Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

Rating:
Summary: Hirohito unveiled
Review: In 1971 David Bergamini, a Rhodes Scholar, who was raised in the Orient and who speaks and reads Japanese, authored, "Japan's Imerial Conspiracy." Bergamini set forth a compelling argument in the role of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito in the planning and guidance of Japan's aggression before and during World War II. Japanese historians and western academia of the time savaged Bergamini; they closed their minds and buried the truth.

Professor Bix has researched and documented the truth of Bergamini's earlier thesis. He does not merely rewrite Bergamini's work but he puts flesh and meat on the bare bones of truth so denounced in 1971. Professor Bix presents the story of Hirohito. A story of deception extending from the Meiji Restoration to the creation of the plausible deniability doctrine of Emperor Hirohito. The Bix work sheds light as to why Japan has refused an apology to China and other of her victims of World War II; to apologize would be a grievious mortal affront to nation's sacred beliefs in the Enperor.

Publishers in Japan have refused to publish, "Hiohito: And the Making of Modern Japan." Japanese in many quarters, including the schools, still maintain the Rape-of-Nanking is but a vicious lie by those who are jealous of Japan. They cannot accept the truth that their Emperor would be a party to the atrocities committed against China and others.

To those readers who seek to fill-in the blank spaces of knowledge dealing with World War II, Professor Bix's work is a must-read. I would only hope that a like work will one day honestly document the excesses of the United States before and during World WarII.

Rating:
Summary: Another Revisionist Viewpoint
Review: Bix's biography of Showa, Emperor of Japan during its most dramatic historical period is indeed a controversial and revisionist view of this man. With the notable exception of David Bergamini and Edward Behr-- both journalists, most historical treatments of the Pacific war have shown the late emperor to be a nerd, caught up in a wave of influence by his jingoistic military advisors, aloof from the responsibility of the war and unknowing about the many atrocities carried about by the Japanese military forces on prisoners-of-war and local populations. Bix claims access to new documentation and materials that support a claim that Showa was much more involved than has been previously represented. His case is well documented, painstakingly presented and quite convincing. It is hard to accept, after reading this book, that Showa was merely a puppet by-stander to prosecuting the war. However, I do find a tinge of ethnocentrism based on Western moral judgements of right and wrong. Scarcely mentioned is the fact that Japan had only recently emerged from a fuedal state and nearly 400 years of cultural separation and isolation under Showa's grandfather, Meiji, into a world at the turn of the previous century where the Western powers dominated in their colonization of most of Asia. Within this cultural context, Japan's view to get her fair share of the spoils did not seem unreasonable. The mythicism of the Japanese world view of cultural superiority exploited by Showa further exacerbated entering into this war. This aspects is well documented by Bix but the critical cultural aspect affected by the years of isolation under the Tokugawa Shogunate is treated lightly in what is otherwise an excellent piece of research.

Frank P. Araujo, Ph.D.

Rating:
Summary: When a Small Man Becomes a Giant Nightmare
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Revealing, but may stretch its point.
Review: Herbert Bix's biography of Emperor Hirohito of Japan is an outstanding work, but it must be read with caution, a critical eye and an open mind. The work is permeated with a sense of Bix's righteous indignation at Hirohito's escape from censure for his part in Japan's role in China and in the Second World War and this seems to color his judgment when facts grow thin and motivations are evaluated.

What Bix contributes to the historical record regarding Hirohito, the Japanese military, and Japan's wars is important and revealing. In Western culture the term "emperor" connotes Rome with a sort of English royalty superimposed on it, a blend of the two greatest empires of the Western world. What gets lost in this merger is the memory that the emperor in the Roman system enjoyed a godhead and that the empire was partly a theocracy.

Theocracy is a missing element in most evaluations of the seemingly insane strategic decisions that governed Japan's entry into, atrocities during, and conduct of World War II. The blind faith that overrode rationality in upper echelons of the Army and Navy makes more sense in the light of the theocratic Shintoist emperor system. Bound up with a system of belief in a state headed by a living god, the racist inhumanity of Japanese atrocities becomes more understandable, but not justifiable. The willingness to "die for the Emperor" in banzai charges and kamikaze flights also becomes more clear.

But where Bix's work raises question marks is in his evaluation of Hirohito's role. While Bix has unearthed an emperor who definitely had a hand in government and the fatal decisions that propelled Japan into war, and bore unacknowledged responsibility for those decisions, he has not necessarily proven Hirohito to be their animating force. But that is the light in which Bix evaluates those missing elements of the record that call for speculation.

An alternative interpretation occurs which, while not going as far as Bix's evaluation, does not divorce Hirohito from his responsibility. Where Bix sees Hirohito as an animating force in the actions of Japan's ruling elites and militarists, too often that animation comes in the form of ratifying faits accompli. Too often intentions that Bix would have us believe were formed by Hirohito were initiated by others, sometimes without Hirohito's foreknowledge. What occurs is that, perhaps, Hirohito did not hold the initiative in the Japanese government.

What becomes apparent in Bix's description of Hirohito's upbringing, personality and conduct, is that he was so insulated from reality that he never enjoyed an undistorted view of the world. He was certainly not the disconnected figurehead who only stepped in at the last moment to save Japan from more atomic bombs and partition with the Soviets. He was definitely active in charting Japan's course, but he did not necessarily hold the compass.

Bix would have us see Hirohito as the ultimate master of indirect rule, served by private intelligence systems to feed him the truth and manipulating all from behind the scenes in ways to make governmental decision appear to be the unanimous work of others presented to him only for his purely ceremonial rubber stamp. But was this a mastermind at work, or a relatively intelligent but confused and uncertain man trying to keep his head above water in a political/religious system he nominally enjoyed power over, but in which his military routinely indulged in acts of grand insubordination, assassination and mutiny? Japanese emperors had been deposed before, and while Hirohito nominally controlled the military, it obeyed when it chose and the ruling elites talked behind his back of the emperor's less than godlike bearing.

Had he been other than the awkward intellectual he was, Hirohito might well fit the role Bix casts for him, but his personality lacks the earmarks of a conqueror. It does bear the earmarks of uncertainty, fear and reaction. His actions are equally explainable as those of a man raised to be a god and generalissimo; who knew intellectually if not emotionally that he was neither; but was emotionally driven to fulfill those roles in all earnestness; attempting to survive in a cut-throat political system and becoming caught up in his role and his military's initial success to the ultimate detriment of himself and the nation.

Hirohito, while awkward of manner, was not stupid. He did not lack for political or military talent, but was no genius in either field. He did, after all, manage to survive, and in his circumstances that took considerable doing and the good fortune to be a useful symbol and tool to others in power, whether the Japanese elites, the Japanese military, or the American Occupation. He was also far from blameless for what happened in his merely human efforts to fulfill a role in which a god would find success difficult.

Hirohito should have been forced to abdicate and confined for life to a Shinto monastery. Japanese emperors had been forced into monastic retirement before and this would have been a suitable punishment for a man who abetted horrible crimes in an earnest attempt--later overtaken by hubris--to fulfill an unrealistic role he was raised and trained to from birth. His brother Takamatsu should have been Regent for Akihito's seven years of remaining minority under the strict supervision of the Occupation, and Akihito's enthronement should have coincided with the peace treaty, the Occupation's end, and the ratification of a new Constitution reducing the monarchy to figurehead status.

Bix's frustration with the unrepentant emperor and the unindicted elites of Japan is palpable. Perhaps had the Americans come as conquerors willing to destroy, vice avengers willing to rehabilitate, then there might have been some justice which might assuage Bix's understandable--but maybe unrealistic--moral outrage.

After all, can you condemn a man to death for his religious beliefs and for attempting to fulfill a delusion instilled in him from birth? For the horrible crimes along his tragic path he can certainly be confined for life...but not hanged.

Rating:
Summary: Hirohito unveiled
Review: In 1971 David Bergamini, a Rhodes Scholar, who was raised in the Orient and who speaks and reads Japanese, authored, "Japan's Imerial Conspiracy." Bergamini set forth a compelling argument in the role of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito in the planning and guidance of Japan's aggression before and during World War II. Japanese historians and western academia of the time savaged Bergamini; they closed their minds and buried the truth.

Professor Bix has researched and documented the truth of Bergamini's earlier thesis. He does not merely rewrite Bergamini's work but he puts flesh and meat on the bare bones of truth so denounced in 1971. Professor Bix presents the story of Hirohito. A story of deception extending from the Meiji Restoration to the creation of the plausible deniability doctrine of Emperor Hirohito. The Bix work sheds light as to why Japan has refused an apology to China and other of her victims of World War II; to apologize would be a grievious mortal affront to nation's sacred beliefs in the Enperor.

Publishers in Japan have refused to publish, "Hiohito: And the Making of Modern Japan." Japanese in many quarters, including the schools, still maintain the Rape-of-Nanking is but a vicious lie by those who are jealous of Japan. They cannot accept the truth that their Emperor would be a party to the atrocities committed against China and others.

To those readers who seek to fill-in the blank spaces of knowledge dealing with World War II, Professor Bix's work is a must-read. I would only hope that a like work will one day honestly document the excesses of the United States before and during World WarII.

Rating:
Summary: Misleading title, picture lost in detail
Review: I was utterly disappointed with the this book. First of all, the title is misleading. Modern Japan was created during the Meiji Emperor and Hirohito inherited it.

Also, the book does not really talk about how Japan is becoming "modern", but just tells the life story - in a very boring way - of Hirohito.

Rating:
Summary: I love this book!!
Review: To many, Hirohito is the conterfigure of Hitler. However, after reading this book, you will find out how he was manipulated by Japanese military oligarch to be such a militaristic leader. Unlike to Hitler, he grew up being educated by military officers who dreamed great Japanese empire in Asia almost as early as when he start learning how to write or read. You will find out how his grandfather, Meiji emperor had great influence on him. Also, you will learn what were Japan's real motivations for the war. I got impression that the war was partly racism against racism. The Japanese defined themselves as supreme race and fought against western racism which looked down "Yellow Race". I'm from Japan and think we should learn more about this war.

Rating:
Summary: An American cultural point of view
Review: Herbert P. Bix, an American, hasn't written a history book. It is enough just to see the little amount of details and his "official" comments about the atomic bombardments. There is no chapter about this matter. The author considered probably this is just a marginal subject. Mr. Bix tried to avoid the subject because he had not enough courage to write that Hirohito was to blame for atomic bombardments of the Japanese cities.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Review: A little dry, but overall an excellent work!

I didn't realize Bix was a Marxist until reading the review below, but his Marxism didn't seem to show in this book.

I was impressed that Bix is fluent in reading/writing Japanese and was the first scholar with access to documents available only after the death of Emperor Showa, plus he could read them himself....

Rating:
Summary: Clear up many myths but perception sufffers...
Review: A very interesting and well researched book about Emperor Hirohito and his era. I think this book does clear up more forcefully that Hirohito was involved a lot more with his nation's policies then we have known before. But I think the author got little bias in trying to condemned Hirohito for doing this but I asked, what is wrong with that? He was their Emperor, he should as their Emperor support his own nation's policies if such policies would help his nation. What head of state would not do such a thing? Second, it seem that Bix misunderstood under what conditions Hirohito got his information that his decisions was based on. From all accounts, he was never given the whole picture, never the details and probably in some way, never the whole truth. He was lied to often, deceptive form of misinformation led him on throughout the war until common logic prevailed him to realized that Japan's glorious victory only lies in the minds of his protectors. I think Mr. Bix tell us a lot about how Japan worked prior to end of World War II but not too much about the man himself. Perhaps the title is little misleading after all.