In the introduction to his biography of Hirohito, Bix details some of the major challenges he had to overcome as a researcher. First and foremost, the Showa emperor did not leave behind a published memoir, a publicly accessible diary (he allegedly kept one), or much in the way of written testimony about how he felt or what he thought about events and people throughout his long life. Secondly, most of his aides and people who knew him intimately have been similarly reluctant to share their personal views of him or to disclose what they observed in the way of reactions and thoughts as they interacted with the Emperor. Thus the daunting challenge before Bix – to somehow draw a portrait of a very private, almost reclusive human being by providing rich context and relying on verifiable facts to (in most cases) extrapolate Hirohito’s state of mind, or his thought process.
This is one of the strongest points of this book, from a purely scholarly point of view. Bix excels at the task of teasing meaning out of oblique statements (either by Hirohito or by his aides), out of social and political context, speeches and legal documents, newspaper reports and photographs. I enjoyed intensely the reasoning of his investigative mind, the logic he brings to bear on known events, in order to construct a very plausible, if rather disturbing portrait of Hirohito, both as a private man and as a leader. Unfortunately two major drawbacks follow from this. The first is that Bix feels compelled to overwhelm the reader with detail as he marshals evidence for his statements. Speeches, newspaper reports, even writings by Japanese scholars on a variety of subjects (for example the nature of the Meiji constitution or the meaning of kokutai) are quoted at length to the detriment of the readability of this volume. Secondly, I felt that on a number of occasions, Bix – for lack of more reliable sources – tends to attribute to the Emperor or to those around him thoughts and ideas taken at face value from his (and their) public statements. As someone who studies politics and closely follows American election campaigns, I remain unconvinced that statements meant for public consumption necessarily reflect a politician’s real opinion or reveal much of anything about their state of mind.
That said, Bix makes a convincing argument that contrary to the image of Hirohito as a powerless “constitutional” monarch who had to bow to the decisions made by others, the Showa emperor gradually but surely gathered in his hands most of the reigns of the state and through both action and inaction, through voicing opinions or withholding them became, over time, an almost absolutist ruler. This, of course, meant that he was personally responsible for Japan’s wars in China as well as for the decisions to join the Tripartite Pact with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and to, eventually, go to war with Britain and the United States.
Moreover, Hirohito’s personal involvement made Japan’s war that much more savage through his refusal to countenance retreat thus impelling Japanese soldiers to fight bitterly to the end, through repeated urgings of his commanders to re-take lost territory even when that was patently unrealistic, through, ultimately, sanctioning a whole philosophy of warfare based on suicide (kamikaze) attacks.
One of the most sordid aspects of Hirohito’s personality emerged as World War II drew to an end and the issue of Japanese surrender became more and more urgent. Even as thousands upon thousands of Japanese fighting men continued to die in what, at that point, had become an obviously lost war, even as the US dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki causing untold destruction, death and suffering, and even as the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, the major sticking point for declaring capitulation remained, for Hirohito and the loyal sycophants around him, the preservation of the monarchy as an institution and of Hirohito as Emperor.
One of Bix’s most significant contributions is to demonstrate that by clearing Hirohito of war crimes in the belief that retaining him as the Emperor will counteract a spread of Communism (this was the main idea though General MacArthur had other reasons as well), the United States prevented a thorough soul-searching of Japanese elites and the Japanese people in general on the issues of war responsibility and war guilt. Bix claims that, to a significant extent, this stunted Japanese democracy at its very inception and that it has prevented its unfettered development and expansion.
Most of these arguments I found convincing and I believe Bix’s contribution to understanding Japanese history is really significant.
Before I conclude, I will lay out two of the main problems I have with the book. First, despite much effort by Bix, I find Hirohito’s persona still largely unresolved in my mind. I am not sure what kind of person he was, how he treated his family, or his friends (if he had any). I remain uncertain whether the grandiose motives attributed to him by Bix (for example, trying to live up to the legacy of his grandfather, Emperor Meiji) are really valid, or if he was motivated throughout his life by nothing more than a lust for power and some sort of Napoleon complex (given his slight stature and squeaky voice). The context Bix has provides is, indeed, rich. But at its center, the Showa emperor remains largely elusive, largely a blank. Secondly, because this is meant to be a study of Hirohito, the focus on him and on the imperial institution necessarily detracts from a fuller understanding of the overall institutional context of Imperial Japan. We do not learn much about elections, or the main political parties, or anything in the way of how the Imperial Diet functioned day-to-day. We learn nothing about how the Army and Navy were constituted and how or why an institutional conflict emerged between them. In short, the figure of the Emperor is used like a lantern – it illuminates only those who came in contact with him. This makes for a rather bewildering – and unsystematic – array of personalities whom Bix introduces, but whose exact prerogatives and institutional roles remain largely irrelevant to the main narrative. In itself, that is not necessarily a problem. But given that Bix’s main thesis – that Hirohito in essence overwhelmed all other institutional constructs created by the Meiji constitution and ended up as a near absolute monarch – an examination of the institutional context of the monarchy would have been, I think, warranted.
I come away from this book with a much deeper and much improved understanding of a crucial period of Japanese history. Bix has convinced me on many points of his argument and has certainly illuminated the ways in which the Showa emperor was personally responsible for much of the suffering inflicted on Asia and on his own people between 1931 and the end of the Second World War. An enthusiastic four stars!
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