Hirohito

Hirohito (1901–89)was Emperor of Japan from 1926 until his death. His role in relation to the Second World War is still highly controversial. In Allied wartime perceptions, as the supreme ruler of Japan he was the paramount symbol of Japanese nationalism, and the personification of Japan's participation with Germany and Italy in a ‘fascist conspiracy’ to dominate the world. The belief that Hirohito had led Japan into the war prompted demands after it ended that he be tried as a war criminal (see also Far East war crimes trials).

A quite different, and more accurate view, based mainly on research in the primary Japanese sources of the period, is that Hirohito personally opposed armed conflict with the Allies, that he was peripheral to his government's decisions in 1941, and that he was instrumental in bringing about Japan's surrender in 1945.

1. Japan's decision for war, 1941

As head of state Hirohito was technically responsible for Japan's final decision to start hostilities at the Imperial Conference on 1 December 1941, six days before the attack on Pearl Harbor which began the Pacific war. It is also the case that during hostilities Hirohito, in military uniform and astride a white horse, frequently exhorted his troops and the nation to prevail in battle. For most Japanese, he was a living god, as propounded in the myths of State Shintō, and the conflict was a holy war fought in his name.

However, in reality, Hirohito reigned but did not rule. The sweeping civil and military prerogatives ascribed to the emperor by the Meiji Constitution of 1889—itself a confused amalgam of absolute and limited or constitutional monarchy—had long since been delegated to his ministers of state and the army and navy chiefs of staff. Like the British monarch, at most he had ‘the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, and the right to warn’, but not, in practice, the right to govern. In keeping with the traditional role of past emperors, Hirohito's main function was to legitimize the policies of his government by formally declaring them as the ‘Imperial Will’. This he did simply through his silent attendance at the strictly ceremonial Imperial Conferences (gozen kaigi) which routinely followed the Liaison Conference (renraku kaigi) where, without the emperor present, leading civilian and military officials decided national policy. That the emperor would ever veto a decision arising from the Liaison Conference, or the cabinet, was unthinkable in pre-war Japan.

His actual powerlessness was all the greater by virtue of the fact that by 1940 the military had achieved political hegemony as a consequence of Japan's evolution into a ‘national defence state’ (kokubō kokka) since the Manchurian Incident of 1931 (see Manchukuo). This enabled the military not only to dominate the Liaison Conferences but also to manipulate the symbolic authority of the emperor so that imperial sanction of military policies would be automatic, through the ritual bestowal of the Imperial Will. There was, then, much irony in the remark of the prime minister, General Tōjō Hideki, at the end of the fateful Imperial Conference of 1 December 1941 that ‘Once His Majesty reaches a decision to commence hostilities, we will all strive to repay our obligations to him’ (by winning the war). Everyone present knew that the government, not the emperor, had decided upon war at the previous Liaison Conference of 27 November. The Imperial Will for war did not reflect the emperor's personal will in 1941.

Possessing considerable influence, as distinct from effective power, Hirohito had, in 1940 and 1941, privately endeavoured to avoid war with the Anglo-American powers by working behind the scenes at court, just as he had tried, without success, to avoid war with China in the Manchurian Incident and, again, in the China incident which commenced in July 1937. From the time of his visit to the UK as crown prince in 1921, he had always believed that peaceful co-operation with the UK and the USA should be the cornerstone of Japanese foreign policy. It was on this account that he had opposed, to no avail, the Tripartite Pact, signed on 27 September 1940, and the stationing of Japanese troops in French Indo-China, which also began that month. Whereas the government had held that these initiatives would help deter the USA from opposing Japan's New Order in Asia (see Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere), Hirohito feared they would provoke greater American hostility towards Japan, resulting ultimately in war.

The application of American sanctions, in particular the embargo on oil exports to Japan on 1 August 1941, justified this apprehension. Accepting the military's argument that the Japanese–American negotiations in Washington (see USA, 1) could not be prolonged indefinitely lest Japan lose the capacity to defend the empire, the Liaison Conference of 3 September determined that Japan should commence war in October if the USA remained unshakeably opposed to the New Order in Asia. This deadline on diplomacy impelled Hirohito to warn the government of the folly of war at an Imperial Conference on 6 September. Breaking the convention of imperial silence on such occasions, he read aloud a poem written by his grandfather, Emperor Meiji, which he said expressed his personal wish for peace. The gesture, at best an indirect warning, did not dissuade the government ministers from their chosen course, however. It took the political crisis attending the resignation of the prime minister, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, and his cabinet, on 16 October, to erase the deadline, with Hirohito's blessing.

Although hostilities were averted at that time, renewed pressure from the military caused the Tōjō government on 2 November to impose a new deadline: the decision for war would be taken by the end of the month if the Washington negotiations were still deadlocked. Though now becoming resigned to war, Hirohito continued in vain at court to press for Japanese diplomatic concessions, to prevent it. However, once the ‘Hull note’ of 26 November from the US secretary of state, Cordell Hull, which was regarded as an American ultimatum, had completely unified the government, Hirohito had no choice but to give ritual sanction to its decision to commence hostilities with the Imperial Will on 1 December. The government's otherwise belligerent Imperial Rescript of 8 December, informing the Japanese people that war had begun, did at least express Hirohito's genuine personal regret that ‘it has been truly unavoidable and far from Our wishes that Our Empire had now been brought to cross swords with America and Britain’.

Thus, despite his public image of great power and unassailable authority, Hirohito was politically impotent to prevent the Tōjō government from launching a major war. Moreover, he was as peripheral to two other related developments as he had been to the decision for war itself. First, President Roosevelt's last-minute message to the emperor on 8 December, Japan time, was rejected by Tōjō, not by Hirohito. Second, Japan's final note to the USA, in effect a declaration of war, was not delivered by Japan's envoys in Washington until after the Pearl Harbor raid had commenced, despite the emperor's strong wish that it be communicated in advance of the attack, to conform with international norms. Although he had been informed of plans for the attack that autumn, he had not been personally involved in war preparations, as these had always been, and would remain, the exclusive responsibility of the general staffs.

It should be emphasized, however, that while Hirohito had no real political responsibility for the decision to go to war, this does not mean that he was an uncompromising pacifist. Like the men who committed Japan to total war in 1941, he was a nationalist who had accepted the legacy of empire as a legitimate fruit of Japan's historic quest for wealth and power. He wanted peace but not peace at all costs, if the price for peace was the liquidation of the empire. This is perhaps why he seems fatalistically to have accepted the apparent inevitability of war in late 1941, especially after the earlier imposition of American sanctions.

Another important factor in his reluctant compliance with the decision to make war was his long-standing wish to emulate the British model of constitutional monarchy. He was determined to refrain from interfering with the policies decided upon by his government for fear that otherwise Japan would succumb to ‘the bane of imperial despotism’, as he often put it. It was the particular misfortune of Hirohito that this self-imposed political constraint, bred of his constitutional idealism, unintentionally assisted those who upheld the public fiction of the emperor as absolute monarch. The result was that he had perforce to sanction a decision he himself opposed. His closest court advisers, notably Kido Kōichi (1889–1977), the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, contributed to this fiction by keeping Hirohito above the political fray of decision-making in order to preserve the traditional transcendental authority of the emperor.

Nor was Hirohito, for reasons of personality and temperament, the kind of man who would forcefully resist the tide of war. Conditioned by the rigid precedents and protocol of court life to play the symbolic role expected of him, and more at ease as a scientist in his laboratory studying marine biology than in the rough give and take of politics, he was less a leader than a follower of Japan's road to belligerency.

2. Japan's decision to surrender, 1945

In many pre-war discussions with General Sugiyama and Admiral Nagano Osami (1880–1947), the army and navy Chiefs of Staff respectively, Hirohito had repeatedly questioned whether Japan had the material means to carry out their proposed policies. While he was pleased by Japan's early conquests in the war, it is not surprising that as early as 1942 he fervently urged Tōjō to negotiate an end to the conflict, believing that Japan, overextended on land and at sea, was unlikely to endure a prolonged war of attrition.

As the war continued, and as Japan fell on to the defensive, Hirohito's desire to have it ended was well known to civilian and military leaders alike. Yet given the determination of the military to continue fighting, it required a combination of three developments for Hirohito to be able to end the war: the coalescence of a ‘peace party’ strong enough to support imperial intervention; a prime minister who would assist the emperor in this endeavour; and the obvious deterioration of Japan's position in the war to the point where surrender was absolutely necessary to save the nation and the monarchy from obliteration.

This combination did not materialize until the spring of 1945. By then a ‘peace party’, including former prime ministers, diplomats, and members of the imperial family, had been formed. In Admiral Suzuki, formerly a Grand Chamberlain, Japan had a prime minister who could co-operate closely with Hirohito in orchestrating an imperial intervention. By then, also, the Allied blockade and incessant bombing (see strategic air offensives, 3), and the loss of the Philippines and Okinawa, clearly signified the nation's impending defeat.

Whether Hirohito could have intervened sooner than he did and thereby spare Japan the trauma of atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August, not to mention the USSR's declaration of war on 8 August, is doubtful. Hirohito himself favoured acceptance of the Allies' Potsdam Proclamation of 26 July (see TERMINAL) demanding the immediate unconditional surrender of Japan's armed forces. But the government's decision at the behest of the military to ignore the demand held sway, resulting in the calamitous events of early August. On 9 August, with the government completely immobilized by conflict between advocates of surrender and the military, Suzuki took the unprecedented step at an Imperial Conference of asking the emperor to decide the issue.

Whereas in 1941 his self-image as a constitutional monarch had prevented him from interfering with the government's unanimous decision for war, the imminent destruction of Japan now resolved him to state his desire to surrender. Even then a second imperial intervention was required to end the war, at the decisive Imperial conference of 14 August, after the military had continued to reject surrender without clear Allied assurances that the monarchy would be retained. In an Imperial Rescript broadcast the next day Hirohito urged the nation to ‘endure the unendurable’ of defeat. Unlike 1941, the Imperial Will for peace, which the people obeyed, represented the emperor's personal will.

3. The aftermath of war

The war had resulted in immense suffering and loss of life throughout the Asian-Pacific region. Many atrocities had been committed by Japanese forces against Chinese civilians and Allied prisoners-of-war and civilians in conquered territories. Hirohito had been informed of some of these outrages, but his attempts to end them went unheeded. Perhaps it was the thought that he was morally, though not politically, responsible for a war which Japan had fought so destructively in his name that caused Hirohito, in his meeting with General MacArthur on 27 September 1945, to offer to take personal responsibility for everything Japan had done in the war. MacArthur, however, refused the offer, intending instead to use Hirohito's residual authority to assist the democratic reform policies of the occupation. For example, the imperial promulgation of a new constitution, in effect from 3 May 1947, stripped the emperor of all theoretical powers and redefined him as a ‘symbol of the state and of the unity of the people, deriving his position from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power’. Similarly, after the occupation proscribed State Shintō to demystify the emperor, Hirohito repudiated his so-called divinity in an Imperial Rescript on 1 January 1946. Since, as a scientist, he had never believed in the myth, he was glad to take this symbolic step, which also reflected his long-held desire to function as a secular constitutional monarch. He also undertook extensive post-war tours around Japan, to bring the monarchy closer to the people.

Hirohito was therefore not tried for war crimes. Rather, he co-operated with the occupation in helping to adapt the monarchy to democracy along the lines of constitutional monarchy in the UK. he continued to encourage this evolution of the Japanese imperial institution for the rest of his life. Yet Hirohito never fully justified his role in the war. When he died on 7 January 1989 after a reign of 64 years (the longest on reliable record in Japanese history), many people around the world still condemned him as a war criminal. A small minority in Japan did so, too, although Japanese public opinion polls from 1945 onwards consistently indicated strong popular support for him.

Stephen Large

Bibliography

Bix, H. P. , Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (London, 2001).
Large, S. S. , Emperor Hirohito and Shōwa Japan: A Political Biography (London, 1992).