The Chrysanthemum Throne

The quality of indirection, inherited from the Chinese, has Japanese imperial rulers functioning shrewdly from behind the seat of power. Emperors who wanted to really rule were known to abdicate early, name a young successor within the family, enter a monastery, then exercise power behind the scene. To be sure, the emperor as titular head remained within the public view but regents, shoguns, militant monks, and Meiji era ministers were the critical decision-makers.

Emperor Akihito, who, with Empress Michiko, descends on our flame tree-covered island, is the 125th occupant of the Chrysanthemum Throne. He is by mytho-historical accounts a direct descendant of Jinmu of 660 B.C., considered the founder of the Empire of Japan. The emperor (tenno) is the ‘heavenly sovereign,’ best understood as the guardian of the transcendent perspective that comprehensively encompasses the total coverage of the four winds.

Like the Mandate of Heaven sense in the Chinese tradition, it is not ‘heaven’ of the Eden over Hades, paradise against perdition contrast of Hebrew and Islamic cosmology. It is not Augustinian City of God’s heaven versus the City of Man’s earth, nor supernature over nature of Aquinas. It is not Dante’s medieval Christianity of Heaven and Hell. It is not the ancient Parsi’s personification of the eternal conflict between good and evil. Heaven in the Chrysanthemum sense is the seat of authoritative certitude, confident feat and total accountability. It is cosmological rather than eschatological; rooted in space rather than time.

Divinity in the Japanese sense is more cultural than political. In the middle of the 19th century, Japan ended the feudalistic rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and ushered Japan’s rapid modernization. The Meiji Emperor Mitsuhito of the ‘the enlightened rule,’ was barely born when Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States sailed into Edo (Tokyo) Bay. He was barely two when the first of the so-called unequal treaties was rammed down the Shogunate’s throat that would trigger Nippon’s defense of its imperial pride and national identity. In this period, Japan would learn from the British and the Germans appropriate political and technological features from each that the Meiji rulers found useful for Japan to modernize and seek its place among nations under the sun.

In the vertical and horizontal integration of Japanese society, begun in the feudalism of the Shogunates, with about 250 separate domains, and accomplished in the Meiji Restoration, there were strong echoes of egalitarian echelons from Edo that protected the rights of the “swordless citizens.”

Emperor Mitsuhito ruled until 1912, followed by his son, Yoshihito, father of Hirohito who would ascend the throne in 1929. He would reign through the 15-year War, which he originally opposed. Hirohito would preside over the establishment of the ethnocentric and nationalistic Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere thrust of Japan, shortly after the onslaught of worldwide depression.

Emperor Hirohito barely warmed the Chrysanthemum seat when Japan joined the Rome-Berlin Axis. It was a defensive move, ironically to discourage assertive Russian encroachment into the Far East. Japan defeated the Russians in a naval encounter in 1904, a stunning affront to the white men’s ego that belittled other races to be inferior to the descendants of Mt. Caucasus. It was also an offensive posture for Japanese zaibatsus, which began to feel squeezed out of the access to natural resource it needed to fuel its industrialization. Short of coal and oil, in a time of empires and European expansion into Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Nihon cast its eyes on the natural resources of its neighbors, particularly Manchuria, and later, the oil fields of Southeast Asia.

There were four critical Imperial Conferences in 1941 that culminated in the Dec. 1 declaration that authorized the Pearl Harbor attack. Hirohito was silent throughout the proceedings. Prime Minister Tojo declared after the crucial fourth session that “our Empire stands at the threshold of glory or oblivion … we tremble with fear … we are keenly aware of the great responsibility we must assume from this point on…”

Although the role of the emperor alternated between that of a super cleric with largely symbolic powers and that of an actual imperial ruler, the main function of the emperor was to authorize and legitimize those in power. Further, the office unified the minds and hearts of a people, and motivated its common will toward a needed deed. The blind fanaticism ascribed to soldiers of the realm in such strategies as the Kamikaze attacks from the air, on the ground and under the sea, were viewed from Nippon land as expressions of obedience in the pursuit of a willfully consensed national cause. The Emperor’s autocracy vicariously extended into the wills of subjects of the realm. Indeed, as expressed in today’s lingo, “someone’s terrorist is another’s courageous fighter.”

Nikos Kazantsakis’ poetry in The Warriors of God mirrors this sense of racial ethos. “You have a great responsibility. You do not govern now only your own small, insignificant existence. You are a throw of the dice on which, for a moment, the entire fate of your race is gambled. Everything you do reverberates throughout a thousand destinies. As you walk, you cut open and create that river bed into which the stream of your descendants shall enter and flow.”

It is in this destinal sense of full responsibility and total accountability that the aristocratic Emperor Hirohito uttered to General MacArthur: “I come to you to offer myself to the judgment of the powers you represent as the one to bear sole responsibility for every political and military decision made and action taken by my people in the conduct of war.”

It is this same office, and this sense of responsibility and accountability, which Emperor Akihito inherited when he ascended the throne upon his father’s death in 1989. Akihito and Michiko come to Saipan to make peace with the spirit of ancestors, both friendly and combatants to the earlier national aspirations of Japan. He comes with the spirit of a nation, mythologically nurtured for 2,650 years, to perform a pilgrimage of profound sorrow. We, of the Flame Tree Realm, will best honor our guests with the solemn and somber sounds of silence.