Photo/Illutration Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui used a quote from the Imperial Rescript on Education in materials for training new city employees. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

Kyoiku Chokugo, or the Imperial Rescript on Education, was eliminated and revoked by the Diet in June 1948 as being incompatible with the basic principle of the Japanese Constitution.

Therefore, public officials are not allowed to evaluate the rescript positively and quote from it, and Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui should stop his utilization of it.

Since 2012, the year after he became the mayor of Hiroshima, Matsui is said to have been using passages from the document every spring as a teaching material in the city’s annual training program for its rookie employees.

And the passages in question preach the virtues of “benevolence” and the “public good.”

“I don’t think that the Imperial Rescript on Education should be re-evaluated, but it is important to know that there were parts of it that could be appreciated. I will continue to use it,” Matsui said.

Maintaining the same argument at his regular news conference on Dec. 19, Matsui said, “There are words (in the rescript) that resonate with democratic ideas.”

We can only say this is dangerous thinking that ignores the essence of the document, in which Emperor Meiji (1852-1912), as a ruler, tells his subjects to practice their absolute loyalty to the emperor and the nation.

Immediately following a passage quoted by Matsui were words to this effect, “Should an emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the nation; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of the imperial family.”

And this very message was used during World War II to mobilize the public through ideological control.

It was only natural that the Lower House and the Upper House passed their respective resolutions to eliminate the rescript and revoke it in 1948, the year after the Japanese Constitution that stipulates the principle of popular sovereignty, vows to honor fundamental human rights and renounces war was put into effect.

Matsui is the mayor of one of the two atomic bombed cities--the other being Nagasaki--that have vowed to the victims to never make the same mistake again.

Given the history of Japan’s brutal victimization of the citizens of the nations it invaded in Asia and elsewhere--which led to the catastrophic destruction it suffered in Hiroshima and Nagasaki--shouldn’t Matsui be the first person spearheading a drive to denounce the Imperial Rescript on Education?

If he truly wants to preach benevolence and the public good, surely, he can do so in the context of his city’s appeals to the nation and the world to abolish nuclear weapons.

As a public official who is obliged to respect and uphold the Constitution, Matsui should never be allowed to intentionally cite the rescript--which is based on a value system totally alien to the Constitution--and cherry-pick what he thinks are its “positive” passages.

In 2017, the government adopted an official reply, approved by the Cabinet of then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which maintained to the effect that the government will “not deny the use of the rescript as a teaching material as long as it does not contravene the Constitution and the Fundamental Law of Education.”

Just before and after this was approved by the Cabinet, many ministers came forward to express their approval of the rescript’s “appraisable parts.”

But there can never be any form in which the rescript can be utilized, except as a material for teaching “negative history.” This needs to be reconfirmed by the central as well as local governments.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Dec. 20