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HOME ABOUT SUBSCRIBE ARCHIVE CONTRIBUTORS SEARCH Search archive YOUR ACCOUNT By the same author ‘Obama vs Okinawa’ ‘Koizumi’s Coup’ ‘Remilitarizing Japan’ ‘North Korea in the Vice’ ‘Breaking the Iron Triangle’ ‘Kim Country: Hard Times in North Korea’ ‘The Price of Affluence: The Political Economy of Japanese Leisure’ ‘Japan and America: Antagonistic Alliance’ ‘The Student Left in Japan’ BACK TO NLR 7, JAN FEB 2001 PDF REVIEWS Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan HarperCollins: New York 2000 GAVAN MCCORMACK JAPAN’S HOUDINI The story goes that fanatical Japanese militarists pressured the unwilling Emperor Hirohito into World War II, with a suicidal zeal that it took two atom bombs to destroy; and that American democracy reluctantly conceded the peace-loving monarch a non-political role in postwar Japan, in deference to his devoted subjects. Herbert Bix’s magisterial new biography—the first anglophone work to draw on the full array of court sources now available—proves every one of these propositions false. Hirohito ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne in 1926, after five years as regent to his mentally debilitated father Emperor Yoshihito. His legacy was mixed. The 25-year-old inherited a dynamic, industrializing economy, an expanding colonial empire and the imperial state system; but also, rising social tensions and popular discontent. Bix cites a widely circulated denunciation written some years earlier by Uchiyama Gudo, a young priest of the Soto Zen sect: The Big Bullock of the present government, the emperor, is not the son of gods as your primary school teachers and others would have you believe. The ancestors of the present emperor came forth from a corner of Kyushu, killing and robbing people as they did. They then destroyed their fellow thieves . . . Although this is well known, university professors and their students, weaklings that they are, refuse to either say or write anything about it. Instead, they attempt to deceive both others and themselves, knowing all along the whole thing is a pack of lies. ‘Extremist thought is about to overwhelm the world; and an outcry is being made about the labour problem’, the young Hirohito had noted in an essay on the Paris Peace Conference in 1920. The response of the conservative court elite was a policy of ‘total national unity’, ‘military preparedness’, accelerated industrial growth and a deliberate project of rebuilding the emperor’s prestige as the embodiment of supreme military, political and religious power. Slight, twitchy, shrill-voiced, near-sighted, physically awkward, reticent and tense, Hirohito was not the obvious candidate for divine martial-monarch. But he was intelligent enough and strong-willed, and he wanted to rule. Whereas his grandfather the Meiji emperor had been all too prone to indulge his prodigious appetites, Hirohito set self-discipline above pleasure: a frugal regime, daily exercise, a highly regulated timetable. His education had a strong military slant: lectured by admirals and generals on American theories of sea-power and the use of infantry (as well as constitutional and international law, Western history, diplomacy and political philosophy, race and imperialism, economics, contemporary events and natural science), he was given actual command of company-sized units of the Imperial Guard, and a trench was dug inside the palace compound so the 19-year-old prince could practise firing the machine-gun. Once he had assumed the throne, Hirohito was rarely out of uniform. The enthronement ceremonies orchestrated by the palace elite lasted a year, climaxing in the secret ritual of his deification—an ‘awe-inspiring mystery’ as the loyal press and newly established national radio had it—consummating his symbolic marriage to his progenitor, the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami, while lying in the foetal position, wrapped in a quilt, on the sacred shinza bed. In power, as Bix demonstrates, Hirohito was the ‘active agent’ of his and the ruling elites’ interests, ‘neither an arch-conspirator nor a dictator but a leading participant’ in the major political and military events of his reign: ‘Like a silent spider positioned at the centre of a wide, multisided web, Hirohito spread his filaments into every organ of state and the army and navy, absorbing—and remembering—information provided by others’. For the court elite, ‘constitutional monarchy’ was a protective façade, allowing the emperor to rule while remaining unaccountable. Bix charts every oscillation of this weak but canny politician. From 1926, Hirohito and his advisors began a succession of anti-democratic initiatives to strengthen the kokutai—the emperor-based polity—and impose an aggressive, militarist-chauvinist nationalism from above. A policy of mass arrests, forced recantations and executions was pursued against Communists and labour and peasant activists. Hirohito’s prerogative of tosuiken—the autonomy of supreme command—was jealously guarded. Nervous about Western condemnations of the invasion of Manchuria, he was gleeful at the Kwantung Army’s success. His silent endorsement of the criminal depradations of his young officers in China encouraged them to worse excesses, in the name of ‘divine Japan’. As the conflict there developed into full-scale war, he was involved in decision-making on a daily basis, authorizing, inter alia, the use of poison gas and the final assault on Nanjing, and ‘signing off’ on the campaigns of annihilation against guerrilla bases that became known as the sanko, or three ‘alls’: kill all, burn all, loot all. Hirohito’s authority was reinforced by the constitution of the Imperial Conference, in the context of a ‘powerless cabinet’ and an ‘emasculated constitution’. He was, Bix argues, a ‘real war leader’ who ‘carefully examined and sanctioned the policies, strategies and orders for waging wars of aggression’. Drawing on the scholarship of a new generation of Japanese historians, as well as palace documents and the memoirs and diaries of aides and chamberlains, Bix details the emperor’s intimate involvement with the planning of Pearl Harbour. From the beginning of November 1941 Hirohito was involved in intense discussions with his High Command, cross-questioning chiefs of staff over minute details in their daily briefings, fussing obsessively over the exact wording of the war rescript. On December 8th (Tokyo time) he received the first reports of the attack at 2.30am and from then on was in constant meetings. His naval aide Jo Eiichiro noted in his diary: ‘Throughout the day the emperor wore his naval uniform and seemed to be in a splendid mood.’ The wartime division of power and responsibility was such that ‘only the emperor himself ever knew the entire picture’, and he devoted himself with meticulous attention to the task of achieving victory, overseeing everything from person­nel appointments to air and sea strategy. A common refrain in his messages to the front was to ‘win a real victory over the Americans’, ‘do the attacking’, achieve ‘a splendid victory’, ‘go on the offensive’—this last as the catastrophic Battle of Okinawa was opening in the spring of 1945. As the war entered its final phase he vacillated, steering Japan toward continued aggression rather than direct negotiations, and ‘continued to procrastinate until the bomb was dropped and the Soviets attacked’. Even then, Bix documents his abiding preoccupation with the survival of the kokutai and the imperial regalia—sword, jewel and bronze mirror. He showed no trace of anguish over the suffering of his ‘subjects’ and no sense of accountability other than to his own ancestors. It was in Hirohito’s name and under his command that Japan had launched on nearly 14 years of war, at a cost, according to official estimates, of nearly 20 million Asian lives and over 3.1 million Japanese ones, as well as some 60,000 Allies. Naturally he was expected to figure prominently on the list of those to be investigated for war crimes. That he was not, Bix shows, was the result of concerted US policy. The reason was simple. In Washington, it was assumed that Hirohito could be deployed as a conservative bulwark to block any possibility of radical change and assure Japanese docility to American purposes. A document which came to light while the book under review was in press (and now available at www.iwanami.co.jp/sekai) reveals that the earliest statement of the US view that the emperor should be given a central postwar role as a ‘puppet who not only could be won over to our side but who would carry with him a tremendous weight of authority’, was penned in 1942 by none other than Edwin Reischauer—later, doyen of American Japanologists and ambassador to Japan in the 1960s; then, a junior staff member at Harvard. On September 6th, 1945, Truman announced the ‘US Initial Post-Surrender Policy for Japan’, instructing General MacArthur to exercise his authority through Japan’s existing government structures, including the emperor, ‘insofar as this promoted the achievement of US objectives’; Hirohito strained every muscle to make sure it did. John Dower, author of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize winner Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, has recently discovered a new Hirohito memo­randum of 1946, which suggests that MacArthur was ‘deeply impressed’ with the emperor’s view that the Japanese people’s ‘cultural level is still low’, that they were ‘too willing to be led’ and inclined to ‘selfishly concentrating their attention on their rights and not thinking about their duties and obligations’; therefore ‘the Occupation should last for a long time’. (The text has been published in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Oct–Dec 1999.) To MacArthur, such views must have been conclusive evidence of Hirohito’s perspic­acious and co­operative character, proof of the wisdom of retaining him in office—and either confirmation, or perhaps the original source, of MacArthur’s own assessment that the Japanese had the mentality of a ‘twelve-year-old’, compared to the average adult Anglo-Saxon or German. Bix, too, finds Hirohito lamenting the fact that the Japanese people lacked ‘a sense of religion’ and ‘calmness’, and that they were inclined to be ‘blind followers’. Nothing could be more shocking to today’s ultra-nationalists in Japan than this evidence of the emperor’s enthusiastic support for the US cause; or the fact that it was precisely for his compliance that he was assigned (and himself welcomed) the role of chief instrument of American policy. MacArthur himself had drawn up his ‘Operation Blacklist’ strategy months before the Japanese surrender: it consisted of detaching Hirohito from the mili­tarists and retaining him, along Reischauerian lines, as a puppet emperor. Since MacArthur was under Potsdam Declaration orders to mete out stern punishment to war criminals, his first task was to establish Hirohito’s innocence—above all, as far as US public opinion was concerned, to separate him from the attack on Pearl Harbour. Under MacArthur’s instructions, the Allied Military Tribunal in Tokyo gave the emperor full immunity from investigation and prosecution; he was not required to give evidence and even the mention of his name was avoided. His assent to all war-related decisions was assumed to have been merely formal, and the official line became that he had been reluctantly embroiled in war against his peaceful inclinations: ‘I was virtually a prisoner, and power­less.’ One decision alone was attributed to him: the exercise of a residual prerogative, in the context of a divided government, to order a cessation of hostilities in August 1945. The American occupiers adopted as one of their key principles the same objective for which the Japanese establishment had held out so desperately during the final, cataclysmic months of war: the retention of the kokutai, the emperor-centred state system. The ‘peace emperor’ myth, hastily cobbled together by Hirohito’s courtiers in those final months as Japan burned around them, was taken up with a passion by MacArthur’s staff. The uniformed commander-in-chief astride his white horse became the bespectacled family man and amateur biologist; it was Tojo who had bombed Pearl Harbour. If there were to be an award for genius in the fabrication and promotion of contradictory images in the twentieth century, the combined efforts of the Japanese and US governments in reconstructing and reimposing the emperor system upon Japan would be hard to beat. The Allied Tribunal is commonly seen in Japan as a forum for ‘victor’s justice’. Bix sums it up as a ‘joint—American–Japanese—political trial’, postulated on the belief, shared by the elites of both sides, that the most important task was to protect Hirohito—something which could only be done ‘by grossly exaggerating the threat of social upheaval in Japan, rigging testimony, destroying evidence and distorting history’. Even after the war, as a ‘symbol’ emperor under the 1947 constitution—a reduction in status which he accepted with the utmost reluctance—Hirohito continued to exert a plainly unconstitutional influence over state affairs: inviting the US to retain its control over Okinawa indefinitely, urging the prime minister to ‘do something about the Communist Party’, giving gratuitous advice about which Japanese the Americans could trust (old and conservative ones who remained close to him). Till his death in 1989, he showed no sign of any guilt or personal remorse over his wartime role. The only time he was confronted directly about it was in October 1975, when a foreign journalist asked him: ‘What does your majesty think about so-called war responsibility?’ The emperor gave the astonishing reply: ‘I cannot answer that question because I haven’t thoroughly studied the literature in this field, and so don’t really appreciate the nuances of your words’. In Tokyo in December 2000, more than fifty years after the Allied Tribunal, the words ‘Hirohito: guilty’ were uttered in a courtroom for the first time. The only sanctions this tribunal had at its disposal were moral, however. It was convened by women’s organizations from throughout Asia to reopen the question of war responsibility—specifically, to try Japan and its emperor for crimes against women (it can be reached via www.jca.apc.org). Paradoxically, the more the actual events retreat into history, the more fiercely contested they become. Courts in Japan now face more than fifty suits for compensation and apology from former comfort women, atrocity victims, former Korean and Taiwanese auxiliaries, forced labourers and POWs. The issues are now debated in schools and universities, the national Diet and the media. In January 2000, formal deliberations on the question of constitutional reform began in both houses of the Diet and ‘constitutional research councils’ were set up. Reformers have begun to focus on the contradiction between the role of the ‘symbolic emperor’ and that of ‘popular sovereignty’ in the constitution that MacArthur bestowed, and to suggest that republicanism may be the only mode of government consistent with the latter. They begin to speak of the transition from a kami no kuni (country of the gods) to a tami no kuni (country of the people). Long taboo, the question is still surrounded by superstition and the real threat of ultra-nationalist violence; republicans tread carefully, knowing full well the lessons of history and the consequences of getting it wrong. Their opponents are not merely right-wing thugs. ‘I continue to affirm to the Japanese people that Japan is a country of the gods, with the emperor at its centre’, Prime Minister Mori declared in a speech to the 230-member ‘Parliamentarian Association for Shinto Politics’ in June last year. This is the same racist and exclusionary vision of identity that was promoted as the official ideology of fascist Japan. Several hundred members of the national Diet now belong to the ‘League for a Bright Japan’ or to the Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference). They contest official admissions of war responsibility and guilt, lament the loss of a ‘distinctive Japanese historical consciousness’ and oppose what they describe as the ‘masochistic’ view of history. For Nippon Kaigi, the emperor is the central embodiment of ‘true’ Japaneseness, and the postwar emperor system is the kokutai that Japan has enjoyed from time immemorial, in which state and emperor are one. The fact is that the questions of 1945 still face Japan today: how should the thirties and forties be assessed? What sort of relationship is desirable with the United States? Should Japan possess armed forces? What should be done about the emperor? The post-1945 system undoubtedly liberated Japan from fascism and militarism and established a constitutional democracy, but it did so on the basis of a political lie: the presentcrisis is one consequence of that. Recent critical scholarship such as that by Dower, Bix and their Japanese colleagues helps to put these developments in historical context, and to question once again the structure of the Japanese polity and the role of the US occupation—commonly regarded, in the West at least, as a triumph of democratic transformation, and now touted by some as a ‘nation-building’ solution to be applied elsewhere. Bix makes careful use of a vast mass of sources, comparing and contrasting, taking nothing for granted. Among the new documents now available is the so-called ‘Monologue’, Hirohito’s own (self-serving but contradictory) version of history, recorded in 1946 and published in 1990, after it unexpectedly turned up in the US. His reflections from the late seventies are still secret, but known in part from references in other documents, diaries, memoirs and archive materials. The project involved a prodigious labour: Bix had to confront the intensely propagandistic efforts of the Imperial Household Agency, who still hold Hirohito’s personal diary. The US government, too, is still refusing to release their secret records of Hirohito’s conversations with MacArthur—another token of the symbiotic if asymmetrical relationship between American and Japanese elites. If necessarily circumstantial, the picture Bix presents is persuasive nevertheless. Nearly thirty years ago, an even larger book—David Bergamini’s Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy: How Emperor Hirohito led Japan into War against the West—was devoted to the proposition of Hirohito’s war guilt. It soon dropped from professional and public consciousness, scarcely denting Hirohito’s reputation and mostly dismissed by specialists for its unorthodox methodology. Herbert Bix is a stubbornly independent scholar, whose account—avoiding moralism—is rooted in scrupulous and exhaustive research. His analysis, while eschewing any notion of conspiracy, is in fact more radical than Bergamini’s, pointing to the structure of power and responsibility in the state as a whole; his work will not be so easily bypassed. However, his every footnote will be scrutinized and his unsettling conclusions—implicitly tackling mainstream Japanologists with complicity in a fundamental misinterpretation of modern history—resisted. It is notable that in treating much of the same subject matter, he makes not even a single footnote reference to Bergamini’s work; whether he can escape Bergamini’s fate remains to be seen. If there is a criticism of this book, it is that it extrapolates too indiscriminately from the past, concluding that a future threat to the Japanese body politic may stem from ‘some future national leadership’ finding ways to make use of a successor emperor—a direct replay, in other words. Despite the continuity of Hirohito’s own career, the pre- and postwar polities are fundamentally different. Today, most Japanese scholars specializing in these questions would say that it is precisely the symbolic, cultural and ‘identity’ dimensions of the emperor system that are at stake, rather than the prospect of direct imperial intervention. But the importance of this attempt to reopen the debate about Hirohito’s rule cannot be underestimated: it is only through such a discussion that the Japanese polity might be reimagined as one in which the people are sovereign, able to share an understanding of the past—and vision for the future—with their continental neighbours. In that process, Mori’s myth of the tenno as lynchpin of an identity marked by purity, homogeneity and difference from Asia will have to be critically addressed and overcome. In striving to raise these crucial questions, Bix performs a valuable service to the Japanese people, as well as writing history at its best. Robert Wade, ‘Showdown at the World Bank’ Jacob Stevens, ‘G. A. Cohen’s Revolution in Morals’ By the same author ‘Obama vs Okinawa’ ‘Koizumi’s Coup’ ‘Remilitarizing Japan’ ‘North Korea in the Vice’ ‘Breaking the Iron Triangle’ ‘Kim Country: Hard Times in North Korea’ ‘The Price of Affluence: The Political Economy of Japanese Leisure’ ‘Japan and America: Antagonistic Alliance’ ‘The Student Left in Japan’ ABOUT CONTACT SUBSCRIBE SUBMISSIONS HISTORY PRIVACY ACCESSIBILITY © New Left Review Ltd 2020 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG United Kingdom +44 (0)20 7734 8830