An Emperor’s Funeral Tests Democracy in Japan

Emperor Hirohito’s death on Jan. 7 and his burial on Friday represent key chapters in an unfolding national drama--and the stakes include survival of Japan as a political democracy. Tension began two years ago when the emperor had major surgery. From that point on, an unprecedented war of nerves gradually mounted. When the late emperor suffered a serious relapse last September, alarm bells began to ring in earnest.

We Americans have had a poorly perceived but genuine role in this drama, based on the growing U.S. insistence that Japan rearm--the process Washington cheerfully refers to as “burden sharing.”

“Why is Ronald Reagan trying to destroy Japanese democracy?” I used to hear that question many times during the Reagan years from left-wing Japanese critics of American foreign policy. But then when an influential local editor and former university classmate of mine--a man who has studied at Harvard and has no socialist leanings of any sort--pushed this question at me two years ago I knew that the Japanese mass media was gearing up for an unprecedented war of nerves. At the center of the struggle was the “slippery slope” argument.

The slippery slope is as old a controversy as the postwar “MacArthur” constitution: Rearming will lead to resurgent nationalism and fierce nationalism will lead to the death of democracy. Many American critics have dismissed the argument as an idle left-wing obsession but the anti-conservative opposition in Japan already feels that it is dying the death of a thousand cuts.

The most sensitive battle of all has been over what place the emperor--once the supreme focus of nationalism--is to occupy in the self-definition of the Japanese people. How the late emperor died, how his passing was received by the country and how the new emperor articulates his constitutional function has been testing Japan’s national posture as no other event could.

The Japanese man in the street has been the object of this struggle, rarely an actor in it. The real battle has been between elites over what message, what image, what interpretation was to be transmitted to the public via print and electronic media.

Often covert and subtle, this contest for the hearts and minds of a nation has been the central story of the last nerve-racking five months, leaving Japanese reporters blurry-eyed with exhaustion.

Part of the exhaustion was caused by fear. Reporting on the imperial institution is a nightmare of linguistic snares, social taboos and interpretational bear-traps. When a Japanese editor at the English-language Mainichi Daily News accidentally ran his newspaper’s carefully prepared obituary before the emperor died, the man lost his job and his boss was demoted.

The mistake was partly a consequence of automated printing, but this was no excuse. To speak of the emperor’s passing before the fact was inauspicious in the extreme. Especially on the right-wing of Japanese political opinion, many people thought that the president of Mainichi Shimbun, the huge parent of the Mainichi Daily News, should have resigned as well.

On two consecutive days, the Mainichi Daily ran a front-page apology; the earlier piece, labeled an “extremely grave error,” was “canceled” and “retracted.” Notice of the firing and demotion were given prominent play in the unambiguous hope that such sacrifices would ward off social censure--and discourage right-wing violence.

Such fears are not the product of overworked journalistic imagination. The Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s second largest daily, has repeatedly had its offices around the country bombed. In 1987, there was a rifle assault on the newspaper’s branch in Hyogo Prefecture that left one reporter dead, another in grave condition. These anonymous attacks on the most conspicuous defender of Japan’s postwar settlement and constitution are almost certainly the work of one or more right-wing radical groups. The country has as many as 800 of them.

Where violence and physical intimidation are judged inappropriate, the radical right has other, more sophisticated tactics. When the Japanese version of Penthouse (published by Kodansha) ran a story claiming a sexual scandal in the imperial household, rightists brought pressure on advertisers. Eventually the magazine had to halt publication, but the final issue included a formal apology to the imperial family.

Then there is that most formidable weapon: the oversized speaker-car. Armed with as many as 20 separate speakers, these cars can make normal conversation impossible for 1,000 yards in any direction. Last year, the right mobilized more than 100 such vehicles to lay siege on the annual meeting of Japan’s Teachers’ Union (Nikkyo-so), which is uncompromisingly opposed to any form of Japanese rearmament. Other speaker-car targets have included Akahata, the official organ of the Japan Communist Party, the most fearless critic of Japan’s emperor system.

Since mid-September when the nation began what was in effect a deathwatch, speaker-cars have been conspicuous by their absence. The streets of Tokyo took on an eerie quiet as right-wing groups agreed that nothing should disturb the high solemnity of the Japanese nation in official mourning. Now that the emperor has been buried, a major demonstration of muscle by the country’s 120,000 self-proclaimed rightists (many of them gangsters) is confidently predicted by many observers.

At the same time, the wide and diverse world of the Japanese right--the young tough in his speaker-car, the intellectual in his think tank or the ruling party ideologue on the hustings--has been struck a blow from an unexpected source: the new emperor himself.

The essence of action within the closed court of the imperial Japanese house is the symbolic gesture. Just as a classical drama can turn on the absence of a chair or the slightest abandonment of formal speech, the new occupant of the Chrysanthemum Throne made a revolutionary gesture in his first formal address by merely adding the honorific san in speaking of and to the Japanese people, something his father would have never dreamed of doing.

Another move also stunned Japanese conservatives: The new monarch used the occasion of his first address to come down firmly in favor of Japan’s postwar constitution. Many conservatives object to the constitution’s peace clause, its symbolic definition of the emperor and its foreign authorship.

The speech immediately raised two sensitive questions. Since the Imperial Household Agency no longer appears to attract the ablest civil servants and since the new emperor has yet to assemble his own group of top advisers, did he write the speech himself? Many Japanese commentators suspect that he did.

Second, and still more interesting, why did Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita approve the content of an address so obviously contrary to his political party’s traditional notions of upholding imperial dignity and its opposition to the 1946 constitution?

One veteran Japanese journalist who has covered the imperial household insists that former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone would never have accepted the address as written; only Takeshita’s awe of the imperial institution and his own lack of clear ideological principles allowed the speech to be presented. Other well-informed sources disagree, insisting that the emperor would have had his way in any case.

The net result of last week’s burial is mixed. The Japanese right can claim a major victory for intensive education in nationalist sentiment during the last month. Yet the new emperor’s stance seems to confirm the view of those who argue that the modern Japanese imperial court has always looked in the right direction even if it sometimes found itself in the wrong end of the room.

Whispered speculation that the emperor’s liberal stance makes him vulnerable to right-wing protests--or worse--remains just that: speculation. But there is no question that Japan has been experiencing an extraordinary historical turning point. The test of a democratic society has so far been met, but it has been a close run. More important, the drama is not yet finished.