MAKING OF MODERN JAPAN

By Herbert P. Bix

HarperCollins. 800 pp. $ 35
 
 

To the extent they remember him at all, most Americans think of Hirohito, the emperor of Japan from 1926 until his death in 1989, in cartoon-like images. In one, a small Japanese man appears in striped trousers and formal morning coat submitting himself to a towering, open-shirted Gen. Douglas MacArthur after Japan's defeat. In another, we see the same man, older, studiously working over a microscope as a marine biologist. In still another, he is very young, placed awkwardly upon a white horse in front of armies over which he is supposed to rule. Rarely, if ever, do we see him as a man of power, of personal ambition--a political leader deciding life and death issues and the fate of millions of people.

Herbert Bix's highly readable and massively researched biography is all but certain to shatter the old images. Above all it is likely to change our understanding of the role Hirohito played in the initiation and conduct of World War II, and his role, direct and indirect, in constricting Japanese political development throughout his long 63-year reign. During the late 1920s and 1930s, he helped Japanese military leaders emasculate Japan's political parties, and followed up this important realignment by systematically promoting anti-democratic, theocratically based imperial ideas. Finally, in nuanced and complex efforts carried through the course of the war and its aftermath, the emperor promoted a subservient anti-democratic culture in the final decades of his life.

Bix views the standard portrait of Hirohito as a passive figurehead who did the bidding of Japanese militarists as almost pure mythology. This image was simply propaganda, Bix argues--consciously contrived to serve the interests of Hirohito, of postwar U.S. Occupation authorities and of conservative Japanese politicians. This reading of Hirohito's character as passive also helped the emperor avoid responsibility (and trial) for Japan's war crimes, kept him politically "clean" enough to be used by U.S. officials to help manage postwar Japan in the Occupation period and in the Cold War, and in general helped shore up the reconstruction of a more conservative politics than would have been possible if the emperor had been discredited for the role he played in the war.

At the core of Hirohito's power was something much more forceful: a religious-political ideal that served to legitimize his and the state's interests as flowing from god-given right. Bix suggests a parallel between this cultural construct and the American idea of manifest destiny, which also served to justify expansionism--and the obliteration of those, such as native Americans, who got in the way. In both cases, claims of a larger moral mission served to marginalize political opponents and blunt moral challenges.

Hirohito was never a constitutional monarch in the British sense. The Meiji Constitution he inherited deemed him a living god, made him the preeminent leader in Japan's political structure, and empowered him as supreme commander of Japan's military. Hirohito had the ultimate power to approve--or ditch--the appointment of generals, admirals and prime ministers. The constitution also made military leaders directly responsible to the emperor, allowing them to bypass Japan's cabinet. Bix demonstrates how this complex structure permitted Hirohito and a group of behind-the-scenes court advisers to participate "directly and decisively" as an independent force in policy making.

The Meiji Constitution provided the framework of Hirohito's power. But the terms of reference in the emperor's most important decisions were set in the 1920s, when he formed his alliance with hard-line factions of the Japanese Army and helped undermine Japan's struggling party cabinet system. Before long, he was able to brutally suppress political dissidents and those who questioned the emperor myth. As Japan's fragile democracy was steadily reduced, the emperor's own position, and that of the military, was steadily enhanced. The stage was set for the aggressive move into Manchuria in 1931, the "rape" of Nanking (in which an estimated 300,000 civilians were murdered) in 1937, and the decisions that led to all-out war in China by 1938.

Bix shows that at virtually every step on the road to total war Hirohito had choices and that he made them so as to directly or indirectly support and reward those who led the military expansion of his empire. The human costs, many of them little understood in the West, were enormous. An estimated 2.7 million Chinese civilians were slaughtered, for instance, during a Japanese "pacification" program that amounted to a sustained My Lai--style massacre targeting "all males between the ages of fifteen and sixty whom we suspect to be enemies" along with other "enemies pretending to be local people." Again, although thousands of Chinese soldiers were captured throughout the long war, a mere 56 prisoners were found to be alive in 1945.

Clearly Hirohito's most important act was the decision to go to war with the United States. Although Bix faults the Roosevelt administration for unwisely narrowing Japan's diplomatic choices, his exhaustive research (together with that of a new generation of Japanese historians) permits him to document Hirohito's direct, hands-on involvement in virtually every stage of the many decisions that produced the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

Bix also sheds important new light on Hirohito's role in the ending of World War II and on the use of the atomic bomb. Bix shows that Hirohito had many opportunities to end the war from February 1945 on. He argues that the emperor consciously chose to delay Japan's inevitable surrender because he was desperately trying to devise an "exit strategy" that would shift blame for defeat away from the throne and thereby preserve his own prerogatives and the "imperial way."

A primary concern was the still-neutral Soviet Union. With unrest in major cities growing as Japan's condition deteriorated, Hirohito and his inner circle worried that a Soviet declaration of war would aid leftist agitators and undermine the entire structure and mythology supporting the emperor. At the same time, Hirohito clung irrationally and foolishly to the hope that somehow the Soviet Union might be persuaded to help Japan achieve a negotiated settlement that would maintain the position of the emperor.

Given that Hirohito had choices open to him--and given that his main concern was with his own position--Bix sees Hirohito as "mainly" responsible for the lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Quite simply, he could have and should have chosen to end the war earlier. Bix also argues, simultaneously, that a "truculent" President Harry Truman could also have ended the war without the atomic bomb--particularly if he had been willing to wait for the Russians to enter the fight.

In fact, Bix's research points to an even stronger judgment: Precisely because Japanese leaders so feared the Soviet Union, American leaders understood that the shock of a Russian declaration of war would be enormous. U.S. intelligence personnel argued as early as April 1945 that a "two-step" combination of a Russian attack and some assurances for the emperor would likely end the war. As early as September 1944, Prime Minister Winston Churchill judged that if Russia joined Britain and the United States in a joint warning to Japan, this alone might lead to surrender.

For such reasons, the July 26, 1945 Potsdam Proclamation warning Japan to surrender as originally drafted both included the Soviet Union as one of the signatories and also offered guarantees for the emperor. U.S. policymakers eliminated both points, however, once the atomic bomb was tested. Not only did Truman not wish to wait for the Russians, he "preferred" the atomic bomb (as historian Martin Sherwin has put it), and now actively worked to delay the Red Army attack.

Throughout Bix's biography we are dealing with a real human being--someone responsible for his actions--and not the vague and misty imperial abstraction that much previous scholarship has given us. Bix is not unsympathetic to the difficulties facing an individual he describes variously as nervous, troubled and lonely--someone brought up from childhood to think of himself as responsible to a long line of divine ancestors, to think of his people as mere children and to think of the Japanese as a spiritually superior race. Bix's final judgment, however, is harsh: "In his single-minded dedication to preserving his position, no matter what the cost to others, [Hirohito] was one of the most disingenuous persons ever to occupy the modern throne."

Bix's bitterness occasionally gets the better of him--especially his anger at the emperor's unwillingness to acknowledge any responsibility for the millions of lives lost and atrocities committed during the wars over which he presided. He also slights the development and power of Japan's giant corporate complexes (zaibatsu) in Japanese capitalism. Moreover, future research is likely to shift our understanding of some of the critical and highly secretive behind-the-scenes decision-making and maneuvering: Both the imperial household and the U.S. government continue to withhold diaries and other critical documents concerning the emperor's life and role, including records of conversations with MacArthur and other documents now more than 50 years old. In addition, many records, particularly concerning the treatment of war prisoners, were destroyed by Japanese officials.

Unlike Germany, Japan has not yet publicly come to terms with its painful history. "Hirohito became the prime symbol of his people's repression of their wartime past," Bix observes. Accordingly, so long as the Japanese do "not pursue his central role in the war, they [do] not have to question their own." The future of Japanese democracy, he argues, depends on demolishing the emperor-related myths that have helped generate a sense of dependence and powerlessness in the face of authority. His controversial and important book is a major contribution to that end.