Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Read Online Free PDF Page B

and relocated, once again, on the periphery of national life. For the first time in his adult life, the reality of Hirohito’s political role came together with the perception of him as a figurehead. The return to power of conservative elites who had earlier been purged from office, however, offered Hirohito hope while setting the stage for nearly a decade of largely unsuccessful political struggle to revive some of his lost powers. Thereafter the monarchy itself underwent further decline, but not the many moral and political problems generated by Hirohito’s continuation on the throne and the failure of the Japanese people to question their support of him.
    The history of the Shwa monarchy and its justifying ideologies up to 1945 is inextricably bound up with the history of Japanese militarism and fascism; after that date it is connected to efforts by ruling elites to roll back occupation reforms, check Japanese pacifism, and regain the attributes of a great-power state. The first half of Hirohito’s life, like that of his grandfather Meiji, illustrates the tendency of military power, in any polity, to expand in situations wheredemocratic institutions are either absent or nonfunctioning, the voices of ordinary people are shut out of national political affairs, and the only institutional restraint on the growth of militarism is the supervisory power of a lax or indulgent chief executive. The lessons of the second half of his life, when he was deprived of deity and stripped of constitutional powers, are less obvious. Hirohito and his advisers were involved in the staging of the Tokyo war crimes trials, and later in the making of the military alliance with the United States. The way he and the monarchy operated during and after the occupation of Japan also reveals how the power of the throne helped tame the liberation of the Japanese people and deflate their sense of empowerment.
    This book therefore challenges the orthodoxy, established long before the Asia-Pacific War and fostered afterward by the leaders of the Allied occupation, that Hirohito was merely a figurehead within a framework of autocratic imperial rule, and a puppet of the military. It also challenges the idea that the army was mainly responsible for Japan’s aggression during the 1930s and early 1940s, and points out the long-neglected role of upper-echelon naval officers in lobbying against arms reduction in the 1920s, bombing undefended Chinese cities during the 1930s, and pushing for war in the Pacific at the start of the 1940s. It argues further that, starting in the mid-1920s, party cabinets and Hirohito himself professed commitment to the new international “peace code” (stated in the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928) that criminalized aggressive war, but pursued a policy toward China that violated the spirit of Japan’s voluntarily assumed treaty obligations embodying that code.
    Even after the nation’s capitulation in August 1945, Japan’s ruling elites remained indifferent to the obligations imposed by international law on all sovereign states. Concerned about some of the wartime actions of the imperial state, and needing to protect the emperor, cabinet officers ordered the destruction of documents thatwould have aided in trying war criminals and reconstructing the Shwa past. Later attempts by conservative politicians and intellectuals to portray the Tokyo war crimes trials as a judicial lynching by the victors, although derived partly from the limitations of the trials themselves, were also fueled by such prewar attitudes toward international law.
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    For more than twenty years Hirohito exercised, within a complex system of mutual constraints, real power and authority independent of governments and the bureaucracy. Well informed of the war and diplomatic situations, knowledgeable about political and military affairs, he participated in the making of national policy and issued