The death of Emperor Taishō

At 1.25 a.m. on 25 December 1926, in the imperial villa at Hayama on Sagami Bay, south of Tokyo, Emperor Yoshihito of Japan died. He was 47. For five years he had not reigned even formally: a grave illness had led to his eldest son, Crown Prince Hirohito, taking over power in his name as regent in 1921. On his father’s death the 25-year-old Hirohito became the 124th Emperor of Japan. That same day the name of the new era, Shōwa, was proclaimed, and the late ruler passed into history under the name of his own era, as Emperor Taishō. The change on the throne was neither a coup nor even a surprise, but it closed the period the Japanese call “Taishō democracy” and opened a reign in whose first twenty years Japan conquered Manchuria, started a war with China and attacked the United States.

The sick emperor

Yoshihito, the only son of Emperor Mutsuhito to survive childhood, had been in poor health since birth. A few weeks after he was born in 1879 he suffered what was then diagnosed as meningitis, and in childhood and youth many other serious illnesses. He ascended the throne on 30 July 1912 and in the first years of his reign carried out the duties of a monarch: he appointed prime ministers, opened sessions of parliament, underwent a formal enthronement in Kyoto in November 1915, and in 1914 Japan declared war on Germany in his name. After the enthronement, however, his health began to fail, and from 1918 his condition was clearly worsening. He found it increasingly difficult to speak and walk, and he was losing his memory. At the end of 1918 he did not attend the opening of the parliamentary session, in 1919 he travelled outside Tokyo to manoeuvres for the last time, and in December that year he gave up opening the Diet because he had been unable to learn to read the speech from the throne.

On 30 March 1920 the Imperial Household Ministry admitted publicly for the first time that the Emperor was ill, although it spoke only of neuralgia and fatigue, not of disorders of speech and balance. A year later it was clear that the monarch’s condition would not improve. In the autumn of 1921, after Hirohito’s return from his journey to Europe, the Minister of the Imperial Household, Nobuaki Makino, and the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Masayoshi Matsukata, prepared the establishment of a regency. In accordance with the Imperial Household Law of 1889, the decision was taken by the Imperial Family Council and the Privy Council. On 25 November 1921 the Crown Prince became regent (sesshō), and the Imperial Household Ministry issued a statement that for the first time openly described the Emperor’s illness and linked it to the illness he had suffered in infancy. According to courtiers’ accounts, Yoshihito reluctantly gave up the seal that the regent was now to use, and for weeks afterwards kept repeating that there was nothing wrong with him.

He spent the last five years of his life in the imperial villas at Nikkō, Numazu and Hayama. He was not present at his son’s wedding in January 1924, nor at his own silver wedding anniversary in 1925. At the end of 1925 he collapsed, and in 1926 he almost stopped walking. In August he was taken to Hayama in a wheelchair. At the end of October he developed a high fever, and Hirohito cancelled a trip to Kyushu to keep watch at his father’s bedside. From 19 November the Imperial Household Ministry issued bulletins on the Emperor’s health every few days, and from 8 December, when the patient began to suffocate and was given oxygen, the whole country followed his death throes. From 16 December the radio suspended entertainment broadcasts, and cancelled festivities and New Year preparations, prayers at shrines and crowds outside the palace showed how much, in the space of half a century, imperial authority had become part of ordinary Japanese life. Prime Minister Reijirō Wakatsuki and his ministers, the genrō and members of the Privy Council came to Hayama, and destroyers stood guard offshore.

The night of 25 December

On the afternoon of 24 December the pneumonia worsened, and in the evening the doctors declared the Emperor’s condition critical. He died of heart failure at 1.25 a.m., in the presence of Empress Sadako, the Crown Prince and his wife Nagako, members of the imperial family and his biological mother, Naruko Yanagiwara, a former concubine of Emperor Meiji. From that moment Hirohito was Emperor. In the Japanese monarchy there was no interregnum: accession to the throne (senso) took place at the moment of the predecessor’s death, while the formal enthronement was postponed until the end of mourning. Hirohito underwent it only on 10 November 1928 in Kyoto.

With the change of ruler came a change in the name of the era by which years were counted. Since the Meiji period the rule had been one era to one reign. The year 1926 was therefore both the fifteenth year of Taishō and, for its last seven days, the first year of Shōwa. The name of the new era was chosen from several proposals prepared by the Imperial Household Ministry. It came from the Chinese Book of Documents, from a passage about a people living in brightness and about harmony among all nations, and is sometimes translated as “enlightened peace”. The change was not without embarrassment. The daily Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun, the forerunner of today’s Mainichi Shimbun, printed in a special edition during the night that the new era would be called “Kōbun”. When the Imperial Household Ministry announced the name Shōwa before noon, the paper had to retract the report, and its editor-in-chief resigned. For a long time a version persisted, repeated also by former court officials, that the court had changed the name precisely because it had leaked to the press. According to surviving documents, however, including the diary of the President of the Privy Council, “Shōwa” had already been the final choice at the beginning of December, while “Kōbun” appeared only on a list of proposals prepared in the Prime Minister’s office.

At the end of January 1927 the late Emperor received the posthumous name Emperor Taishō, after his era, whose name means “great righteousness”. The state funeral took place on the night of 7–8 February 1927 in the Shinjuku Gyoen gardens. A procession several kilometres long made its way at night from the Imperial Palace, lit by fires burning in iron lanterns, and according to contemporary estimates between one and a half and three million people lined the route. The procession was broadcast live on the radio. Taishō was the first modern emperor to be laid to rest not in Kyoto but in Tokyo, in the Tama mausoleum in what is today the city of Hachiōji.

Japan at the change of reign

Yoshihito’s fourteen-year reign was a period of great change. During the First World War Japan sided with the Entente, seized the German possessions in China and the Pacific and imposed the Twenty-One Demands on China. At the Paris Peace Conference it sat among the five great powers and received a permanent seat on the Council of the League of Nations, although its racial equality proposal was rejected. In the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 it agreed to limit its fleet, and in the same year it withdrew its troops from Siberia, and in 1925, under the convention with the USSR, from northern Sakhalin as well. In domestic politics the waning influence of the old oligarchs, the genrō, and the Emperor’s illness opened the way to party government. In 1918 the leader of the Rikken Seiyūkai, Takashi Hara, became Prime Minister, and from 1924 the prime ministers were usually the leaders of the largest parties in the lower house. In 1925 the vote was extended to all men aged 25 and over, which quadrupled the electorate. At the same time, however, the Peace Preservation Law was passed, which punished with imprisonment activity directed against the “national polity” (kokutai) and private property, and which became an instrument for persecuting the Communists and later all opposition.

In December 1926 the country was governed by Wakatsuki’s cabinet, based on the Kenseikai party, and foreign policy was directed by Kijūrō Shidehara, an advocate of cooperation with the Western powers and non-interference in China’s internal affairs. This caution was increasingly criticised in the army and in the opposition Seiyūkai, because the balance of power in China was shifting. In the summer of 1926 the army of the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek – built with Soviet aid and thanks to the alliance with the Communists that had begun in 1923 with the agreement between Sun Yat-sen and the Soviet diplomat Adolph Joffe – set out from Canton on the Northern Expedition and by the end of the year had taken control of much of central China. Japanese military men feared that a united, nationalist China would lay claim to Manchuria, where since the Treaty of Portsmouth Japan had held the Kwantung leasehold, the South Manchuria Railway and the Kwantung Army that guarded it.

Significance

The death of the ailing monarch in itself changed nothing in Japanese policy. For five years the regent had been in charge, and it was Hirohito, not his father, who received prime ministers and signed documents. Yoshihito’s illness, however, had long-lasting consequences. His reign made it plain that the Emperor, who under the Meiji Constitution was “sacred and inviolable” and held supreme command of the army and navy, did not in practice need to rule for the system to work. Decisions were taken in the cabinet, by the genrō, at court and in the general staffs, and the throne merely sanctified them. The courtiers around the young Hirohito, led by the last genrō, Kinmochi Saionji, and Makino, wanted the new Emperor to be the opposite of his sick father: an able, visible and universally revered symbol of the nation. The imperial cult, previously overshadowed by the ruler’s weakness, intensified markedly in the Shōwa era.

The first years of the new reign dealt further blows to “Taishō democracy”. In March 1927 a banking crisis broke out, which in April brought down Wakatsuki’s cabinet. The new Prime Minister, General Giichi Tanaka, sent troops to Shandong province, and in 1928 officers of the Kwantung Army, acting on their own initiative, assassinated the Manchurian ruler Zhang Zuolin. In 1931 the same army staged the Mukden incident and seized Manchuria; in 1932 Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai was shot and party government came to an end; and in 1937 the war with China began. All this was done in the name of the Emperor, whose authority – sacred in theory and limited in practice – allowed the military to invoke his will over the heads of the government. The Shōwa era, which began on the night of 25 December 1926, became in its first part the age of Japanese militarism and the Pacific War, which ended with the surrender in September 1945.