Hirohito: String Puller, Not Puppet
By HERBERT P. BIXSEPT. 29, 2014
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. ─ LAST month, I received a startling email from an employee
at one of Japan’s largest newspapers, about a development I’d long awaited.
The government was about to unveil a 12,000-page, 61-volume official biography
of Emperor Hirohito, which a large team of scholars and civil servants had
been preparing since 1990, the year after his death.
I was asked if I would examine an embargoed excerpt from this enormous trove
and then comment on the emperor’s perspective on various events, including
Japan’s 1937 expansion of its conflict in China and its decision four years
later to go to war with the United States and Britain; the trial of war
criminals; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and the American
military occupation of postwar Japan.
But there was a condition: I could not discuss Hirohito’s ǒrole and responsibilityō
in World War II, which would be strictly outside the scope of the newspaper’
s reporting. Having devoted years of my life to examining precisely this
topic, I politely refused.
The release of Hirohito’s official biography should be an occasion for
reflection around the world on a war that, in the Pacific theater, took
the lives of at least 20 million Asians (including more than three million
Japanese) and more than 100,000 citizens of the Western Allied nations, primarily
the United States and Britain.
Instead, Japan’s Imperial Household Agency, abetted by the Japanese media,
has dodged important questions about events before, during and after the
war. The new history perpetuates the false but persistent image ─ endorsed
by the Allied military occupation, led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur ─ of a
benign, passive figurehead.
As I and other scholars have tried to show, Hirohito, from the start of
his rule in 1926, was a dynamic, activist and conflicted monarch who operated
within a complex system of irresponsibility inherited from his grandfather,
the Meiji emperor, who oversaw the start of Japan’s epochal modernization.
Hirohito (known in Japan as Showa, the name of his reign) represented an
ideology and an institution ─ a system constructed to allow the emperor
to interject his will into the decision-making process, before prime ministers
brought cabinet decisions to him for his approval. Because he operated behind
the scenes, the system allowed his advisers to later insist that he had
acted only in accordance with their advice.
In fact, Hirohito was never a puppet. He failed to prevent his army from
invading Manchuria in 1931, which caused Japan to withdraw from the League
of Nations, but he sanctioned the full-scale invasion of China in 1937,
which moved Japan into a state of total war. He exercised close control
over the use of chemical weapons in China and sanctioned the attack on Pearl
Harbor in 1941. Even after the war, when a new, American-modeled Constitution
deprived him of sovereignty, he continued to meddle in politics.
From what I’ve read, the new history suffers from serious omissions in
editing, and the arbitrary selection of documents. This is not just my view.
The magazine Bungei Shunju asked three writers, Kazutoshi Hando, Masayasu
Hosaka and Michifumi Isoda, to read parts of the history. They pointed out,
in the magazine’s October issue, significant omissions. Only the first
of the emperor’s 11 meetings with General MacArthur was mentioned in detail.
Instead, the scholars noted Hirohito’s schoolboy writings and commented
on trivialities like the discovery of the place where his placenta was buried.
That does not mean that the project is without merit. Researchers collected
3,152 primary materials, including some previously not known to exist, such
as the memoirs of Adm. Saburo Hyakutake, the emperor’s aide-de-camp from
1936 to 1944. They documented Hirohito’s messages to Shinto deities, fleshing
out his role as chief priest of the state religion. They collected vital
materials on the exact times, dates and places of imperial audiences with
civil and military officials and diplomats.
Hirohito was a timid opportunist, eager above all to preserve the monarchy
he had been brought up to defend. War was not essential to his nature, as
it was for Hitler and Europe’s fascists. The new history details his concern
over the harsh punishments enacted in 1928 to crush leftist and other opposition
to Japan’s rising militarism and ultranationalism. It elaborates on his
role in countering a coup attempt in 1936 by young Army officers who wanted
to install an even more right-wing, militaristic government. It notes that
he cried for only the second time in his life when his armed forces were
dissolved.
"Had Japan surrendered sooner, the firebombing of its cities, and the two
atomic bombings, might have been avoided". This is a brutal...
In the discussions about Japanese aggression and culpability before and
during the War in the Pacific certain matters have hardly been...
I too am skeptical of the Occupation's white wash of Hirohito after the
war; but I am also skeptical of Prof. Bix's deeply responsible...
The official history confirms Hirohito’s bullheadedness in delaying surrender
when it was clear that defeat was inevitable. He hoped desperately to enlist
Stalin’s Soviet Union to obtain more favorable peace terms. Had Japan surrendered
sooner, the firebombing of its cities, and the two atomic bombings, might
have been avoided.
Why does all this matter, nearly 70 years since the end of the war?
Unlike Germany, where acceptance of responsibility for the Nazis’ crimes
is embedded in government policy, Japan’s government has never engaged
in a full-scale reckoning of its wartime conduct. This is partly because
of the anti-imperialist dimension of the war it fought against Western powers,
and partly because of America’s support for European colonialism in the
early Cold War. But it is also a result of a deliberate choice ─ abetted
by the education system and the mass media, with notable exceptions ─ to
overlook or distort issues of accountability.
The new history comes at a politically opportune time. Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party government is waging a campaign to pump
up nationalist pride. Mr. Abe has made no secret of his desire to enhance
the monarchy’s status in a revised ǒpeace constitutionō that would rewrite
Article 9, which prohibits Japan from maintaining offensive forces.
The very idea of a carefully vetted official biography of a leader fits
within the Sino-Japanese historical tradition, but raises deep suspicions
of a whitewash, as well as issues of contemporary relevance. Okinawans cannot
take pride in the way Hirohito sacrificed them, by consenting to indefinite
American military control of their island. Japan’s neighbors, like South
Korea and the Philippines, cannot be reassured by the way its wartime past
is overlooked or played down, but neither can they be reassured by America’
s confrontational, militaristic approach toward Chinese assertiveness.
After Hirohito died, in 1989, there was an outpouring of interest in his
reign and a decade-long debate about his war responsibility. Now, after
decades of mediocre economic performance, generational divides have deepened
and the Japanese may not take much note. If so, a crucial opportunity to
improve relations with Asian neighbors and deepen understanding of the causes
of aggression will have been lost.
Herbert P. Bix, emeritus professor of history and sociology at Binghamton
University, is the author of ǒHirohito and the Making of Modern Japan.ō