to capitalize on the popular interest in history. Radio was also at the center of the national history boom.6 The national radio company’s (NHK) offerings in 1940 included the once-per-week, yearlong programs “Touring Shrines” and “Touring Historical Sites,” three-times-per-week, year-long programs on “National History” and “National Literature,” periodic broadcasts of lectures on “Japanese Culture,” monthly broadcasts of “National History Dramas” for children with titles such as “The Descent from Heaven,” and monthly broadcasts of “National History Dramas” geared to adults (the one for January was titled “The Fatherland”), not to mention special broadcasts of 2,600th anniversary ceremonies and celebrations.7

In the years leading up to the anniversary and throughout 1940, almost every imaginable means of shaping memories of the past was employed to transmit the historical significance of the 2,600th anniversary. Even as Shiki was at work gathering materials for his time capsule, individuals throughout the empire were unearthing archaeological evidence to prove, building monuments to commemorate, staging exhibitions to inform their countrymen about, publishing travel guidebooks to help tourists locate holy places (seichi) relating to, visiting sacred sites relating to, celebrating in song, lecturing about, representing visually, and chronicling in everything from authoritative academic treatises to commercial picture books written for young children, the 2,600-year history of the imperial line.

No aspect of imperial history was more competed over, investigated, commemorated, exhibited, and chronicled than the exploits of Emperor Jimmu. Looking back, the widespread belief in and obsession over a fictitious emperor in conjunction with the 2,600th anniversary celebrations seems to represent a moment of national insanity. Whatever one terms the Emperor Jimmu rage, there is little question that the first emperor was at center stage in 1940. The absence of a charismatic leader in the flesh along the lines of Hitler or Mussolini is a point often stressed by scholars who dismiss fascism as a useful concept for understanding Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, but did the incomparably charismatic first emperor serve as a surrogate during the height of the 2,600th anniversary celebrations? Japan in 1940 clearly shared much in common with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, including the manufacture of a fanciful history, celebrated by charismatic means, which justified military expansionism.

More recently, North Korea’s use of the myth of Tan’gun has rivaled Imperial Japan’s use of the unbroken imperial line ideology.8 As fantastic as the myth of Emperor Jimmu, Korea’s foundational narrative is based on Tan’gun (b. 2333 BC), said to be the progenitor of the Korean race. The cult of the leader in present-day North Korea reminds some older Japanese of the wartime cult of the emperor. In a 2003 letter published in the Nagoya edition of the Asahi shinbun newspaper, Ishikura Ayako (seventy-three years old) pointed out that a series of articles in the Asahi about life in present-day North Korea, characterized by widespread suffering but also regular displays of allegiance to the Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Il (1941?–), reminded her of being hungry as a child during the latter part of the war even as she and her peers performed various displays of loyalty, with utmost sincerity, to the emperor.9

Children into Imperial Subjects

The extent to which Japan’s formal educational system by the late 1930s had come to emphasize, through texts and rituals, a national history and civil religion based on reverence for the unbroken imperial line has been well documented. Its role in performing this function in Japan proper during the 2,600th anniversary year needs introduction only in condensed form here. The year 1940 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Imperial Rescript on Education that defined citizenship in terms of loyalty to the emperor, the embodiment of the nation-state. By 1940, three generations of school children had been made to memorize the Imperial Rescript on Education, which appears in abridged translation below:

Know ye, Our subjects:

Our Imperial Ancestors have founded Our Empire on a basis broad and everlasting and have deeply and firmly implanted virtue; Our subjects ever united in loyalty and filial piety have from generation to generation illustrated the beauty thereof. This is the glory of the fundamental character of Our Empire, and herein also lies the source of Our education….

Should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth. So shall ye not only be Our good and faithful subjects, but render illustrious the best traditions of your forefathers.10

Japan’s formal educational system, including lessons in the civil religion, extended to its colonies. Japanese authorities foisted upon their colonial subjects a fanciful version of the past that sanctified Japan’s role in world history. But this version of the past also represented a rare exception to the Europe-centered history (which was itself often specious) dominant most everywhere else in the world that at the time was largely under the control of Euro-American imperialist powers.

Early in 1940 (the thirtieth anniversary of Japanese rule over Korea), the Government-General of Chōsen (Korea) published two collections of children’s essays on the topic of “Our Readiness to Salute the 2,600th Anniversary.” One featured examples from elementary school students and the other from middle school students.11 The contributors were not only the children of Japanese residents of Korea but also Korean students who at their Japanese-administered schools were expected to master the same material as their Japanese counterparts. The essays provide a window into how colonial subjects were inducted into the civil religion of Japan.

In 1940, Japanese colonial authorities tightened policies designed to Japanize Koreans in the areas of religion, language, and also, most infamously, in the area of names.12 The essays cited below, from the collection published by the Government-General, present a dramatically different account of Korean schoolchildren’s reactions to Japanese imperial education than does, for example, Richard Kim’s (1932–2009) novelistic account of growing up in colonial-era Korea. In Kim’s Lost Names, the proud Korean family at the center of the story, among other careful, measured displays of resistance, devises a ploy to foil the sixth-grade play that was to be staged, flawlessly of course, in honor of the birthday of Crown Prince Akihito (b. 1933).13

However, memoirs by other Koreans who came of age during the colonial era suggest that the devotion to Imperial Japan on display in the children’s essays below was in many cases authentic. In his 2004 memoir, the poet Kim Shi-Jong (b. 1929) remembered having been an “imperial youth” (kōkoku shonen) rather than a Korean.14 Kim remembered his desire to make himself into a worthy “child of the emperor” (tennō heika no sekishi),15 and even recalls witnessing as a junior high school student what he now understands was the kidnapping of Koreans to serve as forced laborers. At the time, he thought it natural that such Koreans be asked to exert themselves on behalf of their country, Imperial Japan.16 Finally, Kim stressed that although today he is well aware of the cruelty of Japan’s colonial policies, he nonetheless remembers a childhood punctuated by small joys such as field trips.17

Kim Chang Kook (b. 1933) also stressed in his memoir that however much he is now aware of the distasteful nature of Japan’s colonial policies, he, too, remembers his childhood in Seoul as having included many quotidian joys.18 Kim Chang Kook entered the Second National Elementary School in Seoul in the year of the 2,600th anniversary celebrations. The memoirs of Kim Shi-Jong, Kim Chang Kook, the essays below, as well as Kim’s Lost Names, indicate the diverse ways that Koreans reacted to Japanese colonial rule. But the experiences of children, the most malleable of imperial subjects, are not representative of the overall population in Korea. Many Koreans fiercely resisted the Japanese occupation of their country, and tens of thousands paid for their opposition with their lives.

Certain catchphrases and themes appear over and over in the essays the children composed to commemorate the 2,600th anniversary. The essays by middle school students were longer, but the compositions by the fourth and fifth graders touched upon the requisite themes more concisely. The analysis here relies mostly on essays by Korean children in those two age groups. All the students, in one manner or another, successfully recounted the basic official storyline about the founding of Japan: Emperor Jimmu, descendant of Amaterasu, undertook from Hyūga (the ancient name for the area that broadly corresponds to modern-day Miyazaki Prefecture) a perilous eastward military expedition that culminated, after the Imperial Army covered great distance and overcame many obstacles, with his enthronement in Kashihara 2,600 years ago; this marked the inauguration of the imperial dynasty, which subsequently remained unbroken up to the present emperor (in 1940, Hirohito), the 124th divine sovereign of Japan.

Kang Jong-Won, a fourth-grade boy from Jinnampo, began his essay as follows: “It has been 2,600 years since Emperor Jimmu subdued his enemies and was enthroned at the Kashihara Palace in Yamato.”19 The area of Yamato broadly corresponds to modern-day Nara Prefecture. Several students recounted what a strong impression, in listening to a radio broadcast of a ceremony at Kashihara Shrine to mark the 2,600th anniversary, the rhythmic sound of beating drums had made on them. The fifth-grader Tsuji Yoshiaki (a child of Japanese residents of Korea) stressed that throughout the world Japanese who listened to this broadcast were moved to hear the shouting of “Banzai!” that announced the beginning of the 2600th anniversary year.20

The children cited the typical lit...