Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Prologue
- Author's Note
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Setting the Scene
- 2 An Extraordinary Diary of an Ordinary Soldier
- 3 Priming the Country for War: Imperial Rescripts as Fortifiers of the Kokutai
- 4 Out of Landscape
- 5 The Landscape of Deprivation
- 6 Creating an Idealized World
- 7 Re-creating an Emotionally Accommodating Landscape
- 8 Death as Man's True Calling
- 9 Challenges to a Resolve to Die
- 10 Reconciling Death
- Epilogue
- List of Images and Maps
- Glossary of Terms
- Abbreviations for sources held at the Australian War Memorial (Canberra, ACT)
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Priming the Country for War: Imperial Rescripts as Fortifiers of the Kokutai
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Prologue
- Author's Note
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Setting the Scene
- 2 An Extraordinary Diary of an Ordinary Soldier
- 3 Priming the Country for War: Imperial Rescripts as Fortifiers of the Kokutai
- 4 Out of Landscape
- 5 The Landscape of Deprivation
- 6 Creating an Idealized World
- 7 Re-creating an Emotionally Accommodating Landscape
- 8 Death as Man's True Calling
- 9 Challenges to a Resolve to Die
- 10 Reconciling Death
- Epilogue
- List of Images and Maps
- Glossary of Terms
- Abbreviations for sources held at the Australian War Memorial (Canberra, ACT)
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Disseminating Kokutai Ideology: Imperial Rescripts
How did the kokutai narrative come to have such a strong influence on soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army? As part of the reinstatement of the emperor as ruler under the Meiji Restoration, the Meiji government used the education system and other social institutions to establish a series of socio-political reforms through the promulgation of imperial rescripts and other public statements regarding desired subject behaviour. This effort was undertaken in order to ensure the compliance of subjects with the ideological basis of the new emperor-centred state, and the process was replicated by succeeding administrations.
Imperial rescripts, which charted the course of Japan through the formative years of the Meiji era into the expansionist period of the early Shōwa era, played a key role in the eventual spiritual indoctrination of citizens and, particularly, soldiers. The main focus, couched in language that emphasized the ‘uniqueness’ of Japan's landscape and its people and the ‘matchless’ spiritual fortitude of the subjects of Japan, was always on the requirement for the diminishment and sacrifice of the self. Even more importantly, these rescripts ‘completed’ the establishment of the kokutai discourse with the meta-narrative of the Emperor at its core in that they now defined citizens [kokumin] as the Emperor's subjects [shinmin]. Significantly, the rescripts meant that the discourse that increasingly defined the ‘spirit of Japan’ now had a statutory form [meibunka].
One of the first statements addressed to the Emperor's forces was the 1882 Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors [Gunjin Chokuyū]. The opening paragraph foregrounded the mythical and thus divine origins of the Emperor when it stated: ‘The forces of our Empire are in all ages under the command of the Emperor […] the Emperor Jimmu […] subjugated the unruly tribes of the land and ascended the Imperial throne to rule over the whole country’. In addition to identifying imperial divinity, the document lucidly defined the Emperor's role as the ultimate military chief of staff (the ‘We’ in the following passage refers to the Emperor):
The supreme command of Our forces is in Our hands, and although We may entrust subordinate commands to Our subjects, yet the ultimate authority We Ourself shall hold and never delegate to any subject.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Writing Japan's War in New GuineaThe Diary of Tamura Yoshikazu, pp. 69 - 92Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019