Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Kokutai" in English language version.
Japanists further circumscribed the permissible limits of political discourse. From the middle of the Meiji period, some conservatives had begun to advocate Nihon shugi, or Japanism, as an alternative to rapid Westernization. In particular, they wished to preserve traditional values and what they saw as Japan's unique national polity, or kokutai. For many conservatives in the Meiji era, the concept of the kokutai revolved around two principles. A divine line of emperors had ruled from time immemorial, and intimate familylike ties united the benevolent sovereign with his loyal subjects.
At the same time that [the government] approved universal manhood suffrage, the Diet passed the Peace Preservation Law of 1925. Drafted by bureaucrats within the Ministry of Justice, the measure stipulated that anyone "who organizes a group for the purpose of changing the national polity (kokutai) or of denying the private property system, or anyone who knowingly participates in such group" could be jailed for ten years, or even executed after the law was amended three years later.
In the 1930s, however, Japanists singled out Minobe for intense criticism. Battle was joined in 1934 when rightwing organizations, including the Imperial Military Reservists' Association, published accusatory books and pamphlets charging that Minobe's thoughts amounted to Ièse majesté.
Besides hushing its critics, the government sought to inculcate good citizenship among schoolchildren by introducing a new textbook, Kokutai no hongi ("Cardinal Principles of the National Polity"), published by the Ministry of Education on March 30, 1937, as an official statement of the government's concept of the kokutai. The purpose of the text, according to its own conclusion, was to overcome social unrest and "develop a new Japan by virtue of the Way of the Empire which stands firm throughout the ages at home and abroad, and thereby more than ever to guard and maintain the prosperity of the Imperial Throne which is coeval with heaven and earth." Following a historical overview that paid special honor to the divine origins of the imperial line, a series of overtly nationalistic essays explored the vlrtues of Japan's "special and unique" customs, culture, religion, morality, and way of life. Throughout the volume, the prose sang the praises of the national achievements of the past, credited those accomplishments to the wisdom of the imperial house, and called upon the Japanese of the 1930s to prepare themselves to make any sacrifice necessary to preserve the integrity of the emperor and nation.
Konoe and Matsuoka added to the allure of a geographically extended coprosperity sphere by wrapping it in imperial shrouds. Any move south, they averred, would be accomplished "peacefully" and in accordance, as Konoe so carefully phrased it in his radio address, "with the lofty spirit of hakko ichiu." It was another skillful rhetorical flourish by the veteran wordsmith. As every Japanese schoolchild who had read Kokutai no hongi knew by heart, hakko ichiu meant "eight cords, one roof" and first appeared in the eighth-century chronicle Nihon Shoki to describe how the legendary first emperor Jimmu extended his dominion over the other clans of the early Japanese islands, which subsequently enjoyed unparalleled prosperity and security thanks to his imperial benevolence. Superimposed upon Asia in 1940, the resuscitated ideal pictured a quasi family of nations led by Japan and its patriarch-emperor; the "Imperial Way," Matsuoka intoned, would permit "every nation and every race" to find "its proper place in the world."
Conservatives such as Hiranuma Kiichiro, who served as prime minister for eight months in 1939, objected that the proposed totalitarian IRAA was nothing but a "new shogunate" that would usurp the power of the emperor's government, and Japanists declared that the national polity, the hallowed kokutai, already united the emperor with subjects who naturally fulfilled their sacred obligation to "assist imperial rule." On a more mundane plane, senior officials within the Home Ministry feared the loss of bureaucratic turf and complained that the proposed network of occupationally based units would interfere with local administration at a particularly crucial time in the nation's history.
The growing sense of national emergency prompted many groups that earlier had assumed an oppositional stance toward the state to reassess their goals and tactics. One expression of that tendency came in the early 1930s, when thousands of workers joined so-called Japanist unions whose leadership hoped to improve working conditions by disavowing violent confrontations and demonstrating their loyalty to nation and emperor. Kamino Shin'ichi, originally a foreman at the lshikawajima shipyards, organized one of the more influential Japanist unions. In concert with other members of the conservative right, he and his followers ridiculed the political parties as being corrupt, condemned liberalism and democracy as the failed ideologies of a decadent West, and sought to build a new industrial order, premised on the "unity of emperor and subject," in which laborers and capitalists would be "of one mind and spirit, fused in an inseparable solidarity."
No group experienced more severe suppression than the new religions as Home Ministry bureaucrats embarked upon a crusade "to eradicate evil cults" for the crime of propagating Iese majeste. As manifested in such works as kokutai no hongi, the government in the 1930s fostered the growth of an official orthodoxy centered upon a sacrosanct emperor who stood both as the head of state and as the benevolent father of the family of Japanese citizens. Although not overtly antiemperor, many of the new religions espoused doctrines that threatened the centrality of the imperial figure; prosecutors, for instance, condemned the Omoto sect for revering deities other than the Sun Goddess. The most dramatic moment in the government's campaign against "quack religions" came on December 8, 1935, when hundreds of police stormed Omoto headquarters, smashed the main shrine building, dynamited an auxiliary hall, decapitated religious statues, and arrested nearly a thousand sect members. Four years later the Diet passed the Religious Organizations Law empowering the government to disband any religious organization whose teachings did not conform with "The Imperial Way," and officials promptly suppressed other unorthodox religions. An aversion for social disorder and a desire to "unify the will of the people" around national goals prompted bureaucratic officials in the 1930s to suppress or to co-opt the support of organizations that opposed government policies. Some of the associations, notably the Omoto sect, preferred to break rather than to bend, but most tempered their demands, shifted to less contentious goals, or even dissolved themselves.
