threat. Emperor Hirohito also conveyed such a notion in the famous “Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War” (Daitōa sensō shūketsu no shōsho), broadcast on radio on August 15, 1945. In the gyokuon-hōsō (literally translated as “Jewel Voice Broadcast”), as the emperor’s broadcast speech came to be called, Hirohito officially announced the “end of the war” (shūsen) and Japan’s acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration without direct mention of Japan’s “surrender” or “defeat” (haisen).38 Rather, he claimed: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her [Japan’s] interest. Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”
All his subjects, the “one hundred million people,” would have to face hardships and sufferings, but, Hirohito continued, “it is according to the dictates of time and fate that We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.” The emperor thus called upon his subjects to “let the entire nation continue as one family from generation to generation, ever firm in its faith in the imperishability of its sacred land,” and to unite the “total strength, to be devoted to construction of the future.” All Japanese should “cultivate the ways of rectitude, foster nobility in spirit, and work with resolution—so that you may enhance the innate glory of the imperial state and keep pace with the progress of the world.”39
Although Hirohito’s speech addressed the future of Japan and encouraged the Japanese people to work hard to keep pace with the world’s progress, the emperor’s rhetoric was actually deeply reactionary. This is foremost marked by the language and rhetorical figures applied by Hirohito, who spoke, as Dower has pointed out, “in a highly formal language studded with ornamental phrases.”40 The speech was hardly understood by anyone in the audience, and radio commentators and journalists had to translate his words and explain their meaning in common Japanese in follow-up broadcasts and newspaper articles. Moreover, Hirohito’s terminology, with its strong roots in wartime and prewar propaganda promoting the sacredness of the imperial institution, the divinity of Japan’s soil, and the unity of the Japanese people, did not break with imperial Japan’s ideology—whereby the expression “one hundred million people” was a marker to encompass all subjects under imperial Japan’s rule throughout Asia.41 Another pivotal ideological umbrella term that embraced all these features is kokutai. Hirohito himself uttered the term to express the desire to perpetuate Japan’s unity and what might be called cultural autonomy toward the Allied powers after the war, and it also appeared in accompanying newspaper articles, mostly in the phrase kokutai goji, meaning the protection and preservation of the kokutai.42
Kokutai, usually translated into English as body politic or national body, is a vague and multifaceted concept of modern Japanese nation- and state-building. It had been a central reference for emperor-centered state ideology and institutions since the Meiji period (1868–1912). Its meaning oscillated somewhat between the German terms Staatskörper and Volksgemeinschaft in its application until 1945, and signifies the construct of a unity of the Japanese people, the Japanese state, its institutions, and the Japanese emperor (tennō).43 Of course, as Susan Burns has shown, the idea of unity and community through “a set of unique and enduring cultural values” such as language, ancestor worship, and religious beliefs had already been formulated by intellectuals in the late Tokugawa period (1603–1868) and predates modern Japanese kokutai ideology.44 Earlier debates thus offered a vocabulary for Meiji-period ideologues to construct the kokutai as what Iida Yumiko has called an “embodiment of a timeless Japanese cultural essence” in the process of defining Japanese national identity.45 It was nevertheless the multiple meanings and flexibility of kokutai that enabled Japanese ideologues from various backgrounds to apply the term to Meiji Japan. Kokutai thus encompassed a somewhat contradictory amalgamation in which modern institutions were adapted to the image of an ancient Japanese “cultural essence,” which imperial Japan’s authorities produced and performed in state rituals, Japan’s constitution, State Shinto religion, military parades, as well as education and hygienic reforms.46
One of the key institutional developments for building and promoting kokutai was the establishment of a modern health regime, through which Japanese ideologues attempted to establish a sense of national belonging by integrating the individual body and its health into the “national body” and conceiving the amalgam as an organic unity.47 Of course, the interventions of state agencies also faced much resistance, which ranged from heated debates about the privacy of the citizen’s body to peasant uprisings against quarantine restrictions enacted to control epidemics. However, health manuals, the centralization of the medical system, hygienic laws, and the establishment of modern hospitals and physician training all aimed at creating a strong bond between individual patients and the modern nation-state.48 The constitutive mechanisms of public health, but also education, had a particularly powerful effect on the state- and nation-building process through the construction of certain gender roles. Since the end of the nineteenth century, debates on public health and education had included a strong emphasis on hygiene, domesticity, and reproduction according to the ideal of the “wise mother and good housewife” (ryōsai kenbō).49 Women’s roles were increasingly described in terms of obedience not only to father and husband, but also to the emperor and the state.50 Accordingly, the basic functions ascribed to women were to manage the household and educate the children, both for the sake of creating loyal, obedient, and efficient imperial subjects, and the female body became a symbol for the maintenance and continuity of the “national body.”51 Such ideals intensified with the increasing militarization of Japan in the 1930s, and women were perceived more or less as breeding machines. This was reinforced in particular by the repression of birth control, the banning of abortion, and the enforcement of eugenics laws.52 Simultaneously, as in most nationalistic constructions of gender, women were believed to be the most vulnerable and endangered part of the nation. Especially during warfare, the female body was construed as open to violation and, to quote Ruth Seifert, conceived “as always penetrable and endangered to rape.”53 For civilian and military physicians, civil servants, politicians, and public health officials, female sexuality therefore always represented an ambivalence between security and danger, which had to be managed with proper care in order to secure the survival of the “national body.”
However, kokutai in its use until 1945 cannot be reduced to signifying a singular national entity; the vagueness and multiple meanings of the term evolved with Japan’s imperial expansion in Asia, where kokutai was also employed as an ideological slogan to construct imperial unity under Japan’s rule. The flexibility and expandability of the concept of kokutai was particularly explicit in colonial Korea, where Japan’s colonial assimilation policies (dōka) attempted to propagate under the phrase of naissen ittai (“Korea and Japan as one body”) the integration of Korea and its people into the body politics of Japan’s imperial rule.54 In Japan’s colonies, hygiene and public health were major vehicles for legitimizing colonial rule as a benevolent civilizing process. This benevolence, as some studies have highlighted, adhered to ambivalent implications, because Japan’s colonial administrations used public health interventions to integrate Japan’s colonies into imperial Japan’s body politics, but simultaneously created a hierarchy between an allegedly more modern Japan and the countries and people of Japan’s empire on the basis of hygiene.55
Nevertheless, in the wake of defeat in August 1945, Japan’s authorities appear to have dropped their imperial baggage instantly, and kokutai’s reference must have changed. As is evident in the emperor’s speech as well as in police reports and newspaper articles, after defeat it was only the people in the Japanese metropole (naiichi) who were supposed to be endangered by the invading foreign soldiers. This evaluation totally ignored the fate of formerly colonized people in Japan’s empire. Within