Digressions from Election

Only since 1925 has Japan had what passes in the Empire for "universal manhood suffrage." Last week a few dainty Japanese feminists toddled about the larger cities exhorting men to "Vote, Please!" and wearing scarfs reading not "Votes for Women" but "Pure Election."

Up to last week there had never been a Japanese election in which the party favored by the Government failed to win. After ten years of this, popular apathy was such that in the present general election campaign many candidates rode out to rural constituencies to find the halls hired for their speeches quite empty.

All candidates who wished to circulate campaign literature were compelled by a new law to do so through the Government, and peasants appeared puzzled to be handed by one local official in their village half a dozen different appeals. By this new system, as an eminent Japanese remarked, "Our elections have been purged of much bribery and corruption and of all political importance." This overstatement did not take account of the fact that Japan's dominant militarists are by & large against the Rich, whom they consider chicken-hearted profiteers, and for the Poor, in whom they fancy reside sterling Japanese virtues. If that be radicalism, then the militarists, although they are the world's most violent reactionaries in matters of Japanese Emperor-worship and imperial conquest, are radical.

Any change must be slow in coming to a parliamentary system so formalized and impotent as Japan's. Nevertheless, it has been suddenly observed in recent weeks that Japan's few rabble-rousing proletarian candidates were actually drawing audiences of respectable size. As the slow Japanese counting of votes began, a big surprise broke last week when the previously minuscule Social Masses Party was seen to have won 18 seats in the new Diet, all of which will be occupied by thoroughgoing rabble-rousers who can make Japanese politics lively if they dare.

Emperor an Organ? Of the total of 466 Diet seats nearly all were contested by machine candidates of the two large and wealthy Japanese parties, the Seiyukai and the Minseito. Many of these candidates neither knew nor cared what the issues, if any, were. This astounding state of affairs existed despite the fact that there had been no Japanese election since 1932. In theory the poll last week should have settled the paramount issue of Eastern Asia, whether Japanese expansion is to rage on through China at staggering cost or whether the Japanese people disapprove the extravagant and risky militarism which has been the Japanese Government's main policy for the past four years. This central issue was so packed with dynamite--the politicians fearing that the militarists, if crossed, might sweep away all parliamentary institutions--that it simply was not raised. Only one issue of any sort reached the dignity of figuring in dispatches: the "Emperor Organ Issue."

This was decidedly a red herring. The Seiyukai Party, knowing the militarist-dominated Cabinet to be against them, insinuated in their speeches that the Government had not sufficiently rejected, outlawed and blasted the teaching of famed Dr. Tatsukichi Minobe. As a professor of the Imperial University at Tokyo, this legal savant some 30 years ago produced three books on the Japanese Imperial Constitution and the status of the Emperor. That status, in one word, is divine. Dr. Minobe made the mistake of adorning it with other words and blaspheming His Majesty to the extent of writing that the Son of Heaven is "the highest organ of the nation."

In other countries this might well pass as a particularly unctuous and ingratiating compliment to the Top Man paid by a sycophantic professor. Indeed the awful blasphemy was not at first perceived by Japanese educators and was taught for 29 years not only by Dr. Minobe but by other professors supervised by the Ministry of Education. Suddenly the mystic fanaticism, the blind patriotism and the excruciating reverence for the symbolic EMPEROR, in whom Japanese really worship Japan, exploded (TIME, March 18, 1935 et seq.), and Dr. Minobe was forced out of the Imperial University. He resigned from the House of Peers and vanished into his home outside which the Government stationed an unremitting police guard.

For Seiyukai candidates in these circumstances to campaign against the Government mainly with the charge that it had not sufficiently punished a man for writing that His Majesty is the supreme organ of the Japanese State was arrant bluff & nonsense--even in Japan. No Japanese can successfully reduce to writing what the status of the Emperor is, any more than a Christian can be precise on the status of God. As the votes were being counted last week, two Japanese armed with a letter apparently signed by a magistrate got past Dr. Minobe's police guards, chased the savant out of his house, put a bullet through Dr. Minobe's right foot before they were overpowered.

As for His Majesty, Emperor Hirohito, who knows that he is directly descended from the all-creating Sun Goddess as firmly as Japanese know anything, the Divine Sovereign had of course no concern with last week's election.

Imperial Poem Reading. The last matter of public interest with which the Son of Heaven did concern himself was the immensely important New Year Imperial Poem Reading.

Savants of Japan trace Imperial Poem Reading through 1,000 years of vicissitudes fascinating to explore. The present Emperor is the 124th in direct line and the major crises of Imperial Poem Reading may be said to have been weathered in the reigns of the 62nd, the 83rd, the 103rd and the 122nd. It was Emperor Meiji, grandfather of the present Emperor, who dealt masterfully with the insurgence of Japanese commoners when they vigorously although reverently beseeched that Imperial Poem Reading should depart from the immemorial tradition that no poems were ever read to the Son of Heaven except those composed by himself, members of the Imperial Family and great personages of State. Read the historic petition of 1873 to the Emperor Meiji in part: "It is true that there is a difference in the station of life between exalted persons and commoners, but such distinction should not be made between them in this age of enlightenment and progress."

After meditating upon this for less than a fortnight, the exceedingly quick-minded and bold Emperor issued on Jan. 12, 1874 the Imperial Ordinance upon which is based today the treasured right of every Japanese, without distinction of race, creed or sex, to submit each year to the Poetry Bureau of the Imperial Household Ministry a tanka of 31 syllables. The subject of the nationwide competition this year was Kaijo Kumo Tooshi or "Clouds Far Over The Sea."

Since the result of the Japanese election last week was not going to matter much anyway, interest was all the keener in Kaijo Kumo Tooshi.

In the Phoenix Hall of the Imperial Palace the Imperial Poem Reading was conducted with the ceremony and pageantry of an English Coronation. The great Princes Tokugawa and Yamagata-- names ringing in Japanese ears like Gladstone and Wellington--were in attendance with Princes of the Blood and members of the Imperial Family. The appropriate choral performers and their leader, all schooled to emit the 31 syllables of the incredibly stylized tanka in exactly so many breaths, were at hand.

With ineffable humility the Son of Heaven indicated that the five best poems by commoners were to be read first--much as Alfonso XIII used personally to wash the dirty feet of twelve poor Spaniards each year on Maundy Thursday. Each Japanese commoner's poem was, however, rendered by the ceremonial chorus only once, those by Japanese Princes and Princesses of the Blood twice, and the Empress' poem three times. The poem composed by His Imperial Majesty in person was loudly, deeply and sonorously intoned once, twice, thrice, four times and yet again, in keeping with the dignity and divinity of the Son of Heaven. The Emperor's divine poem on this year's set theme may be translated thus:

As I

Was visiting

The Shino Point in Kii

Clouds were drifting far

Over the sea.

Final Count. Although the reading of commoners' poems to the Emperor is about as near democracy as the Empire ever gets, Japanese election returns were not utterly devoid of meaning. The dominant militarists remained Japan's actual rulers last week, but the final count showed that the Minseito Party, favored by the Government, had ousted the strong Seiyukai Party from first place. Notably President Kisaburo Suzuki of the Seiyukai Party himself failed to win his old seat. In all, the Minseito won 205 seats and the Seiyukai 174. This meant no more and no less than that, when Japan's militarists reshuffle the Cabinet, a few more portfolios will go to the Minseito, nominally a party which views with disfavor further Japanese conquest in Chinese territory.

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