In the Realm of a Dying Emperor

Recently I have read the following book. Its main points are:

Book title: Norma Field. 1991. In the Realm of a Dying Emperor. NY: Pantheon Books.

Main points:

Part III. In December 7, 1988 during the Nagasaki city assembly, a communist party representative asked the city’s mayor to comment on the registry of imperial well-wishes and the question of the emperor’s war guilt. The 67 years old Motoshima Hitoshi was the mayor. The mayor replied that the Emperor did have the responsibility for the war. Yet he was released from taking such responsibility and became the symbol of the new constitution. (178)

- soon right-wing sound trucks sounded out demands for Motoshima’s death.(179) Meanwhile conservative organizations demanded that the mayor should withdraw his statement.(180) The Rising Sun Society added its denunciation (181). Due to the deafening threats of the extreme right, the mayor and his family had to be placed under 24 hours police protection. (181)

- the newspaper account after Hirohito’s death uniformly portrayed him as a peace-loving constitutional monarch from the beginning, The question of war guilt festered at the heart of ‘self-restrain’. (183)

- the mayor, in the face of calls for retraction, apology and resignation; he surprised the nation not only by standing firm but by elaborating upon his words: I was not saying that the Emperor alone was responsible for the war. There were many who should be responsible, myself included. (184)

- perhaps the most eloquent and certainly the most enduring testimony that support mayor Motoshima’s statement was to be found in the more than 7,300 letters, postcards, and telegrams received by the mayor from the whole country and overseas during a period of 3 months.(189)

- the mayor sought to have them published. The choice fell rather quickly to Komichi Shobo, a Tokyo company with Harada Nao as the company president. In 1945 Harada was confused by the adults who only yesterday had said they were going to die for the emperor and, soon after the war ended, proclaimed themselves believers in democracy. (190)

- the project to publish had received unusual publicity form the start. In April, NHK aired a one-hour documentary in which some of the letters were read and several of their writers interviewed. (192)

- for Harada, the shock of the transformation of the Japan society after 1945 was shared by Yano Toshio, a 61 years old physician. What surprised him more than anything was that the Emperor, who, in military uniform, had declared to us, ‘I am the commander in chief’ who issued the rescripts could transform himself overnight into a suited and hatted figured, attempting to appeal to the people and to the occupation authorities. If that transformation from deity to human were to be allowed, then every evil would be condoned. (193-4)

- another letter was from Mizusawa Makoto who said that when he considered the question of the Emperor’s war guilt, he could not help seeing it not only in the Emperor's acts during the war, but in his words and deeds thereafter as well.(195)

- Norma’s aunt in Nagasaki was a woman of passionate who had never spoken out. (220) Norma's uncle, a hero of her adolescence, had been a left wing youth. (225) Uncle married aunt in 1954. (226)

- 17 years had passed since Norma last visited Nagasaki, but it was not unrecognizably changed. (230)  The beginning of the “Nagasaki citizens’ committee to seek free speech” could be traced to a drinking session the night after mayor Motoshima’s statement was made known. This committee was built on the recognition of a need to do something visible, something public, not to let Motoshima stand alone. (233)

- Norma's aunt and uncle’s reception given to Norma in Nagasaki had exceeded the latter's expectation. When originally Norma wrote to say that she would be visiting Nagasaki because she wanted to meet the mayor and planned to stay at a hotel, her aunt ordered her to report to her house. (237)

- in the interview with the mayor, Norma asked about situating the A-bombs in the context of Japanese aggression. The mayor said that he had been working on that for a while. The bomb had its roots in problems going back to the Meiji era, he meant the problems of Japanese aggression. (254)

Epilogue: Mayor Motoshima’s quest for a renaissance began with the dying emperor, and all but inevitable brought him to the brink of his own death (in deed he was later assassinated but survived). It was a lonely renaissance, spurred by the recognition that he could do very little. The fact of death made daring reflection possible. Surely emperor Showa made his great, unwilling contribution in the form of his slow dying.  Chong Chuwol, a Korean-Japanese women borrowed the words ‘thou needst not die’ from a 1904 poet, twisted them slightly to urge the Emperor to prolong his dying so that he might achieve the humanity denied by this identity either as prewar deity, or as postwar symbol.(272)