1

PHOTOGRAPHY’S AURA

The Modern Emperor and Mass Media

Understanding the distribution, reception, and transformations of representations of Emperor Hirohito (1901–1989, r. 1926–1989) is key to understanding the constellation of mass media in early twentieth-century Japan. The institution of the emperor played a leading role in the accelerated development of a nationwide information network, determining modes of production and reception of mass media, but it also provided an ambiguous, conflicted space where the identity of imperial, national(ist) subjects was at once constructed and contested.
One of the most important representations of the emperor was his portrait photograph, or goshin’ei, hereafter referred to as “the Photograph.” The Photograph was preserved at schools, in a separate Shinto shrine on the premises or in a special box made of paulownia kept in a safe place, and also in battleships, in military division headquarters, in local government offices, and at Japanese overseas embassies. People were not allowed to gaze upon it when it was exhibited at a ceremony, and they had to bow to the place or the Shinto shrine that preserved the Photograph every time they passed by. The emperor’s visual image was not to be gazed at when it was worshipped in this way, and by 1940 the other media, such as radio, newspaper photographs, magazine illustrations, and film, were contained or strongly affected by these veneration practices, in terms of both production and reception. A set of rituals and protocols required a copy of a photograph—a sheet of paper—to be treated as if it were the sacred body of the emperor. As a result, starting from the implementation of these veneration rituals in the 1890s, there were cases in which people died to protect the Photograph.
During the very last year of the Asia Pacific War, at least nine school teachers and principals died in attempts to protect the Photograph between April and August 1945.1 One case was a school principal’s death during air raids in Himeji City, Hyōgo Prefecture, which was recorded in an account by a teacher:
In the next moment, I found myself in the middle of a sea of fire and my whole body was on fire.… When I ran to the principal, Ah, what a dreadful sight! He had received one of the enemy’s bullets in his abdomen and another in his chest. I called, “Can you hear me?” and when I tried to raise his body in my arms, I saw that his intestines were exposed and the blood was gushing out. Quickly I provided emergency care, and kept calling his name at the top of my lungs, “Hang on, sir!” Gasping for air, he groaned and whispered to me, “Take care of the Photograph.” As soon as I heard this, I untied [the box that contained] the Photograph from his back, and put it on mine.2
The story describes a patriotic, heroic school principal who died in an air raid while attempting to rescue the Photograph, from the perspective of one of his teachers. As portrayed here, the principal’s priority was to revere the emperor. But there must also have been social pressures, so that he would have wanted to avoid a situation in which he would survive and face accusations surrounding the loss of the Photograph.3
Another account is by navy sailor Watanabe Kiyoshi (1925–1981), who joined the navy at age sixteen and survived the sinking of the battleship Musashi in 1944.4 In his autobiography, The End of the Battleship Musashi, he described the Photograph in the battleship. The Musashi was damaged, and inside the sinking ship sailors were smashed and mutilated by collapsing walls and heavy loose metal equipment. In the battleship’s final moments, when Watanabe was struggling to escape on a floor slippery with blood, he heard a voice: “Here is the Photograph! The Photograph! Move it!” Turning, he saw,
Two petty officers, who had huge picture frames wrapped by bleached cotton cloth on their backs and tied across their bodies, were coming in my direction under the leaning mast, guarded by several officers and led by junior and senior sentries who were shouting. It looked like they were “the Photographs” [goshin’ei].
“The Photographs” were originally preserved in the Commander-in-chief’s office on the upper starboard deck of the Musashi when it was the flag ship.… However, they were moved to inside the controlling room of the main battery, as any damage would be an offense to His and Her Majesties. The room was protected with thick armor and was the safest place in the ship. Now, they were being removed from below at the captain’s order.… Though those two petty officers would jump [into the sea to escape] with the heavy glassed-over frames on their backs, in accordance with orders, they would not be able to swim well. Lives which could be saved might not be because of these pieces of paper. So, I did not feel like bowing [to the Photographs].5
Both accounts reveal the extreme practices in which subjects were situated to prove their loyalty under the modern emperor system. The tragic irony was that it is the nature of photography to be mass-produced, with exhibition value but no cult value, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s terms. The Photograph thus went against the specificities of its own medium in being bestowed with such an aura.
This chapter examines the mediascape of the modern emperor system, which attempted to exercise peculiar uses of media. Historically, the emperor system became essential for the new, modernized government established in the 1860s to replace the old Tokugawa regime of the previous three hundred years. In the new government, the emperor’s assigned role was to serve as the cultural and political center of the state, and, in turn, the everyday experiences of imperial citizens were mediated by images of the emperor with regard to their national(ist) identity formation, consumption and leisure, education, soldierhood, and norms of gender, ethnicity, and religion. In scholarship on modern Japanese history, the emperor system has also been one of the most important topics for studies of politics, international relations, censorship, social norms, and people’s everyday lives. Many cultural historians understand Emperor Hirohito as one of the most compelling driving forces for imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, and social oppression, in ways that match the preceding episode of death on the Musashi.6 Yet I argue that the relationship between Hirohito and imperial citizens was not as linear—oppressor versus oppressed, or state ideology versus subservient recipients—as scholars have often assumed.7
The following questions have often been examined: What were the emperors like as people? How did the notion of lèse-majesté affect cultural production and suppress free speech? Was Hirohito accountable for Japanese military aggression? Parliamentary documents, political leaders’ diaries and testimonies, the emperor’s public and private statements, laws and contemporary publications, and ordinary citizens’ oral histories have been examined to demonstrate how central the emperor system was for modern Japanese history. Nevertheless, one area that has not been fully explored is the relationship between the emperors and mass media.8 In this regard, sociologist Yoshimi Shunya provides an insightful remark, arguing that the modern emperor system should be grasped as a system of reception and consumption of hegemonic discourses that converged on the body of the emperor. In other words, the emperor was an institution of the mass media rather than a person: “The modern emperor system is nothing other than the configuration of various media in which the effects of interpretations of the emperor’s body, whether or not it is present, converge at the level of the nation (in the nation state). Therefore, the emperor system has no essence outside the nationwide reception of media.”9
Yoshimi begins his discussion with the construction of an infrastructure for electrical telegraphy in Japan, which occurred in areas that were to receive visits by the Meiji Emperor Mutsuhito (b. 1852, r. 1867–1912). These transmission lines, which were constructed for imperial visits in the late 1870s through 1880s, were called Lines for His Majesty’s Visit (Go jun’kō sen).10 The emperor’s images were the content of media, but at the same time the emperor, as an institution, was a driving force in the introduction and construction of a technological network.
The political and cultural centrality of the modern emperor was constructed and reinforced both by everyday practices and by the geographic and technological expansion of information networks. Soldiers had to memorize and recite the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers (Gunjin chokuyu, 1882), and students had to listen to school principals reading aloud the Imperial Rescript on Education (Kyōiku chokugo, 1890). In addition, a variety of media circulated widely, including school textbooks, postal stamps, postcards, newspapers, magazines, radio programs, film, rumors, and graffiti, which ostensibly formed a unifying, nationalized experience mediated by educational, cultural, and political institutions such as the military, schools, and organized local activities. To ensure the circulation of these media, the construction of the infrastructure of the nation, including the railroad, electrical transmission lines, and simultaneous radio broadcasting networks, was accelerated. The process of developing infrastructure configured and confirmed the dichotomized relations between metropolitan and periphery, mainland (naichi) and external territories (gaichi), ethnic Japanese and colonial subjects, male and female, and healthy and disabled. Examination of Hirohito’s representation must be situated in this dynamic, since exploration of its mediality reveals imperial citizens’ everyday experiences of the modern emperor system, development and consumption of mass media, and national identity formation.
With a focus on Hirohito, this chapter examines the media representation of emperors as one of the fundamental issues of the early twentieth-century mediascape. Hirohito was born in 1901, ascended to crown regent in 1921 and to the throne in 1926, and reigned through 1989. His early life in the first half of the twentieth century, in particular, paralleled the unprecedented expansion of media technologies, from the halftone printing technology of newspaper photographs to the introduction of radio broadcasting (first for domestic, then international, transmissions) to the expanding production of film to the invention of television and to the introduction of facsimile transmission. Hirohito was a media celebrity. The possible cancellation of his engagement was reported as a scandal in newspapers, and high school girls collected postcard reproductions of his portrait (see fig. 1.1).
image
FIGURE 1.1. A postcard of Hirohito, date unknown, but most likely when he was the prince regent in the early 1920s.
His 1921 visit to Europe was covered by newsreels that were enthusiastically received. When the films were sent from Europe to Japan, every possible combination of routes was examined and explored, by airplanes, Siberian and transcontinental railroads, transatlantic ships, or all together. News about him prompted the deployment of private airplanes for transportation of films, funded by newspaper companies that competed to screen their newsreels faster than their rivals. Newsreels were in high demand in the 1920s and 1930s. The film news covered the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923, the airship Graf Zeppelin’s arrival in Kasumigaura (Northern Kanto) in 1929, the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1932, and many other events and incidents. Images and conceptions of world geography were drastically changing, not only for the viewers of these newsreels but also in the way the film itself was transported.
During these same decades, however, the Japanese emperor’s media presentation underwent reconfiguration to prioritize the political dogma of the national polity, or kokutai, which designated the emperor as absolute sovereign, eventually to the degree that even citizens’ suicidal deaths for the Photograph became prescriptive in the mid-1940s. This shift contradicted the ongoing expansion of media technologies and cultures. This chapter explores how this conflict between two modes of presentation of the emperor, the venerated Photograph and the increasingly available mass media, illustrates the interactions of the emperor system, the mediascape, and the lives of imperial citizens in early twentieth-century Japan.

The State of the Field

From the 1950s to the present, many popular publications and TV programs on the imperial family, including Emperor Hirohito, have been produced to cater to a variety of audiences. The publications vary from gossip journalism to right-wing tributes to glossy photographic journals to memoirs and personal essays about the imperial household written by its former staff members or by journalists specializing in the imperial family. Such stories of the imperial family are an important part of the contemporary Japanese media, both online and in print or broadcast, since imperial family members are celebrities.11 The difference between the imperial family and other media personalities, though, is that the former are regarded as representatives of the nation. To name a few specific cases, in addition to the well-known funeral of Hirohito in 1989, in the following years candidates for crown princess fed gossip journalism; the imperial wedding of Crown Prince Naruhito and Owada Masako in 1993 was widely covered and celebrated as its predecessor had been in 1959; more recently, there w...