bout de papier, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2001) — Fall 2001 // Automne 2001, pp. 38–40
HIROHITO AND THE MAKING OF
MODERN JAPAN by Herbert P. Bix,
Harper Collins Publishers Ltd., 2000,
800 pp, $52.98
Inside Herbert Bix’s monumental Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan are two books struggling to get out. One is an impressively detailed academic study of the Japanese emperor’s education, character and rule in the context of post-Meiji Japan’s intellectual, political and security history. The other is a more populist but convincing polemic, advancing a thesis that has attracted much attention: that Hirohito was not the puppet he is usually portrayed as, but an active and culpable protagonist in Japan’s disastrous aggression during World War II.
To the former book belong the 100-odd pages of notes and the 30-page index; to the latter a nomination for the Gelber prize. Together they form an 800-page tome which will be daunting to most non-specialists. This is unfortunate, as Bix has an important thesis to advance, and one that deserves wider attention.
Bix’s main contention is that Hirohito was no mere figurehead manipulated by militarists, but rather bears a significant share of responsibility for the collapse of democracy on Japan in the 1920s and ’30s, the prosecution of a disastrous and unnecessarily prolonged war, the cruel and illegal actions of Japanese troops, and finally for Japan’s post-war amnesia about these events. He argues that the image of Hirohito as a peace-loving constitutional monarch who finally forced Japan’s surrender was a wholly false construct of conservatives in Japan — including Hirohito himself — and of General MacArthur and his staff. Each side, for its own reasons, wanted to preserve the Emperor and absolve him of war guilt.
In deconstructing this image, Bix is hampered by missing documents. The secretive government office which serves the imperial house, the Imperial Household Agency, permits no access to key documents including Hirohito’s diary, his correspondence with family and the official chronicles of his reign. Many Japanese war-time records were destroyed before they could be seized by the occupying forces, and much was never written down at all. Surviving accounts of the war years are often contradictory, evasive and self-serving. Nonetheless, using contemporary documents and accounts from those surrounding Hirohito, Bix largely compensates — even over-compensates — for these difficulties. The case he builds against Hirohito is lengthy and strong.
In the pre-war years, Bix accuses Hirohito mainly of sins of omission and weaknesses of character. He shows the emperor consistently failing to check the growth of militarism and of extreme forms of emperor-worship, even though he did not support these views himself. Bix suggests that Hirohito unwittingly created or used tools to bolster his own power and prestige — including the myth of his own divinity — which were later taken up by the far right to devastating effect.
Essentially Bix portrays the Taisho democracy period of the 1920s as a struggle between the democrats and the far right, in which there was no room for a middle way. Hirohito supported neither side, but his conservative instincts and desire to bolster the prestige of the Imperial house sapped Japan’s first attempt at democracy and party politics. At the time, Bix argues, Hirohito and his influential court entourage were the only ones with the prestige and informal power to have checked growing military adventurism. If the Emperor later became to some extent a pawn, it was because he ignored warning signs, made bad decisions, and gave in to his own anti-democratic tendencies. Thus, little by little in the 1930s, Hirohito found himself giving way, even on issues where he had serious policy differences with the extreme right, including a radical overhaul of the machinery of government and the total militarisation of Japan’s economy.
By the time of the 1931 “Manchurian incident” ’, however, his accusations against Hirohito are much more serious. Bix argues convincingly that Hirohito shared responsibility for decisions leading up to the 1937 “Marco Polo Bridge incident” ’, and the subsequent decision to wage a full-scale if undeclared war in China. His support for Japan’s refusal to declare war on China formally opened the way for non-recognition of international law on the conduct of war.
Bix makes a convincing case that Hirohito not only continued to fail to restrain the worst instincts of the Japanese military, but actively approved decisions regarding specific policies and actions. While his power was by no means absolute, Hirohito was an engaged commander-in-chief whose word carried immense moral suasion and who had the power to dismiss and appoint prime ministers. His powers may have been informal and circumscribed by the unclear Meiji constitution, significant insubordination in the army and a need to maintain the illusion of a constitutional monarchy for public consumption – but they were real nonetheless. There is strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that Hirohito knew about the “rape of Nanjing” and the use of biological weapons in China, but that he made no attempt to restore discipline in the army or to alter policy towards prisoners of war. Certainly Bix presents clear evidence that Hirohito directly oversaw and sanctioned the use of chemical weapons in China.
Despite Hirohito’s earlier desire to maintain good relations with Britain and the United States, he accepted the militarists’ strategic folly of declaring war on them in 1941, and of occupying much of East Asia and the South Pacific. Not only was Hirohito aware of the attack on Pearl Harbour before it happened, but the account he later gave of his own role in it was false. Bix also completely undermines the post-war received wisdom that the “puppet” Hirohito finally stood up to the militarists and brought an end to the war after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. On the contrary, he shows that Hirohito delayed the inevitable as long as possible, as Japan suffered defeat after defeat in the South Pacific and then the home islands.
In this, as throughout the war, Hirohito showed himself in Bix’s estimation to be a rather incompetent commander-in-chief: cautious, inflexible and pressing for aggressive action long after the situation in the Pacific warranted a switch to a defensive strategy. Bix suggests that Hirohito consistently sanctioned new aggression abroad to deal with — or paper over — conflict within the political and military elites at home, which neither Meiji constitutional structures nor his weak personality could resolve.
Hirohito seems to have shared his military’s obsession with winning a single decisive victory, if only to put Japan in a better negotiating position when the inevitable end came. The bottom line in negotiations was not, however, the well-being of the Japanese people or nation, but continued Imperial rule and protection of his own position. In the final, devastating sections of his j’accuse, Bix shows that Hirohito’s overriding aim was to fulfil his duty to his ancestors by remaining on the throne.
In this he was assisted not only by some of the court entourage and other conservatives, but by General Mac Arthur and elements within the US government. Once the decision had been made not to bring the Emperor before the Tokyo war trials (only the Australians urged this), Cold War pressures further convinced the US to leave Hirohito in place as a force for social stability. Thus emerged the myth of a peace-loving Emperor who, as a constitutional monarch, was powerless to stop Japan’s entry into the war, but managed to force its surrender to end the suffering of his people and prevent a nuclear holocaust.
By joining in the falsification of Japan’s war history, Hirohito escaped post-war pressures to abdicate, and contributed significantly to the problems of collective historical amnesia that still plague Japan. He became the “ultimate symbol of this double standard” of external acceptance but domestic denial of war responsibility. Nor did he seem personally to have drawn any lessons from Japan’s long slide into dictatorship and defeat. Long after the war, Hirohito still appears to have wished to exert political influence and to have chafed at the vague symbolic role afforded him in the post-war constitution. With Hirohito’s death in 1989 and the succession of Emperor Akihito, the constitutional role of the Imperial house became less of an issue. It remains to be seen whether calls to allow female succession following the recent birth of Princess Aiko will re-open the debate that underlay Hirohito’s reign.
The account of Hirohito’s war forms the heart of this book. The lengthy early sections on the Emperor’s education and upbringing will principally attract those with a specialist interest in the Meiji constitution and early modern Japanese intellectual, political and diplomatic history. The final section, on the post-war years, while more approachable, is brief and mainly focussed on the cover-up of Hirohito’s war role. Unfortunately, the broad scope of the book and a part-chronological, part-thematic structure make for much repetition. Bix’s tendency to start each chapter with an overview and then plunge into the detail of events summarised at the beginning, as well as his somewhat difficult style, compound the problem. This book would have benefited from a heavier editorial hand — or from being split into two works. A chronology and a list of the main personalities cited, which include almost every Japanese Prime Minister in Hirohito’s 62-year reign, would also have been helpful.
Despite this, the non-specialist reader should not be deterred from reading at least parts of Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. Bix’s re-evaluation of Hirohito’s war role is a major achievement of historical scholarship. At the same time, almost in passing, Bix throws light on a number of fascinating little-known aspects of the war. He points out, for example, that far more Chinese civilians (some 2.7 million) died under Japan’s “burn all, kill all, steal all” campaigns in Communist-controlled areas of north China than during the rape of Nanjing. He refutes the common view that the Japanese forces were tied down by their long war in China, suggesting instead that it gave them leverage to expand their resources, with the army growing from 17 divisions in 1937 to 51 in 1941. He also shows that the Japanese elite’s chilling disregard for basic human rights extended to its own people. Immediately after the surrender, the Japanese government pressed young Japanese women into prostitution with offers of food, clothing, shelter and assurances that they would be doing their patriotic duty by saving the rest of the pure Japanese race from the horrors of miscegenation with ravening hordes of occupying forces.
In addition, aspects of this book have a much wider application. Bix’s brief but cutting description of the personalities, manoeuvering, realpolitik and hidden agendas informing the Tokyo war trials is useful for anyone working on international tribunals or courts today. In explaining how Japan came to pursue a strategically suicidal war, Bix skilfully and subtly outlines the informal processes by which a semi-theocratic, semi-autocratic state functions, or fails to function. He shows how an intensely traditional system of supposedly divine monarchy struggled to adapt to the modern world. This description of Japan’s intellectual, political and diplomatic evolution in the 1920s and 1930s is an object lessons in the dangers of theocracy. By defining their nation as innately moral, proponents of extreme versions of emperor-worship were able to propagate the view that the emperor — and by extension Japan — could do no wrong. This belief in Japan’s innate moral superiority, allied to an intense nationalism, became a licence not just to do wrong, but to do the worst.
This is not merely of historical interest. Bix’s description of the wide-spread belief in 1930s’ Japan that “Japanese culture was spiritually redemptive … while Western culture, on the contrary, was defiling and needed to be purged” sounds strangely familiar. So, too, does his description of “Asian Monroeism — the rhetorical assertion of a Japanese right to safeguard Asia from the West”, animated by a “Manichean view of the age as a confrontation between have and have not nations, and antagonistic racial groupings …”. As the Taliban goes down to defeat in Afghanistan, the suffering of millions in Asia between 1931 and 1945 has an all-too modern relevance as a lesson in the dangers of absolutist theocratic government.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2001) — Fall 2001 // Automne 2001, pp. 38–40. Read the rest of this issue →
