M/ CLOUDY
It’s a little tricky to know in fashionable times why members of a royal circle of relatives embarked on a long field trip to some other country.
From an imperialist point of view, real tours are necessarily a public exercise.
Those who saw Netflix’s “The Crown” can probably relate this to the Prince and Princess of Wales’ month-long excursion to Australia in 1983. Princess Diana’s popularity two years after her marriage to Prince Charles came here at an opportune time, helping to popularize the British monarchy in Australia and curb the sentiment that could have led the Pacific country to leave the Commonwealth to a republic in its own right.
However, actual visits can also be designed to shape the long-term of the participants themselves. Prince Edward VII’s excursion to the Middle East in 1862 proved to have a dual purpose: to befriend the Egyptian leader Said Pasha to quell French influence on Suez. Channel and drive the prince away from temptation before his marriage to Princess Alexandra of Denmark.
Edward’s to the Middle East was also the first royal excursion documented through an accompanying photographer (Francis Bedford), which marked the beginning of a culture of pictorial commemoration of monarchical travels.
In 1918, Japan was encouraged to board the Royal World Tour train, having supported the Allied powers in World War I.
“The Yomiuri, the Viscount Motono newspaper, advocates a new beginning in imperial family movements,” the Times of London reported on 22 May 1918. “He suggests that the young crown prince (of Japan) be sent to Europe, which he believes would have a significant effect on Japan’s external position.
The tour, almost 3 years later, would only highlight Japan’s new position among the Allied powers after World War I, but it would also have a profound effect on the individual in the middle of the trip: Crown Prince Hirohito.
Japan had been an official best friend of the United Kingdom since the signing of an alliance pact in 1902 and, as such, had played a central role throughout the Allies during World War I. On 7 August 1914, Britain asked Japan to destroy Germany assailants in Chinese waters, securing vital sea routes. British and Japanese ships besieged Tsingtao (now Qingdao) – the main port of the “leased territory of Kiautschou Bay” in China – resulting in the surrender of German forces in November.
By October 1914, Japan had also seized German possessions in the Carolinas, Mariana Islands, Marshall Islands and Palau. At the end of the war, Germany stripped of its colonies, which were then divided between the allied powers of Britain, France and Russia. , Italy and Japan. Japan won a League of Nations mandate to govern Germany’s acquisitions in the Pacific.
As a result, after defeating Russia in the Russian-Japanese War (1904–05), and then helping the Allies erode Germany’s influence in Asia, Japan had definitely become a global power. The country of East Asia was one of the signatories to the Treaty. Versailles, which officially ended the war with Germany. Naturally, Hirohito had his tour of Europe to cement and celebrate this position.
The importance of the tour at the time skilfully captured through Kenzo Ishihara, deputy minister of the Imperial House, on the eve of Hirohito’s departure, says Frederick Dickinson, professor of Japanese history at the University of Pennsylvania. “The excursion,” Explained Ishihara, “perfectly adapted to an heir to the throne of a new “Japan of the world. “
“Japan’s contribution to the Allies’ victory in World War I earned it an honorable position at the Paris Peace Conference,” Dickinson said. This, combined with its source of ships, textiles and weapons for the Allies, had made Japan a trading power.
“Japanese contemporaries consistently praised Japan’s rise to ‘world power’ after World War I, and Hirohito’s excursion to Europe, the first of its kind to go through a Japanese crown prince, marked a dramatic sign of this new status,” Dickinson says.
However, it was not felt in the same way at all in Japan. In fact, there was a vocal opposition to the tour.
Although Prime Minister Takashi Hara and older statesmen such as Aritomo Yamagata, Masayoshi Matsukata and Kinmochi Saionji made a decision that deserves to be made to “expand the delight (of Hirohito) and deepen their ties to European monarchies”, Japan itself a royal circle of relatives was involved in the Array
“By the end of 1919, severe physical fitness disorders due to a meningitis attack in the training years had made Emperor Taisho (Hirohito’s father) unsused,” Dickinson says. “His last public appearance in May 1919 for the 50th anniversary of the kyoto capital’s move to Tokyo. “
All eyes were on Hirohito to assume the office of prince regent (something that would materialize in November 1921, two weeks after his return from Europe) and, therefore, it was intended that a delight for the heir to the throne of chrysanthemum would serve as a form of formation.
“The Empress feared that with the incapacitated Emperor Taisho, imperial duties would be interrupted during Hirohito’s six-month absence,” Dickinson says.
Hirohito’s mother feared that the emperor’s fitness would worsen while the heir was, fears fueled by members of the imperial family such as Hamao Arata, former president of Tokyo Imperial University and respected Adm of the Heihachiro Togo Navy.
Ultranationalist teams such as the Amur River Society (also known as the Black Dragon Society) have added their voices to the opposition. Its members, Dickinson said, feared for Hirohito’s safety abroad.
These teams were also in conflict with Yamagata by a separate factor involving Hirohito’s proposed marriage to Princess Nagako (the couple would marry in 1924).
Although it was believed that the feast would do Hirohito good, it had been precisely the opposite when the imperial circle of relatives had discussed a proposal to send his father to Europe several years earlier, Emperor Meiji (Hirohito’s grandfather) had objected, arguing that this would accentuate Emperor Taisho’s “already overwhelming long-term fascination with the West. “
It is worth noting, at this stage, that a royal abroad was in fact not new in itself.
“In Hirohito’s day, there was a long culture of travel of Japanese royalty, even going so far as to examine the foreigner,” Dickinson says.
And so, following the culture amid the Empress’s concerns, plans were made for him. On March 3, 1921, at 11:30 a. . m m. , Hirohito and his entourage embarked on Europe.
“The Crown Prince of Japan visited the Arc de Triomphe this morning and paid tribute to his country in front of the tomb of the unknown warrior,” The Times of London reported on June 22, 1921. “Paris bathed in the sun and looked the best. “
As he approached the tomb, the then 20-year-old Hirohito bowed and began to speak, praised the price of the French infants who gave their lives in World War I and, if not in vain, emphasized peace. Peace, he said, would unite the peoples of the world.
It was just one episode among many of Hirohito’s European excursion in which he would deliver messages of peace and solidarity. It is almost that, despite the arrangement of the last Emperor Hirohito with the horrors of World War II, such a preference because peace can flourish. However, it was another time, and Japan was looking for a very different position in the world.
Emerging from the war as “one of the five powers,” Prime Minister Takashi Hara said in 1919 that Japan had “contributed to the recovery of world peace. “
“With this,” he said, “the prestige of the empire has gained even more authority and its duty to the global has become heavier and heavier.
Europe, with this costly war still new in mind, sought peace. During a stopover in Verdun, the site of the famous Battle of Verdun in 1916, where more than 714,000 infantrymen are believed to have died, Hirohito said he was incrediblely moved across the scale of the monument.
“War is a terrible thing,” he says, losing a tear. “How pathetic. “
It’s a key mirror image of the time, Dickinson says.
“In the wake of the Great War, one of the main objectives of the excursion was to allow the crown prince to see the ‘raw remnants of the devastation of war,'” he says. “In fact, Hirohito would have described his visits to the battlefield for having left the most intimate impression of his excursion to France.
The French leg of the emperor’s long-term excursion followed a holiday in England and Scotland, where he began paying tribute to the war dead in Europe, placing a floral offering in Whitehall Cenotaphile and visiting the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey in London. In Belgium, he visited the Lion Mound, in commemoration of the Battle of Waterloo, a reminder of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), and in Italy, he had an audience with Pope Benedict XV, who twice tried to negotiate peace in Europe. World War I without success. On his excursion, Hirohito was never too far from the Great War.
Dickinson said it was “another testament to a Japan fully committed to a new culture of global peace. “Between the end of World War I and 1939, peace measures were taken: the Paris Peace Conference (1919-20), the Washington Treaty Navy (1922) which sought to restrict shipbuilding, the Geneva Protocol (1925) banning the use of chemical weapons, the ambitious kggello-Briand anti-war pact (1928); and the London Naval Treaty (1930), which further restricted naval expansion. Japan, new to the world stage, was a signatory to all.
It is difficult to reconcile this pacifist crown prince with the last emperor who has become the head of the Imperial Japanese Army, however, according to a declassified document in 2017, an office written through former British Ambassador to Japan John Whitehead to Foreign Minister Geoffrey. Howe in January 1989: the emperor “turns out to have shown little enthusiasm for his military studies. “
“Evidence from the recent newspaper suggests that Hirohito was not comfortable with the direction of Japanese politics,” read in the correspondence, suggesting that the emperor was in the end “impotent” in the face of militaristic expansionism and war.
Dickinson agreed that in the 1930s the wind had definitely opposed the “solid culture of peace in Interwar Japan. “
“Japan’s war champions in the 1930s made sure only to get imperial support,” he says. “They did their best to erase the wonderful story of Hirohito’s commitment to the global culture of peace between the two wars. “
Hirohito’s European excursion was not only a lesson in outside peace, but also presented him with the probabilities of monarchy in the 20th century.
“Japan’s top categories and the general public are right that Japan is at the center of a global rights network,” Dickinson says.
There had been a long culture of contact between the Japanese imperial circle of relatives and the royal families of Europe, especially Britain, with whom Japan shared “the strongest real ties,” Dickinson adds.
For example, Prince Arthur of Connaught had visited Japan 3 times: in 1906, transmitting the Order of the Jarretera to that of Edward VII; attend the funeral of Emperor Meiji in 1912; and, in 1918, entrusted the marshal’s baton to Emperor Taisho.
However, not only intermonarchical relations in other nations inspired Hirohito, but the dynamics between the palace and the public that touched him.
“Inspired specifically through intimacy between the British crown and the British people, Hirohito swore on his return to Japan to the same intimacy with his own people,” Dickinson says.
In fact, the Times of London reported that, long before the official visit began, crowds would be allowed to “applaud and express their feelings differently” when the crown prince passed.
However, a police order a day before his arrival “forbade cheers, handkerchief agitation and all signaling bureaucracy. “
“As a result,” the Times of London said on September 3, 1921, “the crown prince won through the massive crowds outdoors and inside the station in centuries-old silence. “
What the Times didn’t notice, however, was the way Hirohito peeked out the window of his car from Yokohama to Tokyo when he got home, moving the crowd to tears for this non-public interaction.
The crown prince in fact celebrated by “clearly imbuing himself with the mind of the commoner” who had facilitated intimate dating between the British crown and his subjects, Dickinson says.
It was not the only event that solidified the tour, although the Anglo-Japanese alliance nevertheless expired without renewal in 1922, British royalty was quick to welcome the crown prince, his state visit, like a secret handshake, was a sign. friendship on the world stage.
For Hirohito himself, it’s a taste of freedom.
He walked the Oxford University campus and saw boating careers in the Támesis; marveled at the Eiffel Tower and ate snails in Paris; visited the Colosseum of Rome and visited the ruins of Pompeii.
It was this thrill of a world beyond the shores of Japan that led him in 1970, a year before his 1971 to Europe as emperor, a scale on which he also performed in “The Crown”, not to forget his past adventure with a clever dose of character.
“My life until then,” he said, recalling the days before his first European tour, “was like a bird’s tour in a cage.
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