AN IMPERIAL HOUSEHOLD’S STRATEGY TO SAVE EMPEROR HIROHITO
IN MACARTHUR’S JAPAN
by
Kaoru Hoshino
MA University of Pittsburgh 2010
This thesis was presented
by Kaoru Hoshino
It was defended on
April 2, 2010 and approved by
Richard J. Smethurst, PhD, UCIS Research Professor, Department of History
Akiko Hashimoto, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology
Clark Van Doren Chilson, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Thesis Director: Richard J. Smethurst, PhD, UCIS Research Professor,
Department of History
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WHY AN AMERICAN QUAKER TUTOR FOR THE CROWN PRINCE?
AN IMPERIAL HOUSEHOLD’S STRATEGY TO SAVE EMPEROR HIROHITO IN MACARTHUR’S JAPAN
Kaoru Hoshino, M.A.
University of Pittsburgh, 2010
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This thesis examines the motives behind the Japanese imperial household’s decision to invite an American Christian woman, Elizabeth Gray Vining, to the court as tutor to Crown Prince Akihito about one year after the Allied Occupation of Japan began.
In the past, the common narrative of scholars and the media has been that the new tutor, Vining, came to the imperial household at the invitation of Emperor Hirohito, who personally asked George Stoddard, head of the United States Education Mission to Japan, to find a tutor for the crown prince. While it may have been true that the emperor directly spoke to Stoddard regarding the need of a new tutor for the prince, the claim that the emperor came up with such a proposal entirely on his own is debatable given his lack of decision-making power, as well as the circumstances surrounding him and the imperial institution at the time of the Occupation.
From September 1945 to the end of his term in April 1951, General Douglas MacArthur led the operation of the Occupation. As Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, MacArthur had a considerable effect on the affairs and decision-making processes of the imperial household, whose major concern was the emperor’s life and sovereignty that had been at stake since Japan’s surrender. To protect the emperor in MacArthur’s Japan, the imperial advisers made a series of stratagems to project a new image of the emperor favorable to MacArthur who had a personal aim to Christianize Japan.
Given these circumstances, this thesis argues that it is not coincidental that the emperor, or whoever was in charge of finding a tutor for the crown prince, requested that the new tutor be American Christian; the purpose of the new tutor was to provide the crown prince Englishlanguage lessons, which, from an objective point of view, could have been conducted by a nonAmerican or non-Christian native English speaker. Ultimately, this thesis shows that the imperial household’s effort to invite a new tutor for the crown prince was more politically-oriented than has been interpreted in the past.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE ....................................................................................... VII
1.0 INTRODUCTION 1
2.0 THE CONVENTIONAL NARRATIVE 6
2.1 THE REQUEST FROM THE EMPEROR 6
2.2 VINING IN JAPAN 8
3.0 THE CONTEXTS SURROUNDING THE IMPERIAL INSTITUTION IN OCCUPIED JAPAN 11
3.1 DEBATES OVER THE TREATMENT OF EMPEROR HIROHITO 11
3.2 MACARTHUR’S PERSONAL AIM AS A CHRISTIAN 15
4.0 A CHRISTIAN TUTOR IN MACARTHUR’S JAPAN 20
4.1 EMPEROR HIROHITO AND CHRISTIANITY 20
4.2 THE APPOINTMENT OF VINING, THE QUAKER TUTOR 28
4.3 QUAKER NETWORK 31
5.0 FURTHER ANALYSIS OF THE IMPERIAL HOUSEHOLD’S MOTIVES 37
5.1 THE JAPANESE PERSISTENCE TO THE TUTOR’S NATIONALITY 37
5.2 THE INITIATOR(S) 41
5.3 BLYTH THE LIAISON 46
6.0 CONCLUSION 50
BIBLIOGRAPHY 52
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PREFACE
I would first like to thank the Asian Studies Center for their generous awards that have allowed me to conduct my graduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Without this support, I would not have been even able to come here in the first place.
Secondly, I would like to thank my adviser, Dr. Richard Smethurst, for his tireless support and guidance throughout my research and thesis writing. This work would not have been possible without his feedback that always stimulated my thinking and thus helped improve my project as a whole. My appreciation also goes to Dr. Akiko Hashimoto and Dr. Clark Chilson who have generously served on my thesis committee. Their guidance and encouragement have continuously helped me do the best I could.
I also would like to acknowledge the following individuals by name: Ms Dianne Dakis in the Asian Studies Center, who was always kind and open to my questions and helped me in so many ways; Mr. Katō Mikio of the International House of Japan, who has helped me realize my potential and whose longtime contribution to the promotion of intellectual cooperation between the Japanese and people of other countries continue to inspire me; and Dr. James Huffman, H. Orth Hirt Professor of History Emeritus at Wittenberg University and my adviser during my undergraduate studies, who first inspired me to pursue this field.
Lastly, I would like to thank my family, whose immeasurable support and understanding have always made whatever I pursue possible.
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Elizabeth Gray Vining (1902-1999), a Quaker, professional librarian, and author of children’s literature from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, went to Japan to tutor Crown Prince Akihito (the current emperor: 1933-) about one year after the Allied Occupation of Japan began. During her stay in Japan from October 1946 to December 1950, not only did she tutor the crown prince and teach English classes at Gakushūin (the Peer’s School) in Tokyo, but she also gave English lessons to other imperial family members, including the crown prince’s three sisters, Prince
Masahito (the crown prince’s younger brother), Princes Takamatsu and Mikasa (Emperor Hirohito’s two younger brothers), and the empress.2 Today, her memoirs and autobiography remain as valuable sources to which one can turn to learn about the experiences she had as the first female foreign tutor to the crown prince. Furthermore, her writings are significant in the sense that they show the condition of postwar Japan through the eyes of a non-Japanese individual who played a part in the reconstruction of the nation by working inside the imperial household.
Her contribution was acknowledged and appreciated during and after the four years she worked in Japan. From the time she arrived in October 1946, she built a reputation on her personality and teaching. The fact that the crown prince’s English improved to the point that he was able to meet and satisfactorily carry on conversations with General Douglas MacArthur in 1950 proved not only her excellence as an educator, but also the success of the imperial household in choosing to have the crown prince educated by an American female tutor. Outside of her teaching job, Vining occasionally gave lectures to both Japanese and American audiences. She spoke mainly about English-language education and her teaching experiences at the imperial court and Gakushūin. But, there were times when she received questions from her audience about Japan’s future, the emperor, and the progress of democratization in Japan. Given her position as tutor to the future emperor, her talks, as well as the short articles she wrote from time to time, attracted public attention and undoubtedly had an impact on many people at the nondiplomatic level both inside and outside Japan.
Even after her duties in Japan ended, she continued to contribute through her writings on Japan. Her first memoir, Windows for the Crown Prince, which instantly became a bestseller when it was published in the United States in spring 1952, was particularly significant as it was the first book to portray the Japanese imperial household from the inside. The book was translated into Japanese, French, German, Spanish, and Dutch, and was read worldwide by those who had had little knowledge of the life of the imperial family. Moreover, Vining established a close friendship with imperial family members while she was in Japan, and they continued to stay in touch as friends until her death in 1999.
The project of having an American tutor for the crown prince was a great success for the imperial household, and in fact, there seemed to be only positive things written about Vining and her work at the court. Yet, though the project turned out well in the end, when considering the state of affairs in immediate postwar Japan, and further analyzing the events in detail, one may find the imperial household’s venture to invite a new tutor from the United States (Japan’s former enemy and the major force of the Occupation) more politically-oriented and complex than it seems on the surface. As a result, the story commonly told in past decades—that of an American Christian tutor sought out and invited for the crown prince at the emperor’s request— does not stand up to close scrutiny. Historical records certainly show that the emperor personally asked George Stoddard, who headed the United States Education Mission (USEM) to Japan in spring 1946, to find a tutor from the United States. Yet, given the circumstances of the imperial institution under the Occupation, as well as the position of the emperor and his lack of decisionmaking power at the time, it is difficult to believe that the project to seek a foreign tutor for the crown prince was initiated only at the will of the emperor. The crown prince’s education lay in the hands of the education counselors at the imperial household, and as is still the case today, the emperor was not expected or allowed to do anything entirely on his own.
In fact, one of the contradictions one finds when studying the event is that by the time the emperor requested that Stoddard find a tutor in late March 1946, the imperial palace had already hired an Englishman, Reginald Horace Blyth, as the crown prince’s English private tutor. Blyth began to teach the crown prince in April 1946, and from then on he continued to deliver English lectures at the imperial court until May 1964, five months before his death. The fact that the emperor requested another tutor even before Blyth began teaching shows that it was not out of dissatisfaction with him that the emperor saw the need of another qualified teacher for his son. There are also at least two other aspects of the conditions under which the imperial household requested a new tutor that need to be taken into consideration: first, the imperial household, which had supported Shinto for centuries, suddenly wanted a Christian tutor; and second, the imperial household requested an American tutor in spite of the emperor and his entourages’ longtime preference and admiration for the British royal system, and even emphasized that the new tutor should be sought in the United States instead of in Japan or elsewhere.
In addition, given MacArthur’s intention during the first three to four years of the Occupation to rebuild Japan based on American democracy and American Christian values as he saw them, and the imperial household’s intention to project a new image of the emperor favorable to MacArthur for the sake of the emperor’s survival, the request for an American Christian tutor appears more as a carefully-wrought strategy rather than happenstance. And this leads to my thesis: the idea of inviting a new tutor for the crown prince was developed for purposes other than the crown prince’s education. In fact, one of its purposes may have been specifically political: to help alleviate problems regarding the emperor’s position that the imperial household confronted during the immediate postwar years.
In the past decades, no one in Japan or the United States (except a few contemporary writers, such as Takahashi Hiroshi and Ushijima Hidehiko) has bluntly challenged the conventional narrative based upon the accounts by Vining and Stoddard. Most postwar Japanese writers, if they mentioned Vining at all, acknowledged only briefly the significance of her role as tutor to the crown prince; other than Vining and Stoddard’s memoirs, there seem no English writings that have dealt with this particular event in depth. Partly, this may have to do with the difficulty of obtaining materials on events directly related to the imperial household. In fact, a substantial portion of documents and manuscripts contributed by Vining to the archive at the Haverford College Library is restricted—according to Vining’s own will—for research use and publication during the lifetime of the current emperor (Akihito). While such a limited accessibility to sources can be a challenge to researchers, including myself, it also confirms the fact that there are stories regarding Vining’s work in Japan that have remained untold, presumably for political reasons.
Based on these premises, this paper aims to investigate what really went on behind the scenes at the imperial court from early spring to summer 1946, when a new tutor was requested and sought in the United States. In particular, by unraveling the reasons why the imperial side requested a female American Christian tutor, this paper intends to offer a reinterpretation of the event surrounding not only the crown prince’s education, but also the emperor’s life and sovereignty under the pressure of the Occupation rule. Ultimately, I hope to contribute to the historiographical debate concerning the relationship between the Occupation forces and the imperial household that continues to this day.
Yasuyoshi Kawashima ed., (Tokyo: Kaisō no Buraisu kankōkai jimusho, 1984), 164-165.
2.0 THE CONVENTIONAL NARRATIVE
2.1 THE REQUEST FROM THE EMPEROR
On March 27, 1946, Emperor Hirohito held a reception for the USEM at the imperial palace.
After he greeted each one of the twenty-seven members, he made an unprecedented request of George Stoddard, head of USEM. The emperor asked Stoddard if he could find a tutor for the emperor’s 12-year-old son, Crown Prince Akihito. The next day the news that the Japanese emperor sought a tutor from the United States spread across the North American continent through the media. A few days after the reception, Stoddard and two representatives (Yamanashi Katsunoshin and Terasaki Hidenari) from the imperial side met and discussed in detail the qualifications of the tutor. The Japanese requests were as follows:
1. “An American woman fifty years of age or older.”
2. “…a Christian, but not a fanatic.”
3. “No expert on Japanese culture” or no “‘old Japan hand,’ but someone who came fresh to
Japan.” And “it was not necessary, not even desirable, that she speak[s] Japanese.”
4. “A person with some educational background, but above all, warm-hearted and sympathetic to adolescent youth.”
5. Like Blyth, the other English tutor, she would “confine herself largely to tutoring the crown prince in the English language” for one hour a week.
Stoddard objected at several of these points. He told Yamanashi and Terasaki that the age requirement was set too high and suggested it be lowered; he also pointed out that the task of giving an hour-per-week lesson to the crown prince was too light for the tutor to come all the way from the United States. On the matter of the living conditions of the tutor, Stoddard stressed that “she should have a house of her own, domestic help, and a car—all fitting her exalted place in Japanese eyes, but really a practical solution to her needs.” After the two Japanese compromised accordingly, and the salary for the first year contract was set for $2,000 (which was “modest, in American terms”), Stoddard confirmed that he would find a tutor for the crown prince in the United States.
In the following three months, Stoddard received approximately 600 applications from American women interested in the tutoring position at the Japanese imperial court.14 By midJune, he had narrowed the list to two applicants, Elizabeth Gray Vining and Mildred A. Chaplin, as final candidates for the imperial household to choose from, and submitted their names to the court. On August 7, Stoddard received a cable from the imperial household that it had decided on Vining.
2.2 VINING IN JAPAN
Vining arrived in Japan on October 15, 1946, and officially signed a contract with the imperial household and started teaching the following week. She seemed to have started her work smoothly, and “a second private lesson each week was added to the schedule” scarcely three months after she began teaching. Yet, people outside the imperial court continued to speculate on the primary purpose of her job. For instance, some people, including American missionaries, expected and even expressed their hope directly to Vining that she would “convert the Crown Prince to Christianity,” and some others thought that she had been invited to help democratize the imperial family. In her Windows for the Crown Prince, however, Vining clarifies that her job was to neither convert the crown prince nor “indoctrinate him with any specific dogma,” but to “teach the Crown Prince English.”
Not long after she arrived in Japan, Vining became fully aware of the importance of her job in terms of how it could affect the future, not only of the crown prince, the to-be emperor, but also of Japan as a nation. Thus, she felt a strong sense of responsibility for the duties she had just begun. Moreover, Matsudaira Tsuneo (then the emperor’s grand steward) told Vining that the imperial household wanted her “to open windows on to a wider world for the Crown Prince,” and this made her further think about what she could do for the crown prince other than merely teaching him the English language. She thought she “could present to [the crown prince] ideals of the western world and help him to understand the essential spirit of…democracy.” Then, Tajima Michiji, a Quaker who succeeded Matsudaira as the grand steward in June 1948, told Vining that “the Crown Prince needed a woman’s influence.”22 If both Matsudaira and Tajima meant what they said, one could assume that a new tutor was invited to the imperial household purely for the sake of the crown prince’s education. Yet, if that had really been the case, why then, did the tutor have to be American Christian, and why did the Japanese have to go through the hassle of finding a new tutor from the other side of the Pacific Ocean when there must have been potential candidates (such as English-speaking missionaries and wives of American personnel) in Japan who could have fulfilled the tutoring job?
Oddly enough, no one at the time seemed to have openly asked the question why an American Christian individual was considered as desirable for the tutoring position, and neither Stoddard nor Vining touches on this particular issue in his or her reminiscences; rather, the fact that the emperor or his advisers requested a Christian tutor was simply taken at face value. While the motive behind the imperial household’s selection of a new tutor for the crown prince remained unquestioned, many people, as well as the media, took this as a sign of the emperor’s increased interest in Christianity. But even if it had been the case—that the emperor had truly become interested in Christianity to the point where he wanted his own son to be educated by a Christian— the question of why the tutor had to be sought in the United States still remains.
Before getting into further discussion of the imperial household’s persistence regarding the new tutor’s religious affiliation and nationality, it is crucial to understand the context surrounding the imperial household and the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) during the first years of the Occupation.
3.0 THE CONTEXTS SURROUNDING THE IMPERIAL INSTITUTION IN OCCUPIED JAPAN
3.1 DEBATES OVER THE TREATMENT OF EMPEROR HIROHITO
From the beginning of the Occupation in September 1945, a series of reforms took place under the supervision of SCAP which aimed at eliminating any militaristic and ultra-nationalistic elements from society and making Japan a peace-loving, democratic nation. Accordingly, over 4,050 Japanese who had taken a role in leading the nation into the brutal war were tried as war criminals between May 1946 and November 1948, and over 200,000 men, who were
categorized as former rightists or ultra-militarists, were purged from their offices within the first two years of the Occupation. While those in former leadership positions were subject to such punishment for their involvement in the war, the imperial responsibility for the war emerged as a central concern in the Occupation’s policy-making. Particularly, the discussion in both Washington and Japan centered on the treatment of Emperor Hirohito—that is, whether to put him on trial as a war criminal or to dethrone him for his suspected role as the driving force behind Japanese ultra-nationalism, having led a great number of Japanese people to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the emperor and the imperial land.
By the time Japan surrendered, Japanese authorities had become aware not only of the anti-imperial forces within Washington, but also of “the American public’s hatred for [the emperor] and demands that he be tried as a war criminal.” Thus, from the day the emperor broadcasted Japan’s surrender, the “authorities began to remake [him]…into a man of peace,” as the first step to protect him from harsh treatment by the Allies. As for the Americans in particular, the drafting of the policy concerning the postwar treatment of the emperor had already begun in May 1942, less than half a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and about three years before Japan’s surrender. The policy officers included several Japan specialists in the State Department, such as Hugh Borton, George Blakeslee, and Cabot Coville. Their main point was that the emperor as well as the imperial institution could be used as a tool to rebuild Japan. Their positive approach was then further supported by Joseph Grew, former ambassador to Japan, who served as Acting Secretary of State in 1945. He claimed that “the emperor could be useful in achieving” the objectives of the Allies and that the removal of the emperor as well as the abolishment of the imperial institution could cause a negative effect on the public or even create a maelstrom in society.
By the time the Potsdam Declaration was sent to Japan on July 26, 1945, however, the influence of Grew and the Japan specialists had been in decline, and policy-making concerning the emperor and the imperial institution were beginning to be directed by their opponents.
Particularly, President Truman’s appointment of James F. Byrnes as Secretary of State in July, 1945 and Dean Acheson, “Grew’s acerbic opponent,” as Undersecretary of State to replace Grew in August, diminished Grew’s influence. In addition, members of the War and Navy Departments as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) continued to support Byrnes and Acheson’s idea that the emperor should be subject to punishment as a war criminal and that the imperial institution should be discontinued. After all, the issue was how to democratize Japan. To Grew and his supporters, the emperor was vital to the democratization of Japan, while their opponents saw the abolition of the monarchy as an absolute necessity “if Japan [was] ever to be really democratic.”
Because of the difficulty of coming up with a definite decision, the two opposing sides compromised and managed to produce the Potsdam Declaration, which appeared somewhat favorable to both. It did not explicitly state the intentions of the Allies in terms of how it would handle the issues of the emperor and his war responsibility. In particular, one section, which stated that Japan was to “establish a peacefully inclined and responsible government ‘in accordance with the freely expressed wishes of the Japanese people,’” became debatable in Japan and among the Allies. After the Japanese helplessly tried to understand the document, which, according to Foreign Minister Tōgō Shigenori, “left considerable room for interpretation,” they arrived at the conclusion that the Potsdam document guaranteed the retention of the emperor and the imperial institution.
When MacArthur was appointed as SCAP in August 1945, he was determined from the beginning, as he affirms in his autobiography, to never do anything to derogate the emperor, but to implement the series of reforms he had planned “through the Emperor and the machinery of the imperial government.” There are also other pieces of evidence that reflect MacArthur’s thinking regarding the emperor at the beginning of the Occupation. According to one source provided by Ray Moore and Donald Robinson, “in July 1945 [MacArthur] told Chief of Staff General George Marshall that he favored ‘maximum utilization of the existing Japanese government agencies and organization.’” Supposedly, by then he had become convinced of Grew’s argument about the importance of maintaining the emperor for the sake of the Occupation. Yet, the treatment of the emperor was not something MacArthur could decide on his own even if he practically had “absolute control” over the Japanese people, including the emperor. About three months after the Occupation began, while there was still a split over the issue on the imperial war responsibility and the sovereignty of the emperor within the State, War, Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC), MacArthur was ordered to “collect evidence Washington needed to make a decision” regarding the emperor’s future. At this point, Washington had little intention of trying the emperor for war crimes, and MacArthur was on the same side. The Joint Chiefs, however, continued to claim the emperor’s war responsibility, and in fact, they had just sent their instructions to MacArthur on November 30, reemphasizing that “the emperor ‘is not immune from arrest, trial and punishment.’” Such ongoing debates continued intensively until the end of January 1946, and during that period, MacArthur’s advisers and people in imperial circles became engaged in the effort to prove the expediency of maintaining the emperor’s reign.
3.2 MACARTHUR’S PERSONAL AIM AS A CHRISTIAN
As MacArthur began formally to supervise the Occupation in September 1945, it became clear that the operation of the Occupation greatly depended upon his policy, although he was merely the site supervisor and the Occupation was meant to be directed by the superiors in Washington. This means that while MacArthur in theory was supposed to implement the policies collectively made by the Allies, which for the most part meant Washington, the reality of the situation—that he was in Japan and Washington was unable to get directly involved in the operation of the Occupation—gave MacArthur considerable freedom in policy-making for Japan. Thus, until the end of his term in the spring of 1951, many felt that Japan was in the hands of MacArthur, and policies were being made based on his interpretation of the directives by Washington, which he “protested, or simply ignored” when he disagreed. People even heard him frequently say “my Japan” referring to the nation technically occupied by the Allied forces. Under such circumstances, it became decisively important for the imperial advisers to make sure that he would be on their side, particularly regarding policy on the emperor and the imperial institution, and soon enough, they found a key to make a strong appeal to MacArthur: Christianity.
Although the Potsdam Declaration clearly stated that Japan was to guarantee religious freedom for its citizens, and MacArthur, as SCAP, officially supported the idea, his personal view on religious liberty turned out to be different from “his superiors in Washington,” and his performance became contradictory to the Occupation’s policy on the religious reform. 44 Specifically, while General Headquarters (GHQ) issued an official memorandum called “Abolition of State Shinto”45 in December 1945 and again another directive in November 1946 to further assure the separation of state and church and the abolition of national aid for any religious organizations, including Shinto shrines, 46 MacArthur, who was “a devout Episcopalian” 47 and who even “[thought] of himself and the Pope as the two leading representatives of Christianity in the world,”48 was making “every possible effort” to spread Christian values across Japan to ultimately Christianize the whole nation.49
MacArthur’s idea was that every nation needed a religion to base its values on, but ever since Japan surrendered, it had become “a spiritual vacuum,” and if it were not filled with on His Shoulders), (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2005), 185-186.
44 Lawrence S. Wittner, “MacArthur and the Missionaries: God and Man in Occupied Japan,” The Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 40, No. 1 (February 1971): 77-98, JSTOR, <http://www.jstor.org>, (22 September 2008), 78, and Eiji Takemae, GHQ, (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1983), 192.
45 “Abolition of State Shinto” (December 15, 1945), in Japanese Education since 1945: a Documentary Study, Edward Beauchamp and James M Vardaman Jr., eds., (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E.Sharpe, 1994), 70-71.
46 Takemae, 189.
47 Ben-Ami Shillony, “The Sons of Heaven and the Son of God: Emperors and Christianity in Modern Japan,” Hebrew University of Jerusalem, <http://www.crawford.anu.edu.au/JSAA/Shillony.pdf >, (21 September 2008), 9.
48 John Gunther, The Riddle of MacArthur: Japan, Korea, and the Far East, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), 75.
49 Quoted in Wittner, 78.
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Christianity, “it [would] be ‘filled with Communism.’” For MacArthur, Christianity—which he did not particularly identify as Catholic or Protestant—was not simply a religion to fill Japan’s spiritual vacuum; it was “the antidote to Communism.” In addition, MacArthur saw Christian values as indispensable in accomplishing the true goal of the Occupation, to democratize Japan based on “the American model.” In fact, he clearly stated at one point that “Japan cannot be a democracy without Christianity.” Accordingly, not only did he order 1,000 more missionaries be dispatched to Japan in the fall of 1945 to replace soldiers, but he also initiated a “Bible campaign,” during which he suggested 10 million Bibles be sent to Japan.
In MacArthur’s Japan, Christianity was indeed becoming “the religion of the occupation,” and Christians, whether Japanese or American, Catholic or Protestant, started to gain relatively privileged positions starting from the beginning of the Occupation, largely because of MacArthur’s active support and his personal attachment to the religion. For instance, missionaries, whom MacArthur considered as great contributors to the Occupation in reestablishing a Japan based on his “Christian democracy” ideal,57 were allowed to come back to Japan before businessmen were admitted to reenter Japan. 58 In the meantime, “American educators without church credentials were almost completely barred from entry.” Another case was SCAP’s treatment of Kagawa Toyohiko, a Japanese Christian evangelist, who had earned a divinity degree at Princeton Theological Seminary in the mid-1910s and was acknowledged by the Christian Century at the end of the war as “the greatest living exponent of Christianity in the Orient.” Even after the Occupation authorities had learned of Kagawa’s wartime support of his nation’s war effort, and of a speech Kagawa made during the beginning of the Occupation, which turned out to be “pro-Japanese to the point of being anti-occupation,” he was excluded from the list of the people to be purged. The occupation authorities also let him take his seat in the House of Peers when he was appointed, notably because of his significant contribution to the evangelical campaigns in previous years. When Katayama Tetsu was elected Prime Minister in April 1947, not only did MacArthur openly express his pleasure in knowing that Japan was now going to be led by a Christian “for the first time in history,”62 but he also saw it as “human progress” that three nations, China, the Philippines, and Japan, now all had national leaders who embraced the Christian faith.
Given MacArthur’s power as SCAP, who had considerable authority and who even filled SCAP positions with Christian missionaries, many people must have found Christianity—or more precisely, the Christianity with American democratic values that MacArthur was trying to spread—crucial in making a strong appeal to him when they needed direct support from him and the Occupation authorities. The imperial advisers were perhaps no exception to exploit such an approach. By bringing “their own Christian officials to the fore,” joined by several Japanophile Americans who were willing to help their Japanese Christian friends to protect the emperor, the imperial advisers tried to save the emperor from the war crimes tribunal by remaking him into a pacifist democrat, who fully supported MacArthur’s aim to rebuild Japan based on American-Christian democratic values.
4.0 A CHRISTIAN TUTOR IN MACARTHUR’S JAPAN
4.1 EMPEROR HIROHITO AND CHRISTIANITY
When the war was over, one of the first things that the imperial advisers had to do was to remove the emperor’s wartime image as a divine figure and remake him into a non-divine pacifist, who had true affection for and connections with the Japanese citizens. Accordingly, ningen sengen (declaration of humanity) was drafted in January 1946 and the emperor went on countrywide tours in his new non-military clothes between 1946 and 1954. But, beyond remaking him into a man of peace, the imperial advisers, who had become aware of SCAP’s emphasis on the significance of Christian values in democratizing Japan, decided to create a new image of the emperor “as a pacifist influenced by Christianity” so that he would appear expedient in the eyes of MacArthur.67
From one perspective, their plan succeeded. Within the first two years of the Occupation, the emperor became publicly acknowledged to have great interest in Christianity. Not only did some media report that the emperor would soon convert to Christianity, but MacArthur also told a visiting evangelist preacher that the emperor “revealed ‘his willingness to make Christianity the national religion of Japan.’” Then in the spring of 1946, the world was surprised by the news that the emperor had asked the head of USEM to find a Christian female tutor for his own son. The news spread worldwide and made many people assume that the crown prince, who would technically be Japan’s next emperor, would become a Christian in the near future.
Because “the emperor’s religion became his private affair”70 after the official abolition of State Shinto in December 1945, the emperor could have made his son and even himself convert to Christianity if he had wanted to. And at least for the duration of MacArthur’s control over the Occupation, this seemed like what was happening in the imperial court, and MacArthur’s comments on the emperor’s embrace of the Christian faith were indeed based on some of the emperor’s concrete actions. Besides inviting a Christian tutor from the United States, the emperor seemed to be making an effort to bring Christianity into the court to educate the entire imperial family with religious values. In May 1946, he invited a Protestant scholar, Saitō Takeshi, as well as a Catholic scholar, Tanaka Kōtarō, from Tokyo University to the court and had them give lectures on a Christian-oriented topic. The emperor himself had also received a two-hour lecture on Christianity from Kagawa earlier that year. Then, starting in April 1947, the emperor invited a female pastor, Uemura Tamaki—daughter of the leading Protestant pastor Uemura Masahisa—to provide the empress and his unmarried three daughters with weekly Bible lessons. Even the senior positions of the imperial institution were filled with Christians after the war. It was evident, at least on the surface, that Christianity was fast becoming a dominant religion in the imperial household.
If it were true that the emperor’s interest in Christianity had grown to the point where he wanted to spread it as much as MacArthur did, why would he or whoever was in charge of the crown prince’s English education request “a Christian, but not a fanatic” to Stoddard? In other words, what was the reason behind the imperial household’s request for a tutor who was technically Christian but “not aggressively so”? While they did not seem to have been too concerned about the other English tutor, Blyth, being a truly devout Zen Buddhist, were they afraid that if the new tutor were a fanatical Christian, the crown prince would be influenced heavily by one single religion and possibly convert to Christianity? Furthermore, given that the emperor himself supposedly had become “a pacifist influenced by Christianity,” who was even willing to “make Christianity the national religion of Japan,” it would be contradictory if he did not want his son to be influenced by the religion, which he thought would be good for the entire nation and people. Did he truly embrace Christianity, or did he merely pretend to accept the religious faith for the sake of his throne and his life?
There is some evidence that leads one to believe that Christianity gave the emperor some influence over the course of his life. Since the Taishō period, “Christian officials and educators [had] occupied senior positions in the palace,” and particularly, Emperor Hirohito himself had grown up being exposed to Christians or Christian values since his early childhood. For instance, his caretaker, who was in charge of his education and who spent most of the time with him, was a Quaker woman named Adachi Taka.79 While he was not able to see his real mother as often as a normal child of his age would have, Adachi became a motherly figure to him. Likewise, there was another individual, Makino Nobuaki, who directly served Emperor Hirohito since he was the crown prince. Although Makino was not a Christian himself, he had personal connections with Christians, including Nitobe Inazō, and Makino’s daughter, Yukiko, who would subsequently marry Yoshida Shigeru and had been a devout Christian since her youth. Not only did Emperor Hirohito regard Makino as a father figure since his early days, but he also had great trust in Makino and even sobbed when he learned that Makino was to leave his duty at the court in 1935. In 1921, Sekiya Teisaburō, a Christian and a disciple of Uchimura Kanzō— the founder of the Non-Church Movement—“was appointed vice minister of the Imperial Household.” In the same year, Navy Captain Yamamoto Shinjirō, who was then “the president of Japan’s Catholic Association,” became “Crown Prince Hirohito’s aide on naval affairs.” The Taishō Emperor and Empress had also expressed a personal interest in Christianity. In addition, there were other Christian officials in court circles, including Chinda Sutemi (Methodist) and Sawada Setsuzo (Quaker), who surrounded the emperor. In the spring of 1921, Yoshida, Makino, and Prime Minister Hara Takashi (a Catholic with the baptismal name David)90 in particular helped carry out the Japanese crown prince’s first trip abroad, during which Crown Prince Hirohito was to visit the Vatican and meet Pope Benedict XV. Based on such evidence, it is highly likely that Emperor Hirohito himself had naturally developed a good understanding of Christianity, both Catholicism and Protestantism, long before the Occupation began and his advisers tried to make him a symbol of democracy with a new image of “a pacifist influenced by Christianity.”
At the same time, however, it important to note that during the Meiji and Taishō periods, it was not uncommon for those in elite bureaucracy to have studied with Christian missionaries, and one should be careful not to oversimplify the effect that the Meiji and Taishō leaders could have on the emperor in terms of his views on Christianity. Furthermore, while the emperor was likely familiar with Christianity, whether or not he actually embraced the religion could be another matter. In fact, some sources93 lead one to hypothesize that he pretended to be interested in Christianity and even made himself appear, only during the Occupation, to give full support to
MacArthur’s aim to Christianize the whole nation. One piece of evidence is that the weekly Bible lessons, which the emperor provided to the empress and his three unmarried daughters starting in the spring of 1947, continued only until 1952, the year the Occupation ended.
Moreover, when the emperor learned in the early 1950s that his younger son, Prince Masahito, “was so attracted to Christianity…that he used to pray every night before going to bed,” “he rebuked the prince.” Given the claims that the emperor had regarded Christianity so highly to the point where he was willing to make it Japan’s national religion earlier in the Occupation and even tried to familiarize his entire family with the religion, it would seem contradictory for him to rebuke his son’s great faith.
The fact that the weekly Bible lessons ended in the same year as the Occupation could support the idea that the effort of the emperor or his advisers to bring Christianity to the imperial household was merely a stratagem to project the emperor’s new image favorably to MacArthur. Whatever the Japanese intention may have been, however, such an approach by the imperial side turned out to be effective. Moore and Robinson state clearly that one of the three factors that influenced MacArthur’s decision-making regarding treatment of the emperor was “his conviction that the emperor would cooperate in th[e] effort” of “advancing Christianity in Japan.” 96 Ironically, though, while MacArthur was pleased with the emperor’s new character and was even delighted that Japan was now to be led by a Christian Prime Minister, Katayama Tetsu, in spring
1947, MacArthur did not particularly think the emperor should himself convert. According to William Woodard, MacArthur said to someone “with whom he was somewhat closely associated” that the emperor would “be accused of outrageous cynicism if he became a Christian.” MacArthur even told the emperor that it would be wrong to “impose any religion on a people,” when the emperor expressed his willingness to make Christianity Japan’s national religion.
While exact dates for these dialogues are not clearly recorded, one presumes that they took place during the early years of the Occupation, when the effort of building the emperor’s new image, “a pacifist influenced by Christianity,” was being made intensely by those who surrounded him. From the time of Japan’s surrender to the end of his term in October 5, 1945, Higashikuni Naruhiko, the emperor’s uncle and the first imperial member in history to serve as Prime Minister, strategically tried to spread the idea that the Japanese leaders also felt that what Japan needed was Christianity. Supposedly, he convinced Kagawa Toyohiko to join his cabinet as a special adviser. Then, only two weeks after joining the cabinet, Kagawa spoke to news reporters about how admirable the emperor was because he had been influenced by Christianity, in which the Taishō Emperor also had a great interest. Furthermore, Kagawa had his secretary spread the story of Emperor Hirohito having become a member of the YMCA when he visited London in 1921. These episodes were designed with Higashikuni’s initiative to “demonstrate the imperial family’s interest in Christianity”103 and continued to be spread in the following years.
However, in August 1948, three years after Japan’s surrender, the emperor made a public statement that “he had no intention of converting to Christianity.” Perhaps by then, the emperor felt secure about his throne without becoming a Christian himself, and this may have been not only because MacArthur had told the emperor about the undesirability of forcing the Christian faith on himself or on the people, but also because it had officially been decided that the emperor was to be immune from the war criminal trials. It is also important to note that MacArthur made a public statement in January, 1949 that the focus of the Occupation had now shifted from politics to the economy, and consequently “declared the end of the democratization of the nation.”
According to Ushijima, when the Occupation ended, the imperial household agency not only called for an end to the lectures by Christian scholars and pastors, but also pronounced that anything related to Christianity was now to be forbidden in the court. If this had really been the case, one might come to a conclusion that Christianity was a religion that was used only as a tool to appeal to SCAP and that the imperial side had requested a Christian tutor from the United
States only to further demonstrate its interest in the religion and thus to be favored by MacArthur. The emperor’s words to MacArthur during the early years of the Occupation could partly, if not entirely, be disingenuous as well, and because Christianity was directly linked to MacArthur’s Occupation, the emperor wanted nothing to do with it afterward. One incident about a decade after the Occupation ended, in which the emperor harshly rebuked the crown prince’s wife, Princess Michiko, for having discussed Christian values with Prince Masahito, confirms the idea that the emperor in reality did not embrace Christianity, nor did he approve of his son’s strong faith in Christianity. If he, against his own preference, had pretended to support the religion to survive the Occupation, one could imagine how nightmare-like Christianity must have been to him.
Thus, while many predicted at the time of Vining’s appointment in the fall 1946 that Japan’s next emperor would be a Christian, the possibility of the crown prince’s conversion to Christianity was not only out of the question, but also threatening to the emperor and his advisers, who had requested the tutor for political rather than educational reasons. In light of this view, the following section will further examine the intention of the imperial household in having invited a Christian tutor from the United States. Particularly, the discussion will center on one ultimate question: why Vining, a Quaker, was chosen for the tutoring position.
4.2 THE APPOINTMENT OF VINING, THE QUAKER TUTOR
As has been described above, about two and a half months after receiving the emperor’s request, Stoddard sent the emperor’s representatives the names of the two final candidates, Vining and Chaplin. While Vining was a forty-three-year-old widowed Quaker who had a degree in library science and also was an author of children’s literature, Chaplin was a thirty-seven-year-old single Presbyterian who had two Ph.D. degrees and was teaching at a university in Hawaii at the time. Though both were educated Christians, there was no competition between the two, it seemed. Over the past decades, scholars as well as the media have given explanations as to why it was Vining, a Quaker, not Chaplin or someone else, who was chosen for the position, and their explanations seem unanimous. Vining was chosen because she was not only a Quaker known to be a pacifist but also an author of children’s literature, whom the Japanese expected to be sympathetic to the 12-year-old crown prince in the midst of the postwar confusion. Some also write that the imperial side found Vining more ideal than the other candidate, as she, having lost her beloved husband in an accident, had experienced the utmost sorrow in life and therefore would have compassion for others.
While such reasons may have been true, there was also another reason why the imperial advisers preferred a Quaker, and based on several sources, the religious denomination of the new tutor was, in fact, one of the major factors that led to the imperial household’s decision to hire Vining. According to Maeda Yōichi, son of Maeda Tamon and the crown prince’s French tutor, a Quaker woman was considered most ideal because Quakers are pacifistic but not self-righteous or preachy. Japanese officials also found Quakerism ideal because it was understood, among Christian religions, as most compatible with the oriental world (where different religions had long co-existed) and therefore a Quaker would not force conversion. Likewise, Ishida Toshi, who was once the head of the Friends School in Tokyo, shared similar ideas as Maeda that a Quaker woman was chosen because Quakerism is not exclusive, but respects people of other religions and cultures, and its primary purpose is not to increase its number of believers. Clearly, both Maeda and Ishida emphasized that the imperial household wanted a Christian individual whose views were not strictly limited to a single religious belief and thus would not have trouble teaching a 12-year-old boy with a strong Shinto background. The pacifistic element of Quakerism may have also been considered as beneficial for strengthening the image of the emperor as a man of peace. In such respects, a Quaker perfectly fell under the category of an ideal tutor for the crown prince. In addition, Yamanashi Katsunoshin, who was in charge of selecting a tutor for the crown prince, wrote in his autobiography that when he asked Ozaki Michio and his wife from the Reinanzaka Church for advice regarding the two final candidates, they immediately told Yamanashi, “though we are not Quaker, as far as this particular issue is concerned, we would commend Vining and not anyone else.”
These records show that the Japanese were worried about the possibility that the crown prince could be heavily influenced by a Christian tutor, and it was crucial for them to decide on a tutor who would not convince the crown prince to convert to Christianity. However, because they were supposed to be enthusiastic about having a new Christian tutor, at least on the surface, they did not openly reveal their anxiety over the matter. They let the media write about the imperial household’s developing interest in Christianity. Interestingly enough, Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, “one of MacArthur’s closest advisers,” “reportedly predicted [before the arrival of Vining] that Japan’s next Emperor would ‘undoubtedly be a Christian.’” What is peculiar about this is that Fellers himself was a Quaker, who would be least likely to hope for the crown prince’s conversion because of the ecumenical nature of his religious faith. In addition,
Fellers was pro-Japanese and had tried to help his Japanese Quaker friends save the emperor on the throne. He understood the situation that the imperial household was in, as well as the position of MacArthur. Therefore, it is possible that Fellers made such a prediction only to let others further believe that the imperial household’s interest in Christianity was genuine so that their stratagem—to project a favorable image of the emperor by having him invite a new American Christian tutor for the crown prince— would be carried out smoothly.
4.3 QUAKER NETWORK
Not only was Fellers a pro-Japanese Quaker, but he was also part of the group engaged in the effort to save the emperor from the war crimes tribunal. What was significant about this group was that it was formed by Christians—mostly Quakers or those who had been connected with one another through Quaker friends and acquaintances. Furthermore, this so-called Quaker network was based not only on their shared religious faith and pacifistic ideal, but also on the longtime friendships that had been established since the time of Nitobe Inazō—an influential educationalist and one of the first Japanese Quakers, who became the central figure of the Quaker network in the early 20th century.
Japanese members of the Quaker network during the postwar period included Kawai Michi, a disciple of Nitobe and also a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, who founded Keisen (Christian) Girl’s High School and Junior College in Tokyo; Maeda Tamon, another of Nitobe’s disciples and a Quaker who became the first postwar minister of education; Tanaka Kōtarō, a Catholic scholar at the University of Tokyo who became the minister of education in 1946 and then the head of supreme court; Nanbara Shigeru, a follower of the Non-Church Movement and a political scientist who became president of the University of Tokyo in December 1945; Kamiya Mieko, a psychiatrist and daughter of Maeda who worked for her father and Abe Yoshishige during the immediate postwar years; and Takagi Yasaka, a Quaker and professor of American Studies at the University of Tokyo. These Japanese were connected through Kohinata-kai, a Quaker-based society founded by Nitobe, and played major roles in saving the emperor and emperor system during the early years of the Occupation. There were also other Japanese Christians, including Sekiya Teisaburō, Tajima Michiji, Mitani Takanobu, and Koizumi Shinzō, who had been appointed to work closely for the emperor since Japan’s surrender. Like the other members of the Quaker network, but from inside the imperial household, these four men helped reestablish the imperial institution.
On the American side of the Quaker network, there was Harold Henderson, a special adviser to SCAP’s Civil Information and Education Section (CI&E) and also Maeda’s old friend who had lived in Kyoto in the 1930s and studied Japanese with an interest in Japanese arts. Esther B. Rhoads, a Quaker and Vining’s friend, was another important figure. Rhoads went to Japan as a missionary during the prewar period, but came back to the United States in 1941 and worked for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) until the end of war when she went back to Japan to lead Licensed Agencies for Relief in Asia (LARA). Also, Fellers was an old friend of Kawai, who had developed a keen interest in Japan since college where he met Isshiki Yuriko, Kawai’s lifelong friend. While not everyone listed above was directly engaged in the imperial household’s effort to seek the crown prince’s new tutor in the spring of 1946, they did what they could to help the imperial institution, and therefore the significance of the Quaker network should not be underestimated.
In his autobiography, Stoddard recalls the process in which Vining came to become one of the applicants for the tutoring position at the Japanese imperial household. After he returned to the United States with a mission to find a tutor for the crown prince in the spring of 1946, he received hundreds of applications from all over the country and eventually reached an “impasse,” which was broken only after he received a phone call from Rufus Jones, “an eminent Quaker scholar” from the AFSC whom Stoddard had known personally. Jones told Stoddard about one of his close friends and co-worker (Vining) at the AFSC whom he thought would be a suitable candidate for the tutoring job, and promised to have Clarence Pickett, executive secretary of the AFSC, send more detailed information about her the following week. Stoddard then received a reference letter from Pickett, and by the time he interviewed Vining on June 6, he had selected her as one of the final candidates he would recommend to the imperial household. The interview only made him more confident in her. He writes that, though he “had expected to interview two or three persons,” including Vining, he “had no urge to do so after the first ten minutes with…Vining.”123 So, Stoddard decided on Vining and submitted her name along with another candidate’s name to Japan, and the selection process from then on to the appointment of Vining is the same as the one that has already been described above.
While Stoddard’s story seems legitimate, Takahashi discusses the possibilities that Stoddard might have learned about Vining before Jones contacted him and that the crown prince’s new tutor’s religious denomination, Quakerism, may have been specifically requested from the imperial side before the selection process took place. Takahashi makes these assumptions based on two facts: first, Pickett was an uncle of Gordon Bowles—a Japanese-born Quaker who was a member of USEM as well as of the Subcommittee on the Far East (SFE); second, Pickett asked Rhoads if she would be willing to become the crown prince’s tutor before he asked Vining. Because Rhoads was already engaged in the relief activity, and was in fact the central figure of LARA in Japan, she did not take the opportunity. Besides, she knew that the imperial side “did not want an old Japan hand or a missionary.” Yet, it was natural, Takahashi discusses, for Pickett to think of another potential individual, Vining, within the AFSC. Furthermore, Takahashi states that Bowles, who was standing right beside Stoddard when the emperor made the request for a new tutor for his son, must have contacted Pickett not long after the reception of March 27, 1946. Based on these arguments by Takahashi, it is possible that Vining became one of the two final candidates not because Stoddard happened to like her through the interview he had with her and the recommendations from Jones and Pickett, but because she had already been chosen as the strongest candidate by those involved in the project from the beginning. It is also important to clarify here that Vining did not apply for the job herself; she was encouraged by others, including Sam Marble (then “head of the Japan desk” in the AFSC), Pickett, and Rhoads, to accept the opportunity to “have [her] name suggested as tutor to the Crown Prince.”
When Yamanashi received the names of the two final candidates from Stoddard, he consulted with several people, and besides the Ozakis, those who helped Yamanashi make a final decision included Sawada Setsuzo, a Quaker who “had traveled with the Emperor when as Crown Prince he made a trip to Europe,” and Terasaki Hidenari and his wife, Gwen. Terasaki was a diplomat who served as the emperor’s translator at the reception of March 1946 with USEM and who became Quaker during the postwar period. Gwen was an American who was a distant cousin of Fellers. Then, there was also a group of Japanese educators who served as a corresponding committee when USEM came to Japan. The committee was headed by Nanbara, and the members included Kawai and Hoshino Ai (then president of Tsuda College). Though Hoshino’s religious faith cannot be identified, one could assume that she and Kawai were closely connected through the Quaker network, as Kawai was a graduate of the same college (Bryn
Mawr College) as Vining and Rhoads, and Tsuda College was founded by Tsuda Umeko, also a Bryn Mawr College graduate. In addition, when the final decision was made and Yamanashi began to prepare for the arrival of Vining, he consulted with Rhoads regarding the need of finding a secretary for Vining. In response, Rhoads recommended Takahashi Tane, a Quaker and also a student of Kawai at the Keisen School.
Based on the information presented above, one can see the role of those within the Quaker network in finding a new tutor for the crown prince. Although Takahashi’s conclusions may need more evidence to prove that the tutor’s religious denomination was already decided before Stoddard began seeking potential candidates, they are significant contributions to this discourse: they show the complexity of the project and that of the selection of the tutor, which was carefully made, perhaps with some manipulations to make the selection process appear as natural as possible to those outside the political framework. Indeed, the Quaker Vining was chosen over the other final candidate, Chaplin, based on the reasons described in the previous section. Yet, Vining could have been the only choice for the imperial household, given the strong influence that the Quakers must have had on the selection process as well as on the decisionmaking regarding the crown prince’s new tutor.
So far, this paper has shown that the imperial household requested a Christian tutor from the United States for the sake of the emperor and the imperial institution’s survival and that the emperor and his entourages personally had no intention of Christianizing the crown prince. Thus, a new Quaker tutor was invited to the imperial household to show the emperor’s full support for MacArthur’s aim to rebuild the nation based on Christian-democratic values.
The following section continues to analyze the imperial household’s purpose for inviting a new tutor. With an attempt to further demonstrate the political aspect of the event and the complexity of the circumstances surrounding the imperial household, it particularly focuses on their persistence on the nationality of the new tutor.
5.0 FURTHER ANALYSIS OF THE IMPERIAL HOUSEHOLD’S MOTIVES
5.1 THE JAPANESE PERSISTENCE TO THE TUTOR’S NATIONALITY
As has been mentioned earlier, one of the qualifications of the tutor for the crown prince, which the emperor requested to Stoddard through his two representatives, was that the tutor be “An American woman fifty years of age or older.” While one might buy some people’s claim that the emperor desired an American woman because the other tutor was an Englishman (opposite sex, with British English), the emperor’s persistence to the tutor’s nationality still remains debatable. One of the major reasons is that the emperor’s request for an American female tutor was made only two months after he expressed his personal preference and support for British monarchy during a press conference with American reporters on January 25, 1946. Accordingly, not only had the emperor “been deeply impressed by the British royal style ever since his visit to Great Britain as crown prince in 1921,” but he had also studied the British royal family from “an illustrated English-language book” introduced to him by Yamanashi around the end of 1945.
In addition, Takahashi stresses that it had always been Great Britain that the imperial house had modeled itself after in terms of the education of the imperial family, and the imperial household’s stance never changed. In fact, many princes, including current Crown Prince Naruhito and his younger brother Prince Fumihito, customarily studied abroad at Oxford in the past decades. Thus, Takahashi questions why then Emperor Hirohito specifically requested an American tutor back in March 1946. If the emperor had simply wanted another native English speaker who could supplement Blyth’s teachings, he would have requested a British individual, and that would have been more reasonable to people in court circles, such as Yamanashi, who supported the emperor’s eagerness to adopt the British royal style.
Although Yamanashi and Vining became good friends after she arrived in Japan and continued to be in touch with each other through letters until his death in 1967, his first impression to the emperor’s idea of inviting a female tutor from the United States when it was first brought up to him sometime in the spring of 1946 was by no means positive. He wrote in his memoir that he and Hozumi Shigetō (then the crown prince’s grand chamberlain) felt that there were too many risks involved in the situation, and it would be costly in money to hire someone from the United States as well. Therefore, they supposedly told the emperor that it would be safer and less troublesome both practically and financially if they asked the British Embassy to find a married or unmarried woman. That way, they could easily replace her with someone else if she turned out to be inadequate. Apparently, their ideas were turned down, and the emperor’s proposal—if it had really been his own proposal—was granted.
However, Yamanashi, who had loved England ever since his first service there during the
Russo-Japanese War and who believed that the Japanese imperial family should learn from the British royal family, did not completely let go of his personal preference for the British over the American. When the imperial court received the names of the two final candidates from
Stoddard in June 1946, Yamanashi was the one who was responsible for making a final decision. While he consulted with several people, including Blyth, the Ozakis, and the Terasakis, he also relied on his own judgment. He confessed to Vining years after the Occupation ended that he chose her over the other candidate from the moment he learned that Vining had traveled in England and Scotland; he thought “she knows the world, she knows life, and she knows people.” And when he delivered his final decision to the emperor, he told the emperor that he did not want to hire anyone who knew nothing but America, and received the emperor’s consent. Despite the uncertainty that many people at the imperial court had felt about this project, things turned out well and the emperor seemed to be satisfied with the new American tutor Vining. Supposedly, one day at lunch, the emperor said, “If ever anything I did has been a success, it was asking Mrs. Vining to come here.”
Nevertheless, the emperor’s personal desire to adopt the British royal style at the Japanese imperial court remained throughout the Occupation, and it became evident when the proposal of inviting a tutor from England was brought up to him through Matsudaira Yasumasa of the imperial household agency in early 1950, the year Vining’s contract would end. According to Kudō Miyoko, the proposal was developed by Alvary Gascoigne, a British aristocrat, who had been in Japan as the chief of the British Mission since the fall of 1946, and who thought the crown prince should have a real British tutor, unlike Blyth who had spiritually become “halfJapanese” and therefore in the eyes of Gascoigne could not represent his own country. When the emperor as well as Tajima (the emperor’s grand steward) and Yoshida Shigeru (then the prime minister) were informed of Gascoigne’s idea, they were delighted, although they simultaneously expressed their anxiety about the reaction of GHQ—or more precisely, the reaction of MacArthur—regarding the matter. Eventually, Gascoigne’s proposal was turned down and the imperial household ended up hiring another American Quaker woman, Esther Rhoads, after Vining left in December 1950.
From the story above, one could imagine that, if the Japanese were still as alert to MacArthur’s reaction as they were in 1950, five years after the Occupation begun, they must have been even more careful about everything that could affect MacArthur’s policy-making concerning the emperor and imperial institution during the earlier years of the Occupation. Thus, when the emperor requested an American female tutor for his son in spring 1946, there could have been more objections and debates brought up by people attached to the imperial household and GHQ. But, the fact that no one, except Yamanashi and Hozumi, seemed to have explicitly protested against the emperor’s seemingly-impulsive request shows that people had sensed that the emperor had not come up with his request out of nowhere and that there must have been certain political reasons that had led the emperor to act as the initiator of the plan.
5.2 THE INITIATOR(S)
In the midst of the American-led Occupation in summer 1946, some people had assumed that “the American tutor was imposed [particularly] by the Occupation.” While it could have been a reasonable assumption—since there had been reforms conducted or initiated almost forcibly by the Occupation—neither the imperial household nor SCAP openly discussed how the whole project had started in the first place. Yet, one thing that was made clear as soon as Vining came to Japan was that, unlike other American personnel in Japan who were working directly under SCAP, she was hired and paid by the imperial household agency. And the fact that she did not technically belong to the Occupation forces effectively made the imperial household appear to stand on its own regarding this particular matter.
Having been aware that some people, including both Japanese and Americans, had suspected that she was hired to tutor the crown prince because of the views of the Occupation, Vining also made it clear, from time to time, that that was not the case. She even states in Windows for the Crown Prince that “the idea [of inviting an American female tutor] proceeded from the Emperor himself; he made the proposal on his own initiative without even consulting the people in charge of the Crown Prince’s education.” Then, as if to further stress Vining’s claim, Stoddard writes in his autobiography that “SCAP knew nothing about [the emperor’s request],” until it was officially made at the reception of March 27, 1946. According to Stoddard, even Terasaki, the emperor’s interpreter, “had no warning of the emperor’s request” and could not hide his astonishment for a brief while when the emperor spoke of his wish to seek an American tutor for his son to Stoddard.
Yet, as has been discussed in more detail in the previous sections, given the circumstances of the time—that the Occupation had begun only half a year earlier, and the emperor’s sovereignty as well as the existence of the imperial institution was still a matter in question—it is hard to believe not only that the emperor came up with something on his own and moved to action “without…consulting the people in charge of the Crown Prince’s education,” but also that SCAP did not know anything about the emperor’s new plan when SCAP’s decision and its support were crucial to the imperial court. Furthermore, it is peculiar that even when the emperor’s request was officially reported by the media, neither SCAP nor GHQ openly interfered with the imperial household agency. According to Yamanashi, who was in charge of the arrangement of an American tutor for the crown prince, when the names of the two final candidates were sent to the court from Stoddard in the early summer of 1946, CI&E, through which the cable from Stoddard was received, “refused to indicate their preference in any way” to the Japanese.
This, however, did not mean that the Occupation side made no interference in the crown prince’s education; they surely kept an eye on the education of the young crown prince who would succeed his father in future and did indeed supervise the court decision-making regarding the educational policy for the crown prince when necessary. For instance, when the crown prince was about to finish elementary school education, the Occupation suggested that the crown prince attend a regular middle school with other children of his age, instead of receiving private lessons from selected teachers as his predecessors had customarily done in the past centuries. The Occupation’s idea was that the crown prince should receive an education “more democratic” than the one given to the previous emperors.. Supposedly, GHQ even suggested that the crown prince go study aboard in the United States. Yet, when it came to the emperor’s request for a new tutor from the United States, the Occupation forces, which Yamanashi described in retrospect as “sagacious and prudent” with an awareness of the political aspect of the matter, purposefully avoided interfering in the actual process of finding an American woman suitable for the job. But, exactly why did the Occupation decide not to get involved in the imperial household’s new project for the crown prince’s education this time?
Besides some paradoxes one can find about CI&E—which helped the imperial household communicate with Stoddard through cables but simultaneously avoided, at least on the surface, getting involved in the selection process as much as possible—there are several riddles about MacArthur’s involvement in this event as well. While some historians skeptically discuss the extent to which MacArthur knew about the imperial household’s project of inviting a tutor from the United States, Ben-Ami Shillony mentions clearly MacArthur’s involvement in the selection process. Accordingly, MacArthur, in referring to the qualifications of the new tutor for the crown prince, said that he “preferred to bring someone who could do more than just language.” In fact, when Blyth began teaching the crown prince, MacArthur told Blyth his views on
Christianity and the significance of the imperial household’s embrace of Christian faith. However, while MacArthur must have been constantly informed of the imperial household’s handling of the new American tutor (Vining), he did not meet her in person until May 3, 1947, about eight months after her arrival in Japan. Eight months may not seem too long; yet, given that MacArthur personally wanted to Christianize Japan and counted on the emperor’s support for and cooperation in the effort of “advancing Christianity in Japan” to some extent, it is odd that MacArthur did not meet the next emperor’s new American tutor who was known to be a devout Quaker. Furthermore, for the first three months, Vining was not even granted “access to the PX or the Commissary, which the newspaper men and the LARA representatives enjoyed as well as the Army and Navy civilians;” everything, including food, was supplied to her by the imperial household.
On the day she met MacArthur for the first time, she was at the American Embassy having lunch with him and other seventeen guests, and only briefly exchanged words with the general, who then invited her to visit him at his office in Dai Ichi Building the following week. During the formal conference Vining had with MacArthur five days after their first encounter, he told her the reason why he had not met her in person sooner. According to Vining’s account, he told her that, “‘because of the dangers involved,’ [the Occupation] could not do anything for [her];” they had to let the imperial household handle the matter on its own. While she does not explain any further what MacArthur meant by his statement, it shows that his public involvement in the imperial household’s effort to find a tutor from the United States was limited for some politically-sensitive reasons. Though it is almost impossible for MacArthur not to have known about the matter concerning the emperor and the imperial institution’s future, he had to be careful about when to and when not to use the power and influence he had as SCAP, and most likely, he decided not to get involved ostensibly in order to keep people from assuming that the American Christian tutor had been imposed by him. But, given his authority, now the question is to what degree he was involved in the process behind the curtain, and alternatively, if he was one of the initiators of the project.
Besides his statement above, one of the things MacArthur asked Vining at the conference of May 1947 was whether she thought “the asking for an American tutor for the Crown Prince was ‘a cynical political move’ on the part of the Japanese” to ultimately show their full engagement in the Occupation’s effort to democratize the nation. In response, Vining told MacArthur that, though “many Japanese, like some Americans, had been profoundly doubtful about the wisdom of it,” she genuinely believed that it was the emperor’s sincere gesture concerning his son. This particular dialogue between MacArthur and Vining, which shows her position (and perhaps, how politically sophisticated she was then), is significant in understanding MacArthur’s attitude toward the imperial household, as well as his involvement in the affair. In other words, the fact that MacArthur asked the question could mean two things: first, he himself had actually thought of the imperial household’s action as “a cynical political move;” and second, he was not the one who imposed the idea of inviting a tutor from the United States on the imperial household, as many people have suspected.
But, if not MacArthur, and if not the emperor then, who came up with the idea that was inherently new to the pro-British imperial household?
5.3 BLYTH THE LIAISON
Reginald Horace Blyth (1898-1964), who is perhaps best-known for his books on Zen and haiku today, began teaching the crown prince in April 1946 and continued to deliver English lectures at the imperial court until May 1964. His contributions as a scholar and teacher to postwar Japan were significant and widely acknowledged. In 1949, he was awarded the Fourth Order of the Sacred Crown. Yet, during the Allied Occupation, he was not merely a scholar and teacher; among historians, he is also known to have worked as an informant or “a liaison between court circles and GHQ.” During the early years of the Occupation, one of Blyth’s regular contacts was Harold Henderson, an American special adviser to CI&E, whom Blyth visited to exchange information once or twice a week.
While the Blyth-Henderson duo is not particularly new to this field of research, since many historians have already written about their work—including the drafting of what became the emperor’s ningen sengen (declaration of humanity) —what should be stressed here is the fact that Blyth was a liaison who helped bring the imperial household and GHQ closer and specifically engaged himself in the Japanese effort to save the imperial institution, as well as the emperor on the throne. One of the great contributions he made to the imperial institution was to help Gakushūin remain as it was when the existence of the school became a concern of GHQ at the beginning of the Occupation. According to Fujii Motoko, a former professor at Gakushūin and also the wife of Fujii Akio—the Japanese scholar who brought Blyth to Japan—Blyth was one of those who directly talked to MacArthur and convinced him not to close the school. Fujii even writes that Gakushūin might not have survived without Blyth and that the school owes its continued existence to him.
More significantly, however, Shinki Masanosuke—a professor emeritus at Gakushūin University and also Blyth’s colleague and life-long friend—writes that Blyth had once confessed to Shinki that he was the one who had suggested the idea of inviting another female tutor from the United States for the crown prince, though he himself was to start teaching in the coming spring. Accordingly, Blyth did not make the suggestion directly to the emperor, but proposed the idea to Ōgane Masujirō (the vice minister of the imperial household ministry) as well as to Ishiwata Sōtarō (a former minister of the imperial household ministry) right after Blyth had his first audience with the emperor on February 14, 1946. Shinki continues, Blyth told the two Japanese ministers that he had come up with the proposal based on his knowledge of the affairs inside GHQ. And although Blyth had always consulted with Yamanashi about anything relating to the imperial household in the past months, this time, he first talked to Henderson and even had him ask Stoddard for assistance in finding a tutor for the crown prince.
If Blyth’s confession was true and Henderson reached Stoddard before the reception of March 27, 1946, then, Stoddard must have known about the emperor’s request before it was directly made to him. In his autobiography, however, Stoddard writes that “all subsequent events [that followed after the emperor’s request] confirmed the imperial origin of the request.” Furthermore, Shinki states that Vining, who insisted from time to time that the request for an American tutor was made at the emperor’s own initiative, knew nothing about Blyth’s involvement in her appointment.
Even though Stoddard and Vining were most directly involved in this event, they seemed to have not known the whole story, just like everyone else outside the court. Even Yamanashi, who subsequently took charge of the selection of the new tutor, did not know about the project until he heard from the emperor of his intention to take the suggestion made by Ishiwata, with whom, according to Shinki, Blyth had talked regarding the new tutor for the crown prince. Though Yamanashi’s initial reaction to the idea of having an American tutor was not positive, having been in the midst of the Occupation where MacArthur’s policy to democratize Japan based on “the American model” was absolute, he must have quickly reconsidered the expediency of the imperial household having an American educator inside the court to prove the emperor’s sincere engagement in MacArthur’s policy.
The fact that Yamanashi began to educate Vining as soon as she arrived in Japan, however, shows the carefulness of the imperial side to have the new American tutor who “came fresh to Japan” with little knowledge of the nation, as they themselves had originally requested. Perhaps Yamanashi was most worried that Vining could influence, and even Westernize (or Americanize) the crown prince, more than Yamanashi and those in charge of the crown prince’s education had ever wished since the proposal of inviting an American tutor was first made. During the second week of November 1946, after less than a month since Vining began teaching, the imperial household, on Yamanashi’s suggestion, sent Vining on a trip to Kyoto and Nara, as well as to Nikkō, with other four people—Takahashi Tane (Vining’s secretary), Blyth, his wife, and Asano Nagamitsu (administrative officer at Gakushūin, who worked closely with Yamanashi)—so that she could see the parts of the nation that had remained undestroyed by air-raids unlike Tokyo, where she had spent most of her time in the past month. In particular, Yamanashi wanted her to know “the beauty of Japan and get understanding of [the] ancient culture” in order to become aware that Japan also had culture just like the West.
6.0 CONCLUSION
Despite the positive outcome of the imperial household’s project of inviting a female American Christian tutor for the crown prince—namely, that the crown prince’s English improved to the point where he was able to have a talk with MacArthur in English and that the imperial family members and Vining established a close relationship that lasted until her death—the project itself was clearly more political and complicated than it seems on the surface. With the emperor’s throne as well as his life at stake, the Japanese primary concern was not the enhancement of the quality of the crown prince’s education. It appears that they had no option but to make the emperor embrace or pretend to embrace the ideology that the occupier strongly advocated.
Over the first three to four years of the Occupation when SCAP put its full effort into rebuilding Japan based on “the American model,” Christianity in particular became a key for the Japanese to protect the emperor for two reasons: first, the creation of the emperor’s new image as a man of peace greatly influenced by Christianity became crucial to make a strong appeal to MacArthur whose personal aim was to Christianize Japan to make it a true democracy; second, a significant number of Quakers and individuals connected through the Quaker network became involved in the effort to save the emperor, and their network enabled the communication between court circles and the Occupation forces.
While there is not enough evidence to believe that Blyth was the initiator of the project as he supposedly confessed to Shinki, it should be clear at this point that the emperor was not the one who originally came up with the proposal of inviting an American Christian tutor for the crown prince. There seemed no one in the pro-British imperial court who personally thought an American tutor would be the best for the crown prince’s education. The emperor also did not want a Christian tutor to convert the crown prince, nor did he want his family members to be heavily influenced by Christianity; it was only during the Occupation that the emperor showed his full support to MacArthur’s aim to Christianize the whole nation.
Nonetheless, whether or not MacArthur or anyone involved in this affair knew the intention of the imperial household to have Vining as the crown prince’s tutor, the imperial household’s effort bore fruit, and MacArthur was also able to fulfill his primal duty as SCAP. Indeed, Japan was never Christianized; yet, it was re-democratized based on the American model while maintaining the emperor on the throne as MacArthur had originally planned, and the nation survived without getting too affected by the communists countries, which the United
States had begun targeting since the outbreak of the Cold War. In this respect, the American-led Occupation of Japan had a successful end for both sides.
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