THE YAMATO DYNASTY, by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave (1999) Prologue / EMPEROR MEETS SHOGUN / page 10-21 When the transition government in Tokyo objected to the publication of the photo, MacArthur flexed his muscles by repealing all of Japan's restrictions on publishing. This was followed by a directive on civil liberties that effectively outlawed all of Japan's secret police and internal security organs. Prince Higashikuni, another uncle of the emperor, resigned his post as head of the transition government in protest. MacArthur did this to show what he could do when provoked. The last thing he wanted was to open the way for genuine civil liberties, which could invite political change in Japan. That would be entirely too radical. From his point of view, anyone who was not untra-right was a communist. We can only guess at what reprecussions there might have been in Japan, America and Europe if the real nature of the secret meeting with Hirohito had become known to the general public. It is a cliché` that in Asia things are rarely what they seem. Nobody puts more effort into deception than the Japanese. So it is hardly surprising that MacArthur and his staff thought they were doing the manipulating while they were being manipulated. Their mistake arose from being fascinated by the similarities between Japan and the West, when they should have focused on the differences. The differences were dangerous. The similarities were disarming, reassuring and seductive. Take, for example, the Quaker network in Japan. It comes as a surprise that Quakers, despite their small number, are sprinkled throughout Japanese society, and have remarkable leverage. Let us begin with General Bonner Fellers. He was not just the greeter in the embassy portico. Fellers was an unusual army officer with interesting connections. Through his family he had ties to a Japanese diplomat, Terasaki Hidenari, who was riding in one of the black Daimlers in Hirohito's motorcade on that day. Both Fellers and Terasaki were intelligence officers. "Terry" Terasaki had held the senior post of first secretary at the Japanese Embassy in Wash- ington at the time of Pearl Harbor. He had his American wife and daughter were interned, swapped for other diplomats, then spent the war years miserably in Japan. Now Terasaki had been transferred to the Imperial Household organization, which took care of all practical matters for the emperor and the imperial family. Essentially, his job was to act as Hirohito's personal liaison with General Fellers and General MacArthur. Terry was perfect for the job. He loved America and knew it well. Bonner Fellers was a cousin of Terry's American wife, Gwen Harold, who came from a long line of Quakers. Bonner Fellers had attended a Quaker college in Indiana, where he became friends with Japan- ese Quaker exchange students. Two of these, Watanabe Yuri and Kawaii Michiko, became leading educators in Japan and had palace connections. In postwar Tokyo they were helping Fellers carry out his secret mission. In short, Fellers and Terasaki were part of a network of Quaker and near-Quakers that reached from Herbert Hoover at one end deep into the imperial palace at the other, to the personal entourage of Hirohito's mother, Dowager Empress Sadako, and other members of the imperial family. A number of Japanese men in the ruling hierarchy, who were themselves Buddhist or Shinto, had Chrintian wives. So the inner core of an aggressively warlike Buddhist-Shinto state, in the volatile 1920s 1930s and 1940s, had a nucleus of Chrisitans, many of them Quaker pacifists. They influ- enced England and America greatly between the wars. They did not have enough power to prevent the war, but they tried to stop it. Some of these palace officials used their links to Swiss, British, and American Quakers to send secret peace feelers to London and Washington by way of Switzerland. After the war, they intervened in every way they could to save the imperial family from humiliation and prosecution as war criminals. While this may seem commendable in some respects, it had a dark side. The same network was used very cynically by Bonner Fellers and others to achieve MacArthur's per- sonal objectives, and those of his conservative backers. On the Allied side, this quasi-Chrisitan network was a cat's cradle of powerful connections. One of its leaders was U.S. Undersecretary of State Jospeh Grew, the prewar U.S. ambassador to Japan. Grew had longstanding ties to Bonner Fellers and to former president Herbert Hoover. Grew's wife, Alice Perry Grew, was a descendant of Commodore Matthew Perry, who had opened up Japan to Western commerce in the nineteenth century. As a child, Alice attended school in Tokyo, became fluent in Japanese and was intimate friends with aristocratic Japanese girls, one of whom grew up to become Hirohito's mother. So Alice and Joseph Grew had unique access to aristocratic circles in Japan. One of Grew's cousins, Jane Norton Grew, was mar- ried to Jack Morgan, son of J. Pierce Morgan, whose banking empire was known in Japan as "the Morgan zaibatsu". Morgan Bank made huge loans to Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, and helped many big American corporations like General Electric to make big investments there. So Grew, part of the extended Morgan family, also enjoyed a very cozy reception in the Japanese financial world. While he served as U.S. ambassador to Japan in the 1930s, Grew associated with Japanese men and women who were reassuringly like the Boston Brahamins of his own childhood. With so many Quakers and other Christians among them, Grew felt he was dealing with the Asian equivalent of New England Puritans. The Japan he saw was neat and tidy, freshly scrubbed. The Japanese financial elite he met were so crisp, elegant and beauti- fully mannered that he failed to see--or chose not to see--the pro- found institutional corruption that was deeply embedded in the Japan- system (and remains embedded to this day). At the center of the Yamato dynasty during the first half of the twentieth century was Empress Sadako, Hirohito's mother. A tiny woman of great character, she was an invisible force in imperial affairs from the 1910s to her death in the early 1950s. In a matri- lineal society like Japan, an emperor's mother had leverage that can never be overestimated. Although she was a Fujiwara, one of the top families that provided brides for emperors over many centuries, Sadako had been raised in the countryside by Japanese Quakers. She was said to read the Bible every day, and there are strong indi- cations that she was a practicing Chrisitan, although the Imperial Household kept this carefully obscure. For thirty years, the dowager empress surrounded herself with Japanese Quakers and other Christians, men and women, adding them to her retinue and discreetly arranging for them to be appointed to senior posts in the Imperial Household and in the government bureaucracy. That there were a surprising number of Christians like Sadako in the upper strata of society does not, however, alter the fact that they were first of all Japanese, with overriding loyalties to their own society. This was largely a network of mothers, wives, sisters and daughters, unnoticed by Japanese men, committed to altruistic values and to pacifism at a time when Japan was becoming increasingly violent and militaristic. That this secret network was composed largely of women is not surprising. In ancient times Japan was often ruled by women. Historically, the Yamato dynasty was founded in the first century AD by a witch named Himiko, a priestess with unusual powers who had her court in the Yamato river valley near what is today Kyoto. Chinese court records from that period state clearly that Japan was ruled by women at the time. Himiko was thought to be descended from a line of priests and priestesses going back some six hundred years. Those earlier prehistoric roots of the dynasty were in the warm southern island of Kyushu. It was there, according to legend, that the sun goddess Amaterasu first created the imperial line that has led "unbroken" down 2,500 years to Emperor Akihito and Crown Prince Naruhito. The Yamato people ruled by Himiko were not the earliest known inhabitants of Japan. Those were the more primitive Ainu, whose origins are still unknown. The Yamato people were more recent arrivals. Immigrants from China first brought wet rice cultivation to the lowlands of Kyushu, then more warlike immigrants from Korea settled along the mountainous north shore. Over several centuries of conflict these two immigrant cultures mingled, and their most powerful clans sorted out a feudal pecking order. In search of better farm land they gradually migrated eastward up the Inland Sea to the big fertile plain around what are now Kyoto and Osaka on the main island of Honshu, pushing back the Ainu and taking over their land. There, by the Yamato river, the dynasty coalesced in the first century around Himiko, the leader of the strongest clan Himiko was suceeded by a line of emperors who also served as high priests of Shinto--"the way of the Gods." But women continued to have strong influence, sometimes ruling alone, sometimes acting as regents for young emperors or as martial pawns in power struggles. This ended in the twelfth century when a military dictatorship was set up by the shoguns, or generalissimos, of rival samurai clans. The imperial family then went into a long eclipse. The survival of the Yamato dynasty was often in jeopardy. The gravest challenges came from the emperor's own relatives, who found ways to gain control of the throne and turn the emperor into a puppet. For most of its history, as a consequence, Japan's imperial family has had more spiritual influence than temporal power. At times emperors even were reduced to selling noodles in the street. Many were packed off to Buddhist monastaries, others were exiled to remote islands, while several were simply murdered. Powerless as they often were, emperors provided supernatural cover for the tyranny of invisible men behind the throne. No group portrait of Japan's imperial family can begin without quickly sketching these other faces in the background. From the time of Himiko to the Meji Restoration in 1868, five families gained extraordinary power over the throne: the Soga, Fujiwara, Minamoto, Ashikaga and Tokugawa families. The Soga and Fujiwara were wealthy noble families who married their daughters to emperors and then ruled indirectly as regents for the offspring, generation after generation. They hired samuri mercenaries to protect their interests, and these mercenary amries gradually grew into powerful military establishments. The other three families--Minamoto, Ashikaga and Tokugawa--were samuri warrior clans who set themselves up as dictators starting in the twelfth century, and ruled Japan for the next 800 years, usually treating the imperial family with contempt or ignoring it entirely. Shoguns were subject to the same kind of manipulation. Typically, the first one or two shoguns in each epoch were shrewd, tough men who ruled by violence and treachery, but the were succeeded by weaklings who were manipulated by their own regents, wives, and advisers. The Soga family in the fifth century were the first in Japan to perfect the technique of using the emperor as a front man, deflecting attention from themselves so they could operate in complete secrecy. For three centuries the Soga fended off rivals, then were toppled and exterminated by the Fujiwara. Although the style of the Fujiwara was different, they used the same Soga devices to stay in control. To hide their manipulation, corruption and murder, it was essential to preserve the imperial family in a cosmetic device. As Sons of Heaven, emperors could be seen as pure and sacred. Nobody dared to criticize an emperor because to do so would be a sacrilege, punishable by beheading. For the same reason, nobody dared to criticize the emperor's advisers. This allowed the men behind the throne to be as corrupt as they wanted, without fear of being challenged or over- thrown. Danger usually came only from palace rivals, who tried to gain the upper hand by conspiracy, by bribery or poison, or by putting their own daughters in the imperial bedchamber. The Fujiwara used every means available to destroy initiative on the part of each new emperor, so that a passive state of mind became inbred over the centuries. It was extraordinarily cunning to put the emperor in a position to enjoy all the benefits of authority with few of the responsibilities. To resist would require unusual moral courage. Few had it. Most emperors were awash in luxury, with hundreds of sexual companions, and all the food, drink and enter- tainment they could consume. Emperors continued to have tremendous inferrential power, but they rarely sought to use it without clearing their actions in advance with whoever happened to be the current strongman. For the better part of those eight centuries under the shoguns, most Jaoanese were unaware that emperors still existed, and only a small circle of court nobles continued to regard them as divine. When the shoguns were toppled in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan's new strongmen gained control of the current Son of Heaven, a boy of 15, and announced that the whole country had "submitted to rule by the divine emperor." This was sheer bluff. Even today, there are huge credibility gaps in Japan. If there were a Japanese version of the fable The Emperor's New Clothes, the tailor would be executed for telling the truth the pesantry for seeing the truth. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 was not a revolution. Japan has net to experience a true social revolution, although one may be anout to begin. During the Meiji coup, real power simply was transfered from one ruthless backstage clique to another, and the boy emperor was moved from Kyoto to the shogun's palace in Tokyo. They made sure that the emperor appeared to rule, but he was only decoration. Just as with the Soga and Fujiwara, real power remains to this day in the hands of invsible men behind the throne, heading rival power cliques. No other royal family is so guarded. Seclusion is imperative because the imperial family is--in a certain sense--held hostage by the cliques that actually rule Japan. Who controls and manipulates the emperor controls and manipulates the people. This isolation prevents rival forces from taking similar advantage. The emperor has magical, supernatural influence as a divine icon-- he is "above the clouds." Because he is a demigod, he cannot be criticized. By extension this applies to his advisers and government, so they too are protected. For most of Japan's history, lese-majesty has been punished by beheading. Even constructive criticism was impossible. The sacred his the profane. From time to time, liberals or other "deviants" have tried to seperate the emperor from the strongmen, so that the government could be criticized without implying criticism of the emperor. But the Meiji strategists who designed the modern Japanese system anticipated this, and skillfully identified the emperor with every decision and every aspect of the regieme. It was a Meiji Restoration, a Meiji government, the empirial will, an imperial decree, the imperial army, a decision of the throne "a dynasty unbroken since time immemorial." Because of this mystification, only Hirohito became well known outside Japan. Very little is known of his father and mother, his brothers and uncles, or any other members of the family. Now, thanks to the gradual accumulation of scholarship, plus the recent discovery and publication of family diaries, it is possible to fit many tiny pixels together into a collective portrait of all five generations --four emperors and a crown prince--in the modern period. Even the Meiji emperor remains obscure, his real personality hidden by image-building. In public he was an operatic figure. In private he was completely different, an indolent and self-indulgent man who loved women, horses and flowers, and drinking the night away with his favorites. Keeping him under control was difficult. Because Meiji was so troublesome, his ministers decided to take a different approach with his children and grnadchildren. Great effort was put into making them compliant, completely dependent upon their privy concillors and chamberlains. The Imperial Household staff grew to number more than ten thousand. They failed in the raising of Meiji's son and heir, the Taisho emperor. Most historians write Taisho off as a misbegotten clown not deserving serious consideration. They say he was mentally unbalanced and a drunken womanizer. When Taisho is compared to his father, "the great Meiji emperor," he is always found wanting. But these are false comparisons, because the father's image was as grossly inflated as the son's image is cruelly diminshed. On closer study, Taisho turns out to be refreshingly different. The caricature of him as a lunatic libertine was largely the invention of General Yamagata, who tuned Japan into a secret police state and launched it on its binge of militarism. Yamagata glorified the throne, while diminishing the emperor. By calculated leaks to the press, he destroyed the reputation of the young emperor, and was stopped only by the steadfast counter-attack of Empress Sadako and her allies. Moving behind the scenes, she was able to humiliate the old general in a contest over the choice of a bride for Crown Prince Hirohito. Yamagata was trying to plant his own female agent in the palace bedchamber. When he failed, the general went into terminal decline. But his ruthless, cold-blooded style poisoned Japan for the rest of the twentieth century. By the 1920s, the imperial myth had become dogma. Thought police were at every level of society to inform on neighbors and family. It could cost your life to raise an eyebrow, and all critics of the regime were jailed or executed under harsh new laws. In this atmosphere of terror--Asian in style but reminiscient of Europe's Inqusition--the militarists emerged and were able to take control of Japan in partnership with big business and financial cliques. Hirohito was raised to be different from his grandfather and his father. To avoid the indolence of Meiji and the audacity of Taisho, the Imperial Household oversupervised Hirohito, giving him a lifelong dependence on advisors and complicating the process of decision-making. This had tragic consequences in World War II when Hirohito waited interminably for Japan to regain the upper hand, so he could sue for peace from a position of advantage. His reign was the longest in Japan's history, and the most controversial. Emperor Akihito's resistance to similar manipulation led him to marry outside the aristocracy, and to identify more with the Japanese people. Crown Prince Naruhito has continued this refreshing trend, bringing into the palace as his bride the most independent princess since Sadako. They have their enemies. Japanese conservatives block and frustrate both Empress Michiko and Crown Princess Masako, to keep them from developing the leverage wielded by Hirohito's mother. Both women have been the target of vicious backbiting. While it may still be dangerous to criticize the emperor, it is open season on the empress and crown princess. Recent scandals reveal that money--not Shinto--is the state religion of Japan. Because greed is so fundamental a religion, we will examine how it replaced politics as the main motive force behind the Meiji Restoration, and how greed steered the ship of state into secret alliances, war and disaster. In the 1920s, the promising Anglo-Japan- ese diplomatic alliance was replaced by a vast web of private financial alliances between America and Japan. On the advice of Morgan Bank's Thomas Lamont, America made huge private loans and investments. When the economic bubble burst--first in Japan and then on Wall Street in 1929--it became apparant that much of this prosperity was built on unsecured sweetheart deals. In America the resulted of the banking and financial sectors, and in radical social programs to help the common man. None of this happened in Japan,, where all energy and resources went into rescuing the financial elite from their own folly. Nothing was done to ease the desperation of the people, and hundreds of thousdands of girls were sold into prostitution by families unable to feed themselves. Instead of reforming the system, Japan's power cliques arrested and executed critics and reformers. Today, seventy years later, the same financial corruption has bought Japan to its worst economic crisis yet. During World War II, Japan's militarism became a heady mixsture of glory and greed as the army embarked upon a binge of conquest and looting, from which Tokyo could not extricate itsef. We know a lot about the conquest, but amazingly little about the looting. In the Japanese holocaust, millions were killed and billions were stolen, but the loot vanished. One of the great mysteries of World War II is what happened to the billions of dollars worth of treasure con- fiscated by the Japanese Army from a dozen conquered countries. The answer involves the imperial family, so it is an essential part of this biography. Recognizing after the Battle of Midway in June 1942 that the war was going badly, a number of imperial princes devoted the rest of the war to hiding the loot ingeniously to give Japan a hedge against disaster. This systematic campaign of looting and hiding treasure, codenamed Golden Lily, was under the direct supervision of Hirohito's brother Prince Chichibu. Until now, he was asssumed to have spent the war on medical leave from the army, recuperating from tuberculosis at a country estate beneath Mount Fuji, nursed by his wife. In fact, he traveled all ove occupied China and Southeast Asis supervising the collection of plunder, using hospital ships to carry much of it to Manila for onward shipment to Japan. From early 1943 till mid-1945 he was in the Philippines overseeing the hiding of this loot in bunkers, in vaults beneath old Spanish churches and in vast under- gorund tunnel complexes. Golden Lily stripped Asia of currency, gold, platinum, silver, gems, jewelry, art treasures and religious arti- facts, including more than a dozen solid gold Buddhas, each weighing more than a ton. According to Japanese who participated, some $100 billion worth of gold and gems was hidden at more than 200 sites in the Philippines when it became physically impossible to move the loot to Japan. We have corroborated accounts from eyewitnesses and par- ticipants, including Japanese, and members of Prince Chichibu's personal retinue. Faced with Allied invasion of the Home Islands, and the total destruction of Japan's heritage, Emperor Hirohito was finally persuaded to opt for a quick surrender. This was a bitter pill, but it allowed Japan to survive the war with the bulk of its assets intact, including many billions of dollars of loot that would help put the nation back on its feet. Since the war, the gold hidden in a number of sites in the Philippines has been recovered by teams from Japan and other countries, and these recoveries have been verified. A Swiss court disclosed inn 1997 that one of the solid gold Buddhas is now in a bank vault beneath Zurich's Kloten Airport, along with a large quantity of other gold bullion recovered by former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos and held in Marcos family accounts. In 1997, a Japanese investigation team from Asahi Television was taken to an underground vault in Luzon where they filmed (and took core samples of) 1,800 gold bars worth $150 million --gold that was stolen from Sumatra, Cambodia and Burma. This gold had been melted down in occupied Malaya, recast and marked in accordance with the accounting procedures of Golden Lily, and then sent to Manila on fake Japanese hospital ships. Treasure looted from China was taken to Japan by way of Korea and hidden in undergound vaults in the mountains near Nagano, the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. Gold bullion aboard ships at the time of surrender in 1945 was sunk in Tokyo BAy and other points along the coast, and some of its has since been recovered. Thanks to Prince Chichibu and Golden Lily, when the U.S. occupation ended in 1952 "bankrupt" Japan was able to begin a "miraculous" recovery, on its way to becoming the world's second-richest economy. War reparations were dodged, the imperial family evaded punishment, and Japan's financial elite resumed control as if the war had not occured. Claims that Japan and its imperial family were left virtually pennileass by the war would thereafter appear to be completely false. War loot also provided a huge pool of black money used by postwar politicians to corrupt Japan's bureaucracy, bringing the country full circle again at the millennium to the verge of economic collapse. Although there have been many investigations of Nazi war loot, there has never been a formal investigation of the looting of Asia by the Japanese, nor has Japan ever been forced to account for the plunder. The amounts involved dwarf the Nazi looting many times over. The truth about Japan's looting of Asia puts a completely different spin on history. Emperor Akihito, who was only a child during the war, has begun the process of putting the imperial family in tune with the people of Japan rather than with the power elite. He has effectively cut the umbilical to heaven. But he and his family are still hostages to the myth contrived during the Meiji Restoration long ago. Today, instead of being manipulated by Meiji oligarchs, or Hirohito militarists, the imperial family is window-dressing for financial manipulators who milk Japan like a cash cow. There is a glass ceiling seperationg 90 percent of the population from the elite and their militant disciples. The long-suffering Japanese people have now discovered that even their meritocracy has been corrupted. There are signs that the long-awaited social revolution has begun. Ordinary people are voting with their money by not spending it. Rather than keeping it in Japanese banks, they are investing it abroad. Like a huge supertanker, however, the ship of state will take a long time to slow and turn around. So this is a double-image, this family portrait, of those on the throne and significant others looming behind it. What was true under the Soga and Fujiwara remains true today--real power is Tokyo is in the hands of secretive financial cliques, bureaucratic factions, political kingmakers and outlaws whose roles are little known and poorly understood. They remain hidden because they have learned that "all trouble comes from the mouth" and "when you cease being invisible, you take the first step toward defeat." The public role of the imperial family is like a kabuki troupe. Their highly stylized drama unfolds with magnificantly costumed and masked players moving around a curious figure draped from head to toe in black. This dark fugure, while clearly observed by everyone, is never acknowledged by actors or audience. By tradition he is totally invisible, and therefore does not exist. He is the stage manager, moving the scenery and furniture, altering the set as the drama goes on around him. He is called the kuromaku, the man behind the black veil, and he goes back long before kabuki to the ancient puppet theater of Japan, where audiences could clearly see the puppetmaster and his assistants. Japan's imperial family is comprehensible only if we understand the part played by the kuromaku. Life at the top in Tokyo involves many veiled players. The emperor and his family are surrounded by them.
