Quite by coincidence I happened to come into possession of this work at the same time I received Ian Kershaw's two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler. Hirohito was no Hitler. They never met, and their styles and upbringing were diametrically opposite. Hitler used force of personality to perpetrate his genocide and destruction; Hirohito condoned his own genocide and war crimes from behind a sculpted mask of religion and myth. The eminently argued thesis of author Herbert Bix is that a weak, petty, and selfish man can be just as lethal as a megalomaniac at those perilous junctures in history.
Hirohito's grandfather was the great Meiji, whom readers may remember from high school days as the Japanese Emperor who warred with China and Russia at the turn of the twentieth century and upon whom Teddy Roosevelt kept a wary eye. Meiji did not always win his wars, but he was remarkably successful in creating a schizophrenic self-concept of his nation. On the one hand, Meiji maintained appearances of a modern, westernized world player with an emerging democratic government. At the same time, Meiji rejuvenated an ancient Japanese concept, "kokotai," a term used frequently throughout the book. Kokotai embodied national, religious, and racial unity in the persona of the emperor. While kokotai was a remarkable unifier of the masses, if not the intellectuals, it also promoted tendencies toward xenophobia, racism, militarism, censorship and despotism, all of which would accelerate into the tragedies of the 1930's and beyond.
Meiji's son was a weak and distracted emperor, and thus the hopes of the nation fell upon the young regent, Hirohito. Certainly one of the more fascinating aspects of this work is the education of the young emperor-to-be. Democracies do not have this educational dilemma [though I had an uncle who would not vote for John Kennedy because the latter attended Harvard.] Bix's treatment of this preparatory stage is excellent for several reasons. In the first place, the reader gets a rather detailed description of the disciplines and philosophies [and educational lacunae] that would shape Hirohito's thinking in his critical years in power. While much of the practical training resembles what I have read about West Point curriculum, philosophically one can rest assured that the concept of kokotai was woven through political, religious, and social formation.
But equally important is the issue of just who was chosen to teach the future emperor. Here we are introduced to another major force in the nebulous matrix of Japanese governance, the "imperial household." I would prefer to define this institution with precision, but that is impossible. Over the course of the work the household includes, at various times, members of the royal family, career intimate advisors, favored politicians, and increasingly in later years members of the military's high command. During the emperor's regency period there were major disputes within the household about the direction of his training and development of his public persona. Later, upon the throne, Hirohito would himself choose his advisors, or at least it seemed so.
Assuming the throne in 1926 upon the death of his father Taisho, Hirohito cultivated a style of inscrutability and divine aloofness. He believed that the kokotai was defiled by any appearance of direct interference in political and military affairs, though he clearly had opinions and obliquely communicated them through intermediaries. Hirohito's aloofness had two major consequences: it weakened the Diet, which could have served as a moderating voice when internal and international tensions accelerated through the 1930's. And worse, it unleashed the adventuresome elements of the Japanese military, particularly Japan's considerable presence in China.
Japan's "New Deal" response to depression was the despoiling of China, a nation held by the Emperor and his subjects as racially inferior. In this respect Hirohito, like Hitler, used ultra-nationalism as a motivation for wartime sacrifices. And yet one gets the sense that the Emperor had lost control of his forces in China, hiding atrocities and taking credit for the army's maneuvers and conquests only after learning that they had happened. As more military influence permeated the imperial household, Hirohito gave a series of belated blessings to military expansion in Southeast Asia throughout the late 1930's and into the following decade. The attack on Pearl Harbor was the high water mark of Japan's military adventures. Oddly, Hirohito's own military fever heated up as his high command, thoroughly thrashed at Midway, began to think about extrication. Military defeat, which reveals the true depth of character in some men [Robert E. Lee comes to mind], succeeded in this case to only magnify the petty and self-centered nature of the Emperor, who actually risked a third nuclear strike on his own people in bartering for his own post war immunity.
Even so, Hirohito needed some post-war friends in high places. Whatever one thinks of Douglas MacArthur, he was a practical man who quickly grasped the usefulness of the kokotai for an occupation general. He saw no point in discrediting the Emperor if Hirohito's presence would soothe a broken nation and provide a benign rallying point. Moreover, the first chilly blasts of the cold war signaled the new alignment of nations. It was Russia [and later Mao's China], not Japan, that posed true threats to American security. Thus the last thing MacArthur needed was prosecution of Hirohito for war crimes, morally appropriate as that might be, nor propagation of the facts of the delayed surrender, which would have outraged the Japanese. If by some historiographical miracle Bix's work had appeared in, say, 1947 instead of 2000, I believe it would have been embargoed in both Japan and the United States. But both nations preferred for their own reasons to perpetuate the kokotai deception till Hirohito's death in 1989, though by then Bix and other historians were well on their way to a more factual accounting of the Emperor's role in Japan's international crimes.
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LET’S NOT TALK ABOUT JAPAN UNTIL ASIA AND AMERICA REACH MILITARY PARITY
LET’S NOT TALK ABOUT JAPAN UNTIL ASIA AND AMERICA REACH MILITARY PARITYWWII was a turf war among the military powers of the world on how to cut up Asia, Africa and the Mideast. It was an opportunity for Asia to reclaim its past splendor by clearing the Western colonists out of Asia. As the recent rise of Asia testifies to, we should expect that Asia should not have any problem to liberate itself during WWII. But two factors derailed this liberation effort.First, it was the Christian converts in Asia. The Chinese Christian converts actually maneuvered so effectively that the Asia liberation effort was derailed into one that actually tried to preserve the presence of colonists in Asia, not only in China, but also in Burma and Thailand. This happened in the Xian Mutiny, in which rebelling leaders force the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek, to stop exterminating the indigenous resistance to foreign colonization and to start just to fight the Japanese, which was leading the liberation effort. Japan, at the end, only got the support of the Buddhist countries in Asia, such as Burma and Thailand.Second, it’s the subject of this article – propaganda based on self-fulfilling prophecy, such as the forgery of Tanaka Memorial, and fabricated smear, such as the Nanking Massacre, both aimed at Japan. With America holding such undisputable military superiority that make America the judge, jury and executor, all Asian countries thus far are basically voiceless, except for the pro-West, and mostly anti-Asia, Christian converts, who continue the Western tradition of seamless propaganda.This book is providing them with the appropriate material to keep Asia divided and conquered for the benefit of the West.
Top reviews from other countries
Laura
Interesting Insight into Hirohito's Personality
Reviewed in Germany on February 7, 2016