New book says Japan's Hirohito was active in war

A new book by American historian Herbert Bix is challenging the pacifist image of Japan's Emperor Hirohito

In this story: War guilt Groomed from childhood Fighting on RELATED STORIES, SITES

TOKYO (Reuters) -- Until the end of World War II, Japanese Emperor Hirohito was a living god, a uniformed figure on a white horse in whose name millions fought and died.

Then he was portrayed as a bespectacled biologist who had always loved peace, a man who -- like his people -- had been deceived and used by militarists for their own evil ends.

Now that pacifist stereotype is being challenged by American historian Herbert Bix, who argues in a new book that Hirohito was deeply and directly involved in waging the war.

"He was not Hitler or Mussolini," Bix told Reuters recently in his office at Tokyo's Hitotsubashi University. "But he was a highly activist, interventionist, dynamic emperor, insisting at all times that he had his say in the making of national policy."

The 800-page book, "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan," which was issued by HarperCollins on Sunday, is certain to reignite heated debate about Hirohito's role in the war.

The heavily footnoted tome, written over the course of 10 years, also touches a deeper nerve in Japan's historical psyche -- the enduring question of whether it has faced up squarely to its war-time past.

More than five decades after the war, the topic of war guilt is still emotionally charged in Japan.

Tokyo has made formal apologies to its Asian neighbors for wartime atrocities, but many critics charge it has otherwise failed to come to grips with its wartime transgressions.

A decade ago Nagasaki Mayor Hitoshi Motoshima was shot and injured by a right-wing extremist for saying that Hirohito bore responsibility for the war.

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori set off a political firestorm when he said Japan was "a divine nation with the emperor at its center."

Domestic media and opposition parties lambasted the comment as a sign of nostalgia for a wartime ideology used to justify Japan's aggression in Asia before and during World War II.

Bix argues that a failure to address Hirohito's role is integral to Japan's failure to address its responsibility for the war.

"Eventually Hirohito became the prime symbol of his people's repression of their wartime past," Bix writes.

"For as long as they did not pursue his central role in the war, they did not have to question their own."

But some Japanese historians, reflecting a desire in conservative political quarters to lay the war guilt topic to rest, argue that Bix's central premise is flawed.

"The fundamental premise is that America had right on its side (in the war) and that Japan did not," said historian Takashi Ito, a former professor at Tokyo University. "But in any war, there is right on both sides."

Bix draws a detailed picture of an emperor who was far more than a figurehead, groomed for a role as war leader since childhood in a increasingly militaristic Japan.

Once emperor, Hirohito was kept abreast of military and diplomatic situations and played an active role in shaping strategy as conflict spread from China to the greater Pacific.

"In the postwar period, people whitewashed the emperor -- and the Americans were part of that -- trying to make him a person who was aloof from the political process and the war," said Barbara Brooks, a history professor at City University of New York and author of a book on Japanese imperial diplomacy.

"Bix and others show that is not true," she said. "This is something that people have been debating for 10 years or so. Bix may be the person who has managed to put it together in the clearest and most comprehensively researched argument."

Believing his ultimate responsibility was to his ancestors rather than his people, Hirohito felt bound to fight on to protect his empire and, finally, his throne.

This delayed surrender for months as he and his cabinet scrambled for guarantees that the imperial family would be preserved, Bix said.

With the help of U.S. occupation officials eager to keep him in power to ensure Japanese cooperation as the Cold War heated up, Hirohito remained on his throne and avoided indictment as a war criminal. He died in 1989 at the age of 87.

Historian Ito says the portrait of an activist is overdrawn.

"The role of the emperor was to sign things decided by the cabinet and of course he had his own opinion and gave it and tried to have some influence," he said. "But in general his influence as an individual was very limited."

Left unanswered is the question of whether Hirohito could have been expected to rise above his upbringing, his environment and his advisers to act otherwise.

Some say not. "It has become clear that the emperor could, in theory, have done something to stop the war, and didn't," Brooks said. "But it's too much to expect that he actually would have."

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Japan's Empress Dowager Nagako dies
June 16, 2000
TIME Asia | TIME 100: Emperor Hirohito
August 23-30, 1999

Grolier.com: Hirohito
The Military Tribunal of Emperor Hirohito
Death of the Father: Hirohito & Imperial Japan
World War II Outline

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.