|
With the war Hirohito lost all but symbolic power. Installed as Crown Prince in 1916 and enthroned as Emperor ten years later, he was pressed by General Douglas MacArthur to relinquish his claims to divinity in 1946. Under the 1947 constitution the Emperor was identified as nothing more than "the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people."
戦争で、天皇は、象徴的権力以外のすべてを失った。
１９１６年に、皇太子となり、その１０年後に即位された天皇は、１９４６年、ダグラスマッカサ元帥に強いられて、現人神でない旨を宣言した。
１９４７年制定の憲法においては、天皇は、「国家と国民の統合の象徴」にすぎないと規定されている。
Akihito's accession had been meant to herald a new era in which the imperial office would be free of the controversy that surrounded his father, Emperor Hirohito, for his role in World War II. But it coincided with the publication in the magazine Bungei Shunju of some recently discovered notes on conversations between Hirohito and aides in 1946, in which he discussed his role prior to Pearl Harbor. "It was unavoidable for me as a constitutional monarch," he said, "to do anything but give approval to the Tojo Cabinet on the decision to start the war." Had he opposed the attack, the result most probably would have been a coup d'etat. The country would have been violently and pointlessly divided because in any case war was inevitable. As the U.S. pivoted its great war effort from Europe to the Pacific, it came face to face with a startling fact—it was waging war against a god. Its sea armada had already crushed his island outworks. Its planes were pulverizing his cities. Now its armies were preparing to invade the sacred soil of his homeland.
To the god's worshipers this would be a sacrilege such as the desecration of a church would be to the invaders. Most Americans were unaware of the sacrilege.* To them this god looked like a somewhat toothy, somewhat bandy-legged, thin-chested, bespectacled little man. But to 70 million Japanese he was divine. He was the Emperor Hirohito. Slowly, as they came to bloody grips with their exotic enemy, Americans were beginning to realize that to the Japanese mind (an entity utterly alien to them in culture and almost as uncontemporary with them as Neanderthal man), the Emperor Hirohito was Japan. In him was embodied the total enemy. He was the Japanese national mind with all its paradoxes—reeking savagery and sensitivity to beauty, frantic fanaticism and patient obedience to authority, brittle rituals and gross vices, habitual discipline and berserk outbursts, obsession with its divine mission and sudden obsession with worldly power. In this sense, the war against Japan was inevitably a war against its Emperor. In this sense, the great U.S. military redeployment from West to East was aimed directly at the myth of the divine Mikado, ruling a divine nation on the warpath. Grimy U.S. soldiers and marines who were last week digging out their diehard enemy from the caverns of Okinawa and Luzon were just as surely digging out this myth from the dark corners of the Japanese mind. Who was this man who was also a god? The Clouds of Time. The Emperor Hirohito's millennial origins were lost in the clouds of time. In the beginning, say the Japanese history books, Heaven & Earth were one, a primal protoplasm drifting in the void like a jellyfish on water. Then the Universe took form. On the Plain of High Heaven the first gods appeared. The Sky Father, Izanagi, stood upon the Rainbow Bridge to Earth and dipped his jeweled spear into the sea. The drops that fell, as he withdrew the blade, congealed into the Japanese archipelago. The Sky Father purified himself by bathing in the sea that washed Japan. He washed his nose: the Storm God was born. He washed his right eye: the Moon God appeared. He washed his left eye: lo! resplendent Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, leaped into being. Later, the Sun Goddess sent her grandson, Prince Rice-Plenty, to govern the Earth. In good time, the Sun Goddess' great-great-grandson, Jimmu, became Japan's first emperor. He commanded his descendants to bring all the eight corners of the universe under the one roof of Japan. Thus, in the year 660 B.C. began the divine dynasty whose 124th scion is the Emperor Hirohito, the Magnanimous-Exalted, the Sublime Majesty, the Imperial Son of Heaven of Dai Nippon (Great Japan), in whose reign the Japanese nation was fated to attempt to carry out the Emperor Jimmu's command. Scion of the Ages. Hirohito was born in the lying-in chamber of Tokyo's Aoyama Palace on April 29, 1901. Japan itself was suffering a rebirth. It was 48 years since U.S. Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry had opened the ports of the Land of the Gods to U.S. trade and western ideas. Four years hence Japan would defeat vast, backward Russia and emerge as a foremost Pacific power.
His grandfather, the reigning emperor, was the bold, shrewd Emperor Meiji, in whose name the nation had resolutely turned toward the West. Hirohito's father was the ailing Yoshihito, who died insane. Careful & Colorless. The gods favor obscurity, and Hirohito's early boyhood was as obscure as a god could wish. He was brought up in imperial privacy, and rarely exposed to the eyes of his future subjects. (A memorable occasion was the day he deigned to visit the zoo.) He is reported to have been a quiet, rather colorless, careful little boy—the kind of child who in the U.S. always eats his spinach. (Even today, though he is growing a little stout and his uniforms are rather tight in the wrong places, Hirohito is abstemious in his eating and drinking habits and a vigorous respecter of the modern gods of nutrition.) Though slight and thin-shouldered, he practiced every sport, even wrestling. He was best at swimming. Years later he confessed: "I am not really good at any sport. In swimming, however, I rather think I can hold my own." Ferocious Masks. In the quiet and careful seclusion of the imperial boyhood, war and the warrior mind, like the ferocious masks of Japanese No plays, loomed always in the background. Two of Hirohito's earliest mentors were the war lords who had made modern Japan a power—stern General Maresuke Nogi, the victor of Port Arthur, and Admiral Heihatiro Togo, who, at Tsushima, had sunk most of Russia's feckless fleet in one of history's decisive naval battles. When the future emperor was ten years old, Emperor Meiji died and General Nogi dramatized the most important element in the boy's education—Shinto—by an act that startled the world and can scarcely have failed to impress the child. When the aging General and his wife learned of Meiji's death, they purified themselves by Shinto rites. Then according to the old Shinto practice of junshi (servants following masters in death), they knelt before their household shrine and with ceremonial swords committed hara-kiri by eviscerating themselves. Later, Americans, shocked and baffled when trapped Japanese soldiers blew themselves to bits with hand grenades, or Japanese civilians drowned themselves rather than surrender, might recall General Nogi's act, with a shudder. |
- >
- Yahoo!サービス
- >
- Yahoo!ブログ
- >
- 練習用
コメント（0）
