To most Japanese, who still revere Hirohito, the Showa emperor, as a lifelong pacifist who opposed the war but couldn’t prevent it, Bix’s biography could be myth- shattering. “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan” reveals a sovereign of “fierce cunning and powerful ambition,” who subverted democracy and wielded formidable power until his blood-soaked empire crumbled. Defeated, Hirohito deflected the blame for his disastrous stewardship. His accomplice: Douglas MacArthur, supreme Allied commander in the Pacific. Eager to preserve a defanged monarchy, the U.S. general repackaged the emperor as a puppet of “militarists,” who were executed as war criminals. Letting Hirohito off the hook allowed his subjects to bury their shameful war records, entrenching a culture of denial that still burdens Japan.
Marshaling the notes, journals and private letters of key Hirohito associates, Bix follows the grandson of modern Japan’s founder, Emperor Meiji, through war, defeat and rebirth as a figurehead. On both ends of life, Hirohito cuts a pitiable figure. The slight, introverted young boy was educated by generals, who indoctrinated him to become a great military leader–a role that ill suited his quiet temperament. In his august years Hirohito ruminated incessantly about his legacy, clung to his mythical divinity and mused that he was “nothing more than a papier-mache doll.”
Throughout his middle years, however, Bix’s Hirohito was the master of his own fate. He ruled in “extreme secrecy” through ministers who consulted with him before making key decisions. Hirohito championed Japan’s militarization and territorial expansion. When Japanese troops invaded Manchuria in 1931, Hirohito urged them forward. In 1937, as Japan expanded its “holy war” in China, the emperor advised his generals: “Wouldn’t it be better to concentrate a large force at the critical point and deliver one overwhelming blow?” Months later the Imperial Army razed Nanking in an orgy of rapes and killings. As the battle turned against Japan, Hirohito resisted retreat and delayed surrender. It took two atomic bombs and a Soviet invasion to force the emperor’s capitulation.
Tokyo still prefers to whitewash history. Asked to explain Hirohito’s wartime role, Japan’s Foreign Ministry cites comments made in 1988 by the then Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita. He said the emperor “prayed for world peace from the bottom of his heart and tried to avoid the last war on all fronts.” For many Japanese, that version is a comfortable fiction. Hirohito has become “the prime symbol of his people’s repression of their wartime past,” writes Bix. His superb biography should jog loose a few suppressed memories.
