Hirohito's Crime: He Did Not Act
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday January 9, 1989
IN HIS LATER years Emperor Hirohito, who died on Saturday aged 87, once said that as a child he had been kept as "a bird in a cage". The rest of his life was little different. From his earliest days to his last, he was a captive of scheming men who saw in him the means to their own ambitions.
He broke from his cage twice. Both times it happened under extreme circumstances. Both times the authority of the slight, stooped man with the high-pitched voice went unquestioned. And both times he was a force for sanity and peace.
On the first occasion, he put a swift end to an attempted pre-war military coup. On the second, he brought the Pacific War to a close.
But more than 40 years after the war, and probably for decades to come, many still condemn him for challenging his restraints too rarely, for acquiescing in his own impotence.
Within Japan and without, he is held by both fringe and mainstream elements to be guilty of not breaking out of his cage at critical moments in world history, of failing to prevent the war and the carnage it wrought.
Hirohito was born on April 29, 1901. The bird cage was ready and waiting. At the age of three months he was taken from his mother, removed from the Imperial Court and given into the care of a vice-admiral of the Imperial Navy, where he remained for three years.
This not only took the future emperor out of reach of unscrupulous relatives and concubines, it spared him from the bouts of disease which swept through the court.
More importantly, it was the first step in his lifelong isolation in an imperial incubator designed to preserve him as an unsullied justification for the actions of the powerful, but to keep him from developing power himself.
From the first, his playmates and classmates were the hand-picked sons of the nobility. He was fitted with his first military uniform at the age of five. He was usually confined to a detached palace behind a moat and thick granite walls; he was allowed weekly visits to his mother.
The young Hirohito was ceaselessly reminded that he was an emperor-to-be and a divine being, that he must remain aloof and uninvolved.
He was passed from the care of the vice-admiral to that of a court official, then at seven into the care of a general, and at 11 he became a charge of the exalted war hero Admiral Togo.
Throughout his training, it was impressed on Hirohito that his ultimate goal was to be a constitutional monarch; that he must not interfere with the proper workings of government, that he must only accept the advice of those in power.
At 25 he became the 123rd successor to the legendary first emperor, Jimmu, great-great-great-great grandson of the God of Sun, and born out of a crocodile, according to Japanese mythology.
Of the authenticated emperors, Hirohito was the 109th, making his the oldest hereditary job in the world - at least 1,400 years old. Hirohito's 62-year reign was the longest of any Japanese emperor, and the longest of any contemporary monarch anywhere.
He chose to grace his reign with the title Showa, meaning Auspicious Peace. It was an era that encompassed an extraordinary historical panorama.
He ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne on Christmas Day 1925 to rule over a desperately backward and impoverished nation ruled by a military oligarchy.
He watched war, atomic bombs, defeat, Allied occupation, the execution of Japan's war criminals. He heard Australia's representative on the War Crimes Tribunal, Sir William Webb of the Queensland Supreme Court, also the chief judge of the tribunal, calling in vain for the prosecution of Hirohito as a war criminal.
From the post-war rubble emerged the most breathtaking industrial transformation witnessed in modern history. Hirohito found himself the Head of State of the world's first economic "miracle", which continued to evolve into the world's second economic superpower and, statistically, the richest nation on earth.
The transformation of the Emperor himself was no less spectacular. He changed from god into man.
The war-weary and shattered Japanese, while they were rebuilding their flattened, burnt-out homes, heard their spiritual and literal father, the Son of Heaven, chief priest and deity, addressing them on the radio on New Year's Day 1946: "The ties between us and our people have always stood upon mutual trust and affection. They do not depend upon mere myths and legends.
"They are not predicated on the false conception that the Emperor is divine and that the Japanese are superior to other races and fated to rule the world."
This momentous broadcast was not made at Hirohito's suggestion. Nor, apparently, was it first conceived by the Supreme Commander of the Allied Occupation Forces, General Douglas MacArthur, who wrote that "it was without any suggestion or discussion with me".
It seems most likely that the idea germinated in the mind of an American academic working in Japan, Reginald H. Blyth, an unofficial adviser to MacArthur on the subject of education.
Blyth suggested the renunciation of divinity to the Prime Minister of the day, Mr Kijuro Shidehara. The Prime Minister in turn consulted his Education Minister, Tamon Maeda, and it is to Mr Maeda that we are indebted for this version of events.
The involvement of an American, plus the indirectness of the procedure, has allowed scope for right-wing revisionists to claim that the Emperor's renunciation was made at gunpoint, and is therefore invalid. If so, the Emperor had a prime opportunity to say so in an interview in 1977, when he discussed the statement, but he said nothing to indicate that he had acted with any reluctance.
It was an announcement which, perhaps more than the occupation, shook Japan's definition of nationhood. And it destroyed forever the most powerful instrument of social control ever used in Japan - emperor worship.
Hirohito had never believed that he was divine. He caused great consternation in the Imperial Court when, as a student in his teens, he expressed scepticism of his family history; he suggested much of it was physically impossible and biologically unsound.
The Allies designated the Imperial Palace a no-bomb zone during air raids on Tokyo in World War II, a small pocket of immunity in the midst of mass destruction.
Once, when fire from a bombing raid leapt across the moat surrounding the Imperial Palace and reduced much of the compound to ashes, Hirohito reportedly watched the roaring flames and remarked: "We have been bombed at last. At least now the people will realise that I am sharing their ordeal with no special protection from the gods."
He tested other conventions, too. His father, the Taisho Emperor, presented Hirohito with his first concubine at the age of 11, consolation on the death of the child's tutor. Despite the best efforts of his father, a man whose grip on sanity grew more tenuous as his life progressed, Hirohito became the first Emperor to refuse to take a concubine.
Even when it was widely but erroneously thought that his wife was unable to produce a son, and Hirohito came under extreme pressure to take a concubine, he refused.
He was the first Emperor to make direct contact with his people, and the first to venture outside Japan.
These changes, however, are not enough. Historians have been chiefly concerned not with his reforms to the role of the Emperor, but with the crucial question of whether he could have prevented the Pacific War which took the fury of Japanese bombs as far south as Darwin.
Most historians agree that Hirohito did not approve of the country's slow but inevitable drift into war. But he did not believe that it was his role to direct his Cabinet, a Cabinet where de facto control rested with the military; Hirohito felt bound by the conventions of a constitutional monarchy.
On September 6, 1941, at the second last Imperial council meeting before the decision to attack Pearl Harbour, the senior politicians, generals and statesmen gathered to discuss the new Allied embargo on raw material shipments to Japan, a response to expanded Japanese aggression in China.
Hirohito decided to take the highly unusual course of addressing the meeting. He told the 20 or so men assembled before him that he wanted to read a poem written by his grandfather, the Emperor Meiji. Nervous and flushed, he stood and read aloud:
The seas surround all quarters of the globe
And my heart cries out to the nations of the world.
Why then do the winds and waves of strife
Disrupt the peace between us?
It was Hirohito's last attempt to stop the outbreak of war, and the closest he came to issuing an order to the Government.
At the final Imperial council meeting, when the final and irrevocable decision was taken, on December 1, 1941, Prime Minister Tojo concluded the meeting by addressing his Emperor: "We will now set His Majesty's mind at rest by speedily accomplishing, in perfect unity and with confidence in certain victory, the objectives of the war which Japan must now undertake."
There was no dissent and all assembled bowed to the Emperor. Hirohito said nothing. Seven days later, the carnage began and the first of millions died in the name of Hirohito, Emperor of Japan.
In the post-war years he said repeatedly that he had no constitutional choice. He was faced with a unanimous, constitutionally correct Cabinet.
His decision to end the war, however, was in entirely different circumstances. On August 9, 1945, the Prime Minister, Mr Suzuki, declared that the Cabinet was irreconcilably split on whether it should agree to the unconditional surrender demanded by the Allies in the Potsdam Proclamation.
In the meantime, the military was distributing sharpened bamboo poles to Japan's civilian population in preparation for the Allied invasion and a fight to the bitter end.
On August 14, in the air raid shelter beneath the Emperor's Palace, an imperial conference was convened. The Cabinet remained split.
Hirohito spoke: "...I cannot endure the thought of letting my people suffer any longer. A continuation of the war would bring death to tens, perhaps even hundreds, of thousands of people. The whole nation would be reduced to ashes.
His voice faltering, he went on: "It is my desire that you, my Ministers of State, accede to my wishes and forthwith accept the Allied reply."
Hirohito's biographer, Leonard Mosley, said it was Hirohito's finest hour. The people were issued a special ration of electricity to allow them to switch on their radios to hear, for the first time, the voice of their Emperor, calling on them to "bear the unbearable".
Hirohito was later to say that this decision was one of only two occasions when he overstepped the bounds of his role as a constitutional monarch, according to a chamberlain for the Emperor for 30 years, Mr Sukemasa Irie. Strictly speaking, he should have dissolved the Cabinet, appointed a new Prime Minister and asked him to form a new cabinet.
But knowing a new Cabinet would have been likewise split, he made the decision.
The other occasion was his decision to end the 1936 army putsch which demanded military rule. Hirohito reportedly said that in that case he acted unconstitutionally because it was thought that the Prime Minister had been killed by rebels, when in fact he was hiding in his servants' closet.
Forty-three days after his decision to surrender Japan, Hirohito was driven in his aging Rolls-Royce the few hundred metres from his palace to the sombre, grey building just opposite, today occupied by an insurance company. Inside waited the newly arrived, supremely confident, Supreme Commander of the Allied Occupation, General Douglas MacArthur.
MacArthur later remarked: "I came here prepared to be stern with him."
He knew that Governments around the globe were drawing up lists of the men they wanted prosecuted as war criminals, and that Hirohito would be at the top of most of them. MacArthur had been waiting for Hirohito to petition for forgiveness.
When the two met, they presented an almost comical contrast. The slight Hirohito was, as always, in formal dress, wearing a cutaway coat, striped trousers and a top hat. He posed stiffly for the camera. The towering MacArthur, tieless and in his khakis, struck a casual, arrogant pose, hands on hips. Neither smiled for the camera.
Hirohito spoke: "I come to you, General MacArthur, to offer myself to the judgment of the powers you represent as the one to bear sole responsibility for every political and military decision made and action taken by my people in the conduct of the war."
MacArthur wrote that he was moved "to the very marrow of my bones".
"He was an emperor by inherent birth, but in that instant I knew I faced the First Gentleman of Japan in his own right."
Despite the calls of the Australians, British and Russians, Hirohito was never prosecuted. The decision was made by the US Cabinet in the week before the Japanese surrender. It was a calculated decision; the US saw the Emperor as its most promising instrument for an orderly occupation.
Another key piece of American calculation was that the mere act of preserving the Emperor would exert a conservative social and political force on the Japanese.
There was a third reason, one based on emotion, for sparing Hirohito. The US State Department was convinced that the Emperor personally had not approved of the war.
MacArthur, however, with characteristic egotism, claimed the decision as his own: "When Washington seemed to be veering toward the British point of view, I had advised that I would need at least one million reinforcements should such action be taken."
But Hirohito did not absolve himself. After the war, he never wore a military uniform, never received a serving soldier, never reviewed a military parade, and never failed to lead the nation in prayers for the world's war dead on the anniversary of the close of the war. He ended decisively the ancient nexus between the Emperor and the military.
The discovery in 1987 of a diary kept by the wartime Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal indicates that Hirohito tried to take responsibility for the war by abdicating in 1951 on the signing of the Japan-US Peace Treaty, but was refused permission by the then Prime Minister.
In his post-war life as a mortal, he was still sometimes invoked by right-wing nationalists as the incarnation of the Japanese spirit and the father of the nation. Opinion polls showed that for most of the people, however, he was an object of mere affection, and increasingly, indifference.
PAGE 8: Editorial
© 1989 Sydney Morning Herald