The meaning of a bow
A march to Kudan
Since 1925 the army had assigned serving officers to schools and universities to give military drill. Students who passed the drill earned real advantages: a shorter term of service, and a chance at officer training. For a university, an assigned officer was a mark of standing. Sophia University, recognised as a university under the University Ordinance in 1928, asked for an officer that year, and from September 1931 its officer was Colonel Kitahara Hitomi.The spring of 1932 was a proud one for the young Jesuit school: a department of journalism opened in April, and a long-awaited new main building was finished and celebrated over several days.It was also a dangerous season. The Manchurian Incident had begun the previous September, and ten days after the march came the violence of the May 15 Incident, which Sophia's history names as a sign of the militarist years.
On 5 May 1932 Colonel Kitahara led about sixty second-year students of the preparatory course on a march to the war museum at Kudan and to the Yasukuni Shrine beside it, where the war dead are enshrined.As they set out, the university president, the German Jesuit Father Hermann Hoffmann, happened to pass. Several Catholic students, uneasy in conscience, asked him what to do. Visits to shrines with a bow were then forbidden to Catholics; the catechisms listed them under the First Commandment. Hoffmann told them they need not take part.
At the shrine the students were called to attention and ordered to salute the dead. Two, perhaps three, Catholic students did not.Sophia's own history says three, and that they declined "as Catholics, for reasons of faith".A student who was there, writing forty years later, remembered it differently: the students were told to bow on their own, in small groups, and two Catholics simply walked past without bowing, not in defiance; on the surface, he wrote, it was "a truly trifling matter".(Disputed: the number of students and the form of the order.)
The army and the university
The colonel reported to the Army Ministry at once.The army told the Ministry of Education that Sophia was harmful to the nation. On 14 June, in the middle of the celebrations for Sophia's new main building, the Ministry of Education telephoned: the army intended to withdraw its officer.The Jesuit rector, Father Max von Kuenburg, in a report written months later, says the news came "like a flash of lightning".The reason given was that "the spirit of Sophia University did not fall in line with the principles of Japanese education".
To lose the officer was to be branded unpatriotic. Students would lose their privileges in military service; graduates would not find work.
A bishop's counsel
Help came from Bishop Johannes Ross SJ, vicar apostolic of Hiroshima, who had long struggled with the shrine question for his own people.He believed that a sympathetic reading of Canon 1258 of the Code of Canon Law, which governs a Catholic's presence at the worship of others and allows exceptions, would let Japanese Catholics take part in the shrine visits.He took his arguments to Archbishop Jean-Alexis Chambon of Tokyo, of the Paris Foreign Missions, who gave permission "by word of mouth and for this instance" for Catholic students to join group ceremonies at the shrine of the war dead, while the question was studied with the apostolic delegate.Father Hoffmann told the Army Ministry, and on 5 July he gathered the Catholic students and told them of the archbishop's permission.(Disputed: Miyoshi dates Chambon's oral permission itself to 5 July.)
On 18 September 1932, the first anniversary of the Manchurian Incident, students of the Tokyo universities gathered before the Imperial Palace and marched to Yasukuni. Sophia sent about a hundred, more than any other school, and the Catholics among them joined the salute without difficulty.
Chambon's question
The archbishop wanted something more than private reassurance. On 22 September 1932 he wrote to the Minister of Education. He assured the government of the patriotism and loyalty of Japanese Catholics, and explained that he was writing because their consciences were perplexed. Then he asked:
"Are we to take it for certain that the reasons for requiring participation in these ceremonies are patriotic and not religious? Moreover I assure your excellency that we would experience less difficulty in the matter if it could be clearly stated that the inclination of the head, which the students are called upon to do, has a patriotic and in no way religious meaning."
His original letter is kept today in the National Archives of Japan.The reply was worked out in the following week with the help of a Catholic layman, Rear Admiral Yamamoto Shinjirō, who had been educated by the Marianist brothers in Tokyo and later served as a tutor to the emperor.
On 30 September the vice minister, Awaya Ken, sent the official reply:
"The visit to the national shrines is required of the students of the higher schools and the students of the middle and primary schools for reasons which conform to the program of education. In this instance, the bow that is required of the group ... has no other purpose than that of manifesting the sentiments of patriotism and loyalty."
Sophia's history sums up what followed: on receiving this answer, the bishops of Japan understood shrine visits as an expression of patriotism, not religion, and began to allow Catholics to take part.
The newspapers
It should have ended there. But on 1 October the Tokyo newspaper Hōchi ran the story under the headline "Students Refuse Reverence at Yasukuni Shrine: Adhere to Religious Conviction".Other papers followed, and two Marianist schools were dragged in on similar charges: Gyōsei in Tokyo and Kaisei in , called only "a certain school in Kudan" and its like, though everyone knew which were meant.The rector's report blamed the Army Ministry, which could reward or punish the press with news from Manchuria. Father Johannes Kraus of Sophia's new department of journalism, who knew the leading newspapermen, traced the campaign; Hoffmann and Kraus even met the Minister of War, General Araki, unofficially.Sophia published a notice in the Tokyo Asahi on 21 October saying that the university was not a religious school and that the reports were contrary to the facts, and it sent the same message to parents on 5 December.On 7 December 1932 the army transferred Colonel Kitahara to Aomori without the consent of the Ministry of Education, and sent no one in his place.
The university nearly died. Students who numbered about 315 in May 1932 fell to 264 by May 1933 and about 220 by the end of that year, and rumour said Sophia graduates could not find jobs.Miyoshi notes that only some thirty freshmen enrolled, and that Hoffmann, some Jesuit professors and students went to Yasukuni of their own accord several times to show their loyalty.At last a new officer, Colonel Koide Haruo, was assigned in December 1933, and the affair was over.
What the answer meant
For the Church, the written answer mattered more than the march. Minamiki, a Jesuit historian, calls it a statement that "clarified in written form the significance of the ceremony", and traces from it a series of Church decisions that reflected "broad comprehension and the spirit of liberty in action".In 1935 the new apostolic delegate, Archbishop Paolo Marella, issued an instruction on the national observances, and on 26 May 1936 Propaganda Fide's instruction Pluries instanterque confirmed it: such acts, "not enjoined as signs of religion but only as civil acts to manifest and foster devotion to one's country", might be performed by Catholics.Minamiki writes that, in days when any hint of disloyalty invited repression, the instruction let Japanese Catholics "line up alongside their non-Catholic compatriots" and answer the charge that a Catholic could not be a loyal subject.
Not everyone reads it so warmly. Miyoshi Chiharu, a Catholic historian at Nanzan, entitles the aftermath "Accommodation to Nationalism", and quotes Father Taguchi Yoshigorō's booklet of 1 December 1932, The Catholic View of the State, which promised that Catholics would go to death for the emperor "as if they were martyrs".That is Miyoshi's judgement, and Taguchi's words are documented.
The question of 1889 had come back. The promised freedom of belief within "the duties of subjects"; the state had said shrines were not religion.In 1932 a Catholic archbishop took the state at its word and asked it to say so in writing. It did, and Japanese Catholics, whose ancestors had died rather than renounce the faith, were told that this bow was not worship. The Church took that answer in good faith for its people's sake, in a time of danger. After 1945 the new Constitution separated religion and state. Minamiki, writing in 1980, notes that questions about the meaning of Shinto rites in public life were still being raised under its Article 20.