Emperor Hirohito: The God Who Fel To Earth - Review

Contemporary Review, July, 2001 by Raymond Lamont-Brown

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. Herbert P. Bix. Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd. [pound]25.00. 800 pages. ISBN 0-7156-3077-6.

Fiction, obfuscation, distortion and perversion surround the life and reign of Hirohito, 124th Emperor of Japan, who died at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, on 6 January 1989, aged 88. He had ruled Japan from the Chrysanthemum Throne for sixty-two years, and was the world's sole remaining Emperor and the very last survivor amongst the infamous figures of World War II.

A number of westerners had had a stab at writing Hirohito's biography. In 1966 the late war correspondent, Leonard Mosley, offered the first real overview in English with the underlying conclusion that 'Hirohito almost single-handedly stopped the war in 1945'. In 1971 Life magazine's editor, and ex-Japanese PoW, David Bergamini, rattled imperial skeletons to show 'how Emperor Hirohito and his faction planned step by step to force Japan into war...' The French roving correspondent, Edward Behr, produced his biography in the year of Hirohito's death, which named the Emperor as a devoted militarist. In 1999, in a history of US occupation of Japan, Professor John Dower, endorsed Behr's assertions.

Mosley produced a work which opened up the subject of Hirohito; Bergamini overstated the case that Hirohito was the real mastermind behind Japan's militarism, a case easily demolished by the Emperor's apologists while Behr and Dower managed to blow some of the fog away from an understanding of the imperial institution and its role in World War II. Yet vital questions remain: Exactly who was Hirohito and what was his divine-pragmatic status at the apex of the nation's political hierarchy? To what extent was he personally responsible for Japan's wartime aggression, atrocities and expansionism? More controversially, was he a war criminal? At a time when several of Japan's historians and politicians still publicly deny Japan's World War II atrocities and peddle the old line that 'Japan was not the aggressor nation in World War II', Herbert P. Bix's volume is timely.

Hirohito is not an easy candidate for biography. He was not fond of the company of others; he was a reticent speaker, wary of revealing his inner thoughts; he wrote no personal reminiscences and until the post-war years was unknown as a flesh and blood person to his teeming subjects. Until 1945, he was considered a living god. Nevertheless he remains a fascinating and complex political character in twentieth century Japanese and international history. For his reign ran from 1926, when Japan was once more embroiled in his nation's relations with and hatred of China, thence after World War II through the Cold War to the sunny uplands of astounding national prosperity.

Even before World War II had ended, Hirohito and his aides were preparing a defence for him should he be called to the War Crimes Tribunal which the Japanese high command knew would take place. From the 1920s, the complete involvement of Hirohito with the emergent Japanese war machine was known to dissident watchers in Japan. To the world he proclaimed that he was a constitutional monarch. After all, his aides pointed out, he had only intervened twice in Japanese politics, once in 1936 to confound an attempted coup by young army officers and again in August 1945 to force surrender.

In truth Hirohito and his aides had assisted the military cadre to achieve huge political influence and stifled opposition to the militarist government that would emerge with General Hideki Tojo at its head. Hirohito was at the centre of a new wave of the kodo, an 'imperial way' of emperor-based nationalism that would be xenophobic and racialist and lead to policies of genocide and imperial expansion to promote Hakko Ichiu, 'The whole world under one roof', that is Japanese world domination under the Emperor.

Thus there was a strong case for bringing Hirohito to trial. To counter it Hirohito had to be depicted as a 'helpless puppet' of the militarists, and a prisoner in his own palace with no political power that mattered. All this was to be achieved by the extraordinary behaviour of the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur.

MacArthur's considered task was to present Hirohito, although stripped of all political power and demoted from the status of kami [god], as a unifying force within a new and docile (to US interests) nation. Japan would also be a key bulwark in the East to tackle the growing menace of Communism which was thought by most Americans to be ready to leapfrog amongst the nations of Asia. Thus by distorting and falsifying history MacArthur completed a whitewash of Hirohito.

This great story has been re-examined and re-focussed by Herbert Bix. His task has been an uphill one, not only because of its reticent subject, but because of the unreliable extant notes, reminiscences and memoirs compiled by former aides and contemporary politicians bent on self-justification and a plea of Watashi wa machigai de wa arimasen, 'It wasn't my fault'.