Emperor Hirohito's War
What did Hirohito
really think of Pearl
Harbor? On the 50th
anniversary of the
Japanese attack that
brought the US into
the Second World
War, Herbert Bix
offers a provocative
reassessment of the
Showa Emperor's
responsibility for the
conflict, drawing on
his translations from
diaries and memoirs
of Hirohito and his
court circle.
Since the death of the Showa Emperor Hirohito in
January 1989, new historical documents have
focused public attention on the leadership role that
he and his innermost circle of advisers played in
the Japanese political process both during and after
the Second World War. These new materials, and
others published over the course of the 1980s,
furnish a fresh starting point for situating the
Showa emperor in the history of the twentieth
century. They help to delineate more clearly key
elements of Emperor Hirohito's character, while
exposing certain myths pertaining to his innocence
in starting the Pacific War, and his heroism in
ending it. They also raise questions about his
position in the post-war state, where he was
supposed to be a powerless 'symbol', completely
devoid of any political role.
The emperor's death lifted a taboo on discussing
his role in history and in 1990 alone six 'insider'
diaries and memoirs of considerable historical
value appeared. Two of them – the diaries of
Makino Nobuaki, the emperor's Grand
Chamberlain and Privy Seal from 1925 to 1935,
and Nara Takeji, his chief military aide-de-camp –
reveal the emperor during his first political crises
in 1928 and 1931-33. They show his permissive
attitude toward the military elite from the very start
of its rise to power; and also show that, with the
exception of the Genro Saionji Kinmochi (whose
influence relative to Makino declined after 1929),
the emperor and his most important political
advisers were never strong supporters of party
cabinets.
The era of 'Taisho democracy' (First World War to
1926) had coincided with the physical and mental
inability of Hirohito's father to exercise his power
under the Meiji Constitution. That situation, which
had been public knowledge ever since the First
World War, facilitated a decline in the power and
prestige of the throne, making possible the rise of
'Taisho democracy'. In 1926 when Emperor
Hirohito ascended the throne and the 'Showa era'
began, a major concern among ruling circles was
how to implant in the people the authority of
Emperor Hirohito. It was, therefore, not entirely
accidental that the period that witnessed the decline
and end of the era of political party governments –
1928 to 1931 – was also the period in which the
young emperor and his close advisers, Makino
Nobuaki, Suzuki Kantaro and Nara Taketsugu,
were most pre-occupied with reasserting the power
and prestige of the throne, and establishing the
'imperial will' as distinct from the policy of the
government.
Sokkin nisshi, Kinoshita
Michio, another diary
revealing the emperor in the
early post-war period, was
kept by Kinoshita Michio, a
Tokyo University Law
School graduate, who in
1924 became Crown Prince
Hirohito's private secretary
and chamberlain. Kinoshita's
record covers the period
from his appointment as
Vice Grand Chamberlain in October 1945 until his
resignation in June 1946. He has much to say about
developments in the making of the post-war
Japanese state, including the emperor's role in the
emergence of a new 'give and take' relationship
with the United States. Here one finds the
emperor's defence of his wartime prime minister
Tojo Hideki's discussions of the emperor's thoughts
on the designation and arrest of war criminal
suspects, and entries dealing with the making of the
emperor's famous 'declaration of humanity', issued
as an imperial rescript to the Japanese nation on
January 1st, 1946.
According to Kinoshita seven people participated
directly in the drafting process of the declaration,
including the emperor. The Americans took the
initiative and approved the original draft, believing
that they were getting the emperor to participate
directly in the debunking of emperor ideology. But
Hirohito wanted to get across a different message:
namely, that the monarchy had always been
compatible with democracy. And his revisions
ensured that the primary message of the rescript
was not so much the disavowal of his alleged
divinity but the idea that the democratisation of
Japanese society marked a continuation of ideals
inscribed in the Five Article 'Charter Oath' of the
Meiji Restoration. In its reaffirmation of the past,
and failure to explicitly repudiate the old wartime
ideology of the divine origins of the imperial line,
the 'Declaration of Humanity' had some of the
same mendacious qualities as the emperor's famous
August 15th, 1945, surrender broadcast, which cast
his acceptance of the Potsdam Proclamation in the
form of a unilateral assertion of imperial will.
Kinoshita is also helpful in explaining how the
emperor and his entourage prepared for the Tokyo
war crimes trials, and how American policy makers
in Tokyo and Washington assisted the Japanese
'moderates' in transforming him from the symbol of
Japanese militarism to the emblem of its new found
pacifism. Kinoshita does not focus on the Japanese
people who were the targets of this propaganda
effort, but he was writing in that critical period
when a gap had opened between the monarchy and
the people, which the court, with General
Headquarters co-operation, was attempting to close
by promoting a new image of the emperor as a
great pacifist. The emperor's periodic tours of local
areas, which began in February 1946 and continued
until 1954, were part of that effort. When historians
examine Japan's road to war with the peoples of
Asia and the West, they will not be able to ignore
the issues of the emperor, the 'palace groups' and
the 'emperor system'; nor will they be able any
longer to treat the emperor in the post-war period
as a completely non-political figure. The discovery
of new historical materials has made it possible to
put them all back into the picture. Doing this,
however, will involve taking account of the
emperor in his capacity as supreme military
commander.
A recent Japanese language study of the Showa
Emperor's war leadership, by Yamada Akira, gives
new insight into the role of the emperor as
commander-in-chief. In standard, authoritative
historical accounts, such as Robert Butow's Japan's
Decision to Surrender (1954) the wartime emperor
is depicted as 'a bystander watching with interest
the turmoil of political activity taking place around
him but never interfering no matter how personally
concerned for the outcome he might be', However,
this 'bystander' image of a constitutional monarch
robotised and kept in the dark by the military, is a
travesty. It is far more accurate to see Emperor
Hirohito at the height of his political powers as an
inconsistent wielder of sovereign power who did
not want war with the United States and Britain
but, by the late 1930s, moved squarely into the
camp of the 'renovationist' group who were tending
toward an ever-expanding war in Asia.
By October 1941, as Konoe Fumimaro and his
chief cabinet secretary, Tomita Kenji, have
suggested, a major factor in Prime Minister
Konoe's resignation, which paved the way for the
war cabinet of General Tojo Hideki, was the
emperor's own increasing inclination toward war.
Less than seven weeks after he had bestowed the
mandate of prime minister on Army Minister Tojo,
Emperor Hirohito sanctioned the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor. Thereafter, as the nation's
supreme commander-in-chief, he frequently
worked to give overall supervision for the entire
war effort, even going so far as to insist that
specific orders be issued to his commanders in the
field, and, on occasion, interfering in military
operations in all the far-flung theatres of the war.
Yamada documents eleven major instances where
the emperor was deeply involved in supervising the
actual conduct of war operations. According to the
evidence in this work, Hirohito pressured the High
Command to order an early attack on the
Philippines, including the fortified Bataan
peninsula. He pressed for, and secured, the
deployment of army air power in the Guadalcanal
campaign. Following Japan's withdrawal from
Guadalcanal he demanded a new offensive in New
Guinea, which was duly carried out. Unhappy with
the navy's conduct of the war, he criticised the
withdrawal from the central Solomon Islands and
demanded naval battles against the Americans for
the losses they had inflicted in the Aleutians.
Finally, it was at his insistence that plans were
drafted for the recapture of Saipan and, later, for an
offensive in the battle of Okinawa.
Yamada's work is an excellent guide to a
remarkable historical document, written around the
time of Kinoshita Michio's diary but, like
Kinoshita, not published until the great 'emperor
boom' of 1989-90. This document is the Showa
emperor's dokuhakuroku or dictated account of the
key events during his first twenty years as emperor.
It was taken down in five dictation sessions in the
spring of 1946, by close aides.
When the popular literary magazine Bungei Shunju
conveniently published the dokuhakuroku in
December 1990, it created a sensation by enabling
readers to get a new and deeper insight into the
emperor's character, For the first time since the
war, many saw the forgotten fighting generalissimo
side to Hirohito – a side that Yamada Akira and
other Japanese historians had already documented
on the basis of the emperor's 'questions' to his
military commanders, and their reports to him on
the unfolding war situation.
The first point to consider about the dokuhakuroku,
however, is the political intention behind its
genesis. The emperor's first person survey of
Japan's crises and wars from 1928 to 1945 was
composed in order to answer questions that had
arisen specifically in connection with the Tokyo
war crimes trial. The fear then was that the
Americans might bring pressure on the emperor to
abdicate, or even to testify as a witness in the
forthcoming trials. The second point is that the
published document is essentially a shortened
version of an original that was copied out in pencil
by the liaison officer of the Imperial Household,
Terasaki Hidenari.
It has been conjectured by well-informed Japanese
scholars such as Awaya Kentaro and Hata Ikuhiko,
that Terasaki made an abbreviated English
translation of the document and presented it to high
officials within SCAP. Evidence in Terasaki's own
diary as well as Kinoshita Michio's suggests that
Terasaki probably acted with the approval of the
Japanese foreign minister, Yoshida Shigeru.
Judging from the large number of copies that the
Terasaki version of the dokuhakuroku has sold in
Japan and the media attention it has gained, one
may say that this single document has attracted
more public attention than any of the other new
historical materials on Emperor Hirohito. Although
many Japanese have commented favourably on the
Showa emperor of the dokuhakuroku, many more,
from all walks of life, have been shocked by the
revelations: the amazing alibis by which he sought
to exonerate himself for the defeat, his lack of
consideration for the Japanese people, or guilt for
the millions of victims of Japanese aggression.
The lack of moral fibre shown by his constant
shifting onto others of his own ultimate
responsibility for the defeat, and his failure to
reflect on his own mistakes, have drawn the most
critical comments. Readers have also raised
questions about his dismissal of his first prime
minister, Tanaka Giichi, in 1929, his decision to
sanction the starting of the Pacific War in 1941;
and his role, three and a half years later, in Japan's
decision to surrender unconditionally to the Allies.
For their part, professional historians have
concentrated on the many myths about the emperor
and his court advisers, or those whom US
Ambassador Joseph Grew used to call the
'moderates' around the throne. One such myth is
the notion that Emperor Hirohito was a normal
constitutional monarch who, with a few wellpublicised (and therefore undeniable) exceptions,
never issued commands but merely expressed
opinions or put his seal to documents. Another is
that during the Pacific War he was a member of the
peace camp, trying to surrender before the US
began its all-out bombing campaign of the
Japanese mainland. The dokuhakuroku has
undermined the emperor's false renown as a
constitutionalist and pacifist and raised questions
about his incredibly belated decision to surrender
in August 1945. In these and other ways, it has
helped advance the whole debate on his
unacknowledged war responsibility, even though
much of what it contains is not new to historians.
The emperor of the dokuhakuroku combined a
keen sense of himself as an absolute sovereign,
with a remarkable capacity to pretend that he was a
normal constitutional monarch. He was certainly a
political realist with an appetite for the fruits of
territorial aggrandisement, and that might have
made him susceptible to the rhetoric of hakko ichiu
(eight corners of the world under one roof), When
he observed in the dokuhakuroku that:
it does not matter much if an incident occurs in
Manchuria because Manchuria is rural; but if
something were to happen in the Tientsin-Peking
area, Anglo-American intervention would surely
worsen and might lead to a clash,
he seems to have been speaking true to character.
In the Asian arena he could safely express his
expansionist inclinations; and in China's northeastern provinces in particular he easily
rationalised the aggression of his armed forces. But
when dealing with the West he preferred caution
because he lacked confidence in Japan's ability to
win a war against the United States and Britain,
and was far more aware than his military
commanders of Japan's vulnerability to economic
blockade. Essentially, he believed in force but
wanted to combine it with its opposite, diplomacy,
so that Japan might retain the fruits of its
aggression against weaker Asian neighbours.
Equally well-documented are the emperor's
frequent disagreements with the military and his
condemnations of their recklessness. These
disagreements, however, were mainly tactical and
not principled. They stemmed from what the
emperor imagined the United States or Britain
would do in response to any particular act of
Japanese aggrandisement. Although the military's
rise to power in the 1930s created situations in
which the emperor's orders were sometimes
disobeyed, rifts between him and his military
should not be exaggerated. Moreover, the military
never had enough power to establish a dictatorship
and could only operate through the authority of the
emperor. As historian Yoshida Yutaka has
observed, the military's rise to power during this
period was also a process in which Emperor
Hirohito strengthened his voice and projected his
will in the policy making process.
Two other aspects of the emperor's world-view can
be gathered from the dokuhakuroku. One was his
sense of Japan as a 'have-not' nation (vying with
the Anglo-American powers who were intent on
keeping it in a subordinate international position
within the Washington treaty system). Another
element appears to have been a low regard for
party government at home. Needless to say, these
too were features that the emperor shared with the
militarists; and both are exemplified in his defiant
introduction to the dokuhakuroku. This particular
monologue appears as a document attached to
Kinoshita Michio's diary, written about the same
time as the dokuhakuroku, but it is not reproduced
in full in the published and abbreviated (Terasaki
Hidenari) version. Here, addressing the origins of
the Second World War, is what the emperor says:
Japan's call for racial equality, advocated by our
representatives at the peace conference following
World War I, was not approved by the Great
Powers. Everywhere in the world discrimination
between Yellow and White remained, as in the
rejection of immigration to California and the
Whites-only policy in Australia. These were
sufficient grounds for the indignation of the
Japanese people who suffered from having a small,
over-populated territory and a lack of raw
materials, yet had considerable ability to develop.
Nor was that all. Despite my visit to England and
the efforts I made for mutual friendship, the AngloJapanese alliance was abrogated immediately after
my visit. As time passed, Great Power pressure on
Japan to reduce its armaments grew steadily
stronger. We were forced to return Tsingtao. In
China anti-Japanese education, which drew on the
sympathy of the Great Powers for the weaker party,
had very deep roots. For these reasons Japan-China
relations could only continue to worsen. Moreover,
our political ability to deal with these unfavorable
international conditions showed signs of gradual
debilitation as a result of the corruption of the
political parties. The feeling spread among the
nation's masses that entrusting politics to the party
politicians was endangering the future of the state.
The selfless spirit of the nation cries out in such
times of national crisis.
Because the military stood up under such
circumstances, bearing the frustrations of the
nation, it was extremely difficult to check the
spirited young men who formed its core, even
though they acted recklessly without regard to
means. For their reckless behaviour appeared to
exhibit some common ground with the patriotic
action of breaking the deadlock of the state.
Having rationalised Japan's war of aggression as a
just war of defence against white Western
imperialism and Chinese resistance, the emperor
launches into a discussion of his first political
crisis: the assassination, in June 1928, of the
Manchurian warlord Chang Tso-lin by staff
officers of his Kwantung Army, and his subsequent
scolding (in effect, firing) of his prime minister, the
Seiyukai party president, General Tanaka Giichi,
for his alleged mishandling of the incident. His
intention is to introduce at the outset his main
defence: namely, that he was a 'normal
constitutional monarch', who ratified military faits
accomplis but was unable to interfere in cabinet
decisions.
If the dokuhakuroku raised many different aspects
of the emperor's war responsibility, other new
documents published in recent years have helped to
carry that discussion into the post-Second World
War period. On three different occasions the
Showa emperor considered abdicating as a way of
acknowledging his responsibility for Japan's war
dead (as opposed to the Asian and Western victims
of its aggression). The first was right after the
surrender; the second was around the time of the
reading of the final verdict in the Tokyo War
Crimes Trial in November 1948; and the third was
right after Japan signed the San Francisco Peace
Treaty and regained its independence in 1951.
Throughout that seven year period, the question of
abdication was at once a war responsibility issue
and an issue of protecting the imperial institution
itself, on the ideological plane, from the dangerous
idea of political accountability to which the
emperor's pre-war and wartime activities had
exposed it.
In 1980 Tokyo University Press brought out the
previously unpublished post-war diaries of Kido
Koichi, covering the period December 15th, 1945,
to the end of 1948, together with various Kido
interviews, interrogations, memorandums and
letters. Kido, who had been sentenced to life
imprisonment as a 'Class A' war criminal by the
Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in November 1948,
also gave thirty depositions to the Tribunal's
International Prosecution Section between
December 21st, 1945 and March 15th, 1946. And
in 1987 this entire record was also published by the
leading authority of the Tokyo Trials, Awaya
Kentaro, and others. In Awaya's commentary on
Kido one finds new documentary evidence of
Kido's strong feelings on the war responsibility
issue and how he tried to get the emperor to act on
the third and last occasion when he considered
abdicating. Having served the emperor as Privy
Seal and close confidant between June 1940 and
November 1945, Kido knew what he was talking
about when, from Sugamo prison on October 17th,
1951, he sent the emperor the following secret
message:
I had left the same word when I bid farewell to His
Majesty [December 1945]. No matter how one
looks at it, the Emperor bears responsibility for
losing the war. Therefore, once you have
thoroughly carried out the Potsdam Proclamation –
in other words, when a peace treaty has been
signed – I think it is most proper for you to take
responsibility and abdicate for the sake of your
imperial ancestors and for the nation.... By doing
this, the bereaved families of those who died and
were wounded in the war, those who were not
repatriated and the families of the war criminals
will somehow feel requited. I think that should
make a very important contribution to national
unity centered on the Imperial House. However, if
you do not do this, then the end result will be that
the Imperial Family alone will not have taken
responsibility and an unclear mood will remain
which, I fear, might leave an eternal scar.
Emperor Hirohito could never bring himself to
abdicate. Nor could he adjust easily to the spirit of
the new peace constitution which, although it
stripped him of all political powers, had been
largely established for his benefit. The conservative
party politician and diplomatic historian Ashida
Hitoshi served as foreign minister in the first
socialist cabinet of Katayama Tetsu in 1947 and
was prime minister in his own cabinet in 1948. His
seven volume diary, published in 1986, has shed
important light on the imperial institution during
the entire occupation period. Ashida confirms the
emperor's unabated (and unconstitutional) political
activism and his inability to desist from interfering
directly in domestic and foreign policy affairs. In
an entry of July 22nd, 1947, Ashida describes how
the emperor urged him to 'align' with the United
States in the Cold War with the Soviet Union and
pressured him to continue the practice of making
informal reports to the throne on diplomatic
problems, even though such reports violated the
new constitution.
By 1947 the Cold War had started to affect Japan,
accelerating a reverse course in US occupation
policy and creating new opportunities for the
emperor to project his views into the policymaking process. As the international situation
worsened, the emperor began to act more
forcefully in the old mould, not only insisting that
the government make unofficial reports to the
throne (naiso), which it did, but secretly operating
behind the scenes to ensure that the Ashida
government co-operated with Washington against
the Soviet Union. Ashida even records that on
March 10th, 1948, the emperor importuned him to
take action against the Japanese Communist Party,
though any such action would have been illegal
under the new constitution. By re-establishing the
practice of naiso, and in other ways, Emperor
Hirohito continued to act not as a 'symbol' but as a
political monarch.
Finally, new light has also been shed on the
emperor's role in the establishment of the
Shidehara Kijuro cabinet (October 1945 to April
1946), and how that cabinet colluded with
MacArthur's GHQ to defend him on the issue of
his responsibility for the defeat and for having
indulged Japan's military cliques in their rise to
power. Tsugita Daizabiro nikki, the short diary of
Tsugita Daizaburo, chief cabinet secretary in the
Shidehara government, brings alive the world of
early post-surrender Japan with its millions of
unemployed, demobilised soldiers, looming food
shortages, mushrooming popular movements, and
rising criticisms of those responsible for the great
defeat.
Tsugita wrote from the viewpoint of a professional
bureaucrat and politician who believed in the twin
myths of the Showa emperor as a constitutional
monarchist and a pacifist who had brought the war
to an end. The following diary entry of October
26th, 1945, suggests that from a very early point in
the occupation General MacArthur was
predisposed to exonerate the emperor of all war
crimes charges, without even bothering to
investigate the available evidence.
Around 6 o'Clock [Army] Lt. General Haraguchi
[Hatsutaro] called on me. He said that he had met
[Brigadier General Bonner F.] Fellers of
MacArthur's headquarters and was told that the
problem of the Emperor's responsibility for the
attack on Pearl Harbor is the 'most important and
critical' issue on the American side. The topic came
up of how to deal with it. Both MacArthur and
Fellers have very warm feelings toward His
Majesty. Haraguchi has no doubt that they are
thinking of how to solve this problem without
causing trouble for the Emperor. However,
American public opinion is very strong; there is
also a proposal from the Soviet Union; and it seems
that it is not so easy for MacArthur to do as he
pleases. In any case, he said that we must have
prepared and ready a general explanation [i.e.
defence for the Emperor]. Regarding this matter, I
think that since the Meiji Emperor, the Emperor of
Japan has approved all matters reported to him by
the Government or the Imperial Headquarters and
never once has he exercised a 'veto.' But at the time
of the ending of the war, the Cabinet ministers and
the staff officers of the Imperial Headquarters
could not reach agreement. So, at the prime
minister's request, the Emperor made a decision.
One can say that this is almost the only instance in
which the Emperor's will was reflected directly in
government. I think it is most appropriate to
explain this fact honestly.
Ten days earlier, on October 16th, 1945,
Washington had instructed MacArthur to 'proceed
immediately to assemble all available evidence of
Hirohito's participation in and responsibility for
Japanese violations of international law'. From
Tsugita's comments, it would seem that MacArthur
responded to Washington's order by alerting the
Shidehara cabinet to prepare a general defence of
the emperor. Worried about how the United States
would proceed on the issue of punishing war
criminals, the Shidehara cabinet for the remainder
of its existence worked closely with MacArthur's
GHQ to protect the emperor from the Tokyo
Tribunal. A statement it adopted on November 5th,
1945, to guide government officials in answering
questions 'On matters of war responsibility' laid out
the official line thereafter: all war responsibility
(by which they meant responsibility for having lost
the war) lay with the Government and the military
High Command, while the emperor bore no
responsibility whatever.
Meanwhile, MacArthur's efforts to solve the
problem of the emperor's war responsibility
'without causing trouble for the Emperor' were
neither entirely successful, nor salutary for the
Japanese people. The very logic of the reforms
entailed the smashing of emperor ideology by
promoting a broad interpretation of war
responsibility in all areas of Japanese national life.
So, while MacArthur was attacking the social basis
of the emperor system, extending the pursuit of war
responsibility even to school-teachers who had
indoctrinated the Japanese nation with militarism
and ultranationalism, he was also moving in the
opposite direction where the emperor himself was
concerned. By shielding the emperor from the
scrutiny of the war crimes investigators, and later
discouraging his abdication, MacArthur abetted the
Japanese conservatives in preventing the Japanese
people from coming to grips with their own past
aggression.
With the publication of the dokuhakuroku and
other documents, the veil that was drawn over the
Showa Emperor's war responsibility and his failure
to abdicate has been pulled back. New debate on
the role of the palace groups in the period of
fascism and war has also been stimulated. The
prevailing views in the West of the emperor as a
pacifist standing outside the political process, and
the palace 'as a break on extremism throughout its
pre-war existence', have never corresponded to
reality and are now sure to be revised in the light of
the new material.
This will also bring the Japanese people back into
the debate on war responsibility from which they
were largely excluded during the occupation
period. Since the death of Hirohito, a post-Cold
War evolution has got underway in which issues of
war responsibility and monarchy have once again
become part of a necessary Japanese dialogue with
the past. For historians, the danger in this debate is
that because of documents like the dokuhakuroku,
which focus solely on the emperor as an individual
in the decision-making process, we are apt to lose
sight of the elusive pre-war emperor system itself;
and what it reveals about the deeper structures of
Japanese state and society: its triangulation with
power, class and cultural themes.
Further Reading:
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Edited by Ito Takashi & Hirose Junko –
Makino Nobuaki nikki (Tokyo, 1990)
Yamada Akira – Showa tenno no senso
shido (Tokyo, 1990)
John W. Dover – Empire & Aftermath
(Harvard, 1979)
Saturo Ienaga – The Pacific War (New
York, 1978)
Nakamura Masanori – The Making of the
Symbol Emperor System (New York, 1992)
Herbert P. Bix is Associate in Research at the
Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at
Harvard University.