Hirohito and the 36 coup

From The Dark Valley:
HIRourr 0 found shades of the prison-house closing upon him as the decade progressed. At its beginning he was merely a captive of convention. He was occasionally paraded as a pageant, usually immured as a fetish. Before his people the Emperor manifested himself in all the trappings of divine kingship. He could not smile or wave lest it should impair his dig-nity, though he was obliged to appear in ill-cut clothes because tailors had to guess his measurements, not being permitted to touch him. When he was on tour spectators were not allowed within too metres of his maroon Rolls-Royce. His situation was epitomised by the weird communion he held with his subjects while on fleet manoeuvres in Kinko Bay during the autumn of 1931. After dusk, while his ship's company were having their evening meal, the Emperor was observed on the aft deck standing alone, stiffly at attention, saluting towards the land. It was five or six miles away and totally obscured by the murk. But a telescope revealed two rows of flickering lights, evidently lanterns waved by fishermen and bonfires blaz-ing on hill-tops. A chamberlain wrote: At such a distance the people on the coast could not possibly have seen the ship, so they must simply have timed this demonstration of their loy-alty and affection according to the predicted hour of the ship's passage. The emperor's response to this must have been intuitive, for unless he was aided by some temporary change or quirk in atmospheric conditions, it is unlikely that he could see the lights with the naked eye. It was quite a moving sight . . . the emperor saluting people he could not see, and the people hailing the emperor they could not see. At first the ship's Captain could not think how to acknowledge their greeting. Then he slapped his knee and exclaimed, "The searchlights! We'll turn on the searchlights, and they will know we are here. " As their beams burst through the gloom and played over the undulating shores of the Sat-suma and Osumi peninsulas, the vessel became a seaborne temple of light. The eyes of crew and courtiers blurred with tears as they witnessed the imperial aureole and thought of the joy it would inspire. Yet it is clear that, in their perceptions of each other, the living god and the anonymous masses remained in the dark.
For the most part Hirohito was quite invisible, shut up in the Imperial Palace. It was guarded by an azure moat, massive grey walls of unmortared stone, heavy iron-studded gates and the Towers of Tenshu, with their pro-tecting "arms from Heaven. "No sightseers were admitted and from the outside nothing could be discerned of the Palace, a maze of pavilions built on the site of the ancient Tokugawa castle, except porcelain tiled roofs shaped like Mongolian tents. Twice a year, at cherry blossom time in the spring and when the autumn chrysthanthemums were in bloom, the Emperor gave garden parties. Privileged visitors, the men in top hats and frock coats, the women in European dress or gorgeous silk kimonos, saw a 300-year-old horticultural masterpiece. It contained ancient plum trees and gnarled pines, lotus pools and bronze fountains, waterfowl and but-terflies, vines and water lilies, willow-pattern bridges and lacquered pergolas, purling brooks and rockeries banked with cryptomeria. It was another Eden, a place of sublime confinement. The first telephone was admitted to the Palace only in 1928, the first journalist in 1933. He was Ward Price, star reporter of the London Daily Mail and a celebrated lickspittle of totalitarian regimes. He owed his entree to having given Japan "very favourable publicity" in the past, and he would soon trumpet the army's "most categorical assurance" that it had no aggressive intentions towards China.
and
 Paradoxically, the more the soldiers exalted the Emperor as a god, the more they reduced him to the status of a puppet. This was because they could pull the strings in a theocracy, whereas if the Emperor were a constitutional monarch Japan would be a parliamentary democracy with the army remaining subject to civilian control. Hence the explosive debate, which rocked Japan to its volcanic founda-tions in 1935, over whether the Emperor was a mere "organ" of government. This view had been put forwards by a dull legal scholar named Minobe Tatsukichi, who now became the victim of a heresy hunt comparable to that involving Salman Rushdie in a later age. The irony is that Minobe, who supported the authoritarian Meiji constitution, would else-where have been deemed a conservative. However, he did defend civil rights such as freedom of speech and he attacked the army for making war "the basis of our national policy." The soldiers and their factious political supporters retaliated with an "epoch-making" assault on liberalism. Minobe, as Saionji said, became "the scapegoat." Few had read his works and fewer understood the intricacies of the academic argument. But the campaign ripped across the country like an earthquake. Minobe was invited to kill himself.
....
Like the pearly mist which so often veiled the morning face of Tokyo, aggression was in the air. The city was tense with anxiety and rife with rumours of further terrorism. Court officials were given police guards. Saionji believed that the country was taking the path of German or Russian dictatorship. When in mid-January 1936 Japan finally walked out of renewed London negotiations to limit naval rearmament, after once more being denied parity, Takahashi feared that political and military extremists would unite to bring about fascism.
Signs that its enrages would precipitate some new putsch were legion. Hirohito's brother, Prince Chichibu, was rumoured to be encouraging the young officers: he had given one of them a set of his underwear. It was clear, in fact, that some new libation of blood was about to be offered on the altar of the Showa Restoration. But the Japanese convention of tacit understanding operated to a bewildering degree. The coup was common knowledge in government circles and
even received a measure of official collusion. It was foreshadowed but unmentioned. Agitated by the Minobe debate and stimulated by the trial of Aizawa, which took place at the beginning of 1936, the plotters, a score of modern samurai none higher in rank than captain, had steeled themselves to act. They held the leadership in common, but they were not an entirely homogeneous group. Many streams, some flowing from Nazi and revolutionary sources, fed their murderous idealism. But its essential well-springs were nationalistic. The plotters were in revolt against the degenerate alien creeds of liberalism, capitalism, fascism, socialism and Communism. They mod-elled themselves on the 47 ronin in the classic morality tale, whose vengeful self-sacrifice for the sake of personal obligation answered the deepest yearnings of the Japanese soul. In fact the current which swept these young soldiers to destruction was that of native religious fundamentalism. No one has analysed this better than the writer Mishima Yukio, who shared their utopian ambition to purge Japan of foreign defilement and their "supreme resolution to die a fanatic's death."
At two o'clock the next morning, 26 February 1936, bugles sounded reveille within earshot of the Palace. Fourteen hundred troops of the 1st and Guards Divisions donned heavy greatcoats and packs, drew live ammunition and mustered in their barracks. Many of them expected another night exercise. But, obedient to a fault, they carried out their ferocious orders to the letter. Separate squads set out to assassinate seven prime targets.