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The Emperor Showa standing at ground zero: on the (re-)configuration of a national memory of the Japanese people

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Takahashi Tetsuya
Takahashi Tetsuya*
Affiliation:
University of Tokyo
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A Japanese history textbook for junior high school students, created by the members of the ‘Atarashii rekishi kyokasho o tsukuru kai’ (hereafter referred to as ‘Tsukurukai’; Society for History Textbook Reform)1 and approved by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in spring 2001 (we shall use the edition published for the general public), depicted the Showa Emperor over two pages at the end of its ‘Personality Columns’. The first part of this column, entitled ‘The Showa Emperor - a life lived with the Japanese people’, reads:

‘On the day of the demise of the Showa Emperor’

On the morning of 7 January 1989 (the 64th year of Showa), when the Showa Emperor (124th Emperor: 1901-1989) passed away, many people assembled in front of the Imperial Palace on hearing the news. An old lady of sixty-eight years old who had been exposed to the radiation in Hiroshima and was then living in Tokyo said, ‘I have a feeling that I have always been sharing hardships with the Showa Emperor’. Just like this old lady, in front of the Palace as well as in all parts of the country, various kinds of people including youths, elderly people, housewives and salaried workers quietly pondered over the true meaning of the era of the Showa Emperor. (p. 306)

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , January 2004 , e6
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2004

References

Notes

1. In Japan, new nationalistic movements that advocate the recovery of national pride have intensified since the latter half of the 1990s. ‘The Society for History Textbook Reform’ is one such representative neo-nationalistic movement. It was established in December 1996 by activists including Nishio Kanji, a scholar of German literature, Fujioka Nobukatsu, a scholar of education, and Kobayashi Yoshinori, a cartoonist, and its formal inauguration took place in the following January. In its inaugural statement, the Society criticized existing history textbooks as being dominated by post-war ‘masochistic views of history’ and advocated the creation of a new textbook that could serve as ‘the official national history’. The Society strongly demanded deletion of all descriptions of the so- called ‘comfort women’ from existing textbooks.

2. From ‘The Path to the Tokyo Tribunal’, broadcast in 1992 in Video Images of Twentieth Century Japan, NHK. The narration reports that ‘50,000’ people gathered. It is probably a scene from the ‘Hiroshima Citizens Welcoming Venue’, built at the site of the former Gokoku Shrine to greet the Emperor on 7 December 1947.

3. On 29 May 1949, the ‘Nagasaki Citizens Welcoming Venue’ was built near ground zero to greet the Emperor, with 50,000 people reportedly gathering.

4. In this interview, the Emperor was also asked: ‘What does Your Majesty think of so- called war accountability?’ To this he answered: ‘I did not study literature well enough and do not understand the exact connotation of such words. As I do not understand well these matters, I cannot answer such questions.’ It is one of the wonders of world history that such an answer was made, coolly and in the eyes of the world, and that it remained largely unchallenged. However, in light of the arguments advanced in this paper, it is nothing to be astonished at in post-war Japanese society. In any case, the complexity of the Showa Emperor's interview is beyond the scope of this article and needs further close examination.

5. This does not mean that, in Hiroshima and in Nagasaki, there were no individuals who tried to detach themselves from identification with the Showa Emperor. For example, the case of Ms Amano Fumiko, also ‘an old lady exposed to radiation in Hiroshima’, is remarkable. One should also bear in mind the example of Hitoshi Motoshima, former Mayor of Nagasaki.

6. Hitoshi Sakurai (2001) ‘How video images have been delineating hibakusha’, Sekai September: 132.