Hirohito: Dunce or Duplicitous Leader? Michelle Yost
aegis 2006 96 yost
Introduction At the conclusion of World War II, American occupation forces faced a tough decision: remove the Showa Emperor Hirohito and charge him with war crimes, or leave him as the symbolic leader of a defeated nation. To this end, General MacArthur chose to ease the occupation of Japan by allowing Hirohito to remain in the position of Emperor (now largely impotent) and helped to reform the image of the Emperor in the new democratic government. Hirohito was not up front about his role in the war, and MacArthur did not press for details. Previous historical works have portrayed the Showa Emperor as a background figure who bore very little responsibility for Japan’s actions. With new sources released by the royal family, Herbert Bix makes the argument in his book, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (2000), that the Emperor was not a passive figure controlled by militaristic forces, but an active director of World War II. History is always changing in accordance to new popular interpretations, and Hirohito’s war history has changed significantly in the last forty years. To this end, I will compare the position of Bix’s book with four published before his between 1966 and 1998. Leonard Mosley’s Hirohito: Emperor of Japan is the oldest, published in 1966, and by far the most sympathetic to Hirohito. In 1971 there was David Bergamini’s Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, blowing onto the historical scene with allegations of a cover-up about Hirohito’s true involvement in the war. However, his book was not well received (as will be seen in the reviews) and he did not have access to all of the documents that Bix used. Edward Behr, author of Hirohito: Behind the Myth (1989), balanced the position of Mosley and Bergamini, asserting that in the person of Hirohito there was “a shrewd and skillful manipulator as work, who knew what was going on.”1 In 1998, Peter Wetzler published Hirohito and War, which makes the argument that while Hirohito was well informed about military maneuvers, his participation in the decision-making process was driven by his desire to maintain Japanese policy and the image of the imperial household. Wetzler summarizes, “The emperor was not the ultimate or the only decision maker; he was part of the decision-making process.”2 The image of Hirohito’s guiltless ignorance was crumbling away, but reviewers and fellow historians don’t seem to have come to full acceptance of the Emperor’s war responsibility until Bix’s book. Beginning with the Meiji Restoration in 1867, the position of Emperor of Japan was moved from a marginal religious figure to the center of the government. However, the cabinet (headed by the genro at first) held real control. Military leaders were given powerful positions in the cabinet, and the cabinet often appointed prime ministers independent of public elections. With this history, it is not impossible to image Hirohito as “a helpless puppet of “the militarists”,”3 but new documentation points a guilty finger at him as a well informed schemer who helped to guide Japan’s war course. Herbert Bix asserts, From the very outset Hirohito was a dynamic emperor, but paradoxically also one who projected the defensive image of a passive monarch. While the rest of the world dissociated him from any meaningful personal role
