Hirohito and War: Imperial Tradition and Military Decision Making in Prewar Japan

8. Conclusion

• 8 Conclusion The relation between the emperor of Japan’s personal convictions and his participation in prewar decision making is a perplexing question. Many separate Emperor Hirohito from the emperor system, exonorate the former, and condemn the latter. Others convict and condemn both —based on systems of ideology (communism, socialism, capitalism) or Western legal concepts that had little to do with the realities of his personal or official existence. Much has been said about English constitutional monarchy; but Hirohito was the emperor of Japan, not the king of England. Although his authority and limitations were defined in the Meiji Constitution (based on Prussian precedents), his power and influence rested on the conventions of Japanese history and tradition. We are considering a man who lived a long and complicated life, moreover, a man who interpreted his position in Japanese history and government differently at different times. Many studies of the Shòwa emperor and the emperor system slight the national polity, its apparent demise, and the changes in thinking a normal person experiences as he grows older. This, however, is a mistake. All men change, and it is unrealistic to assume that Hirohito did not. The crown prince of 1916 was not the new emperor of 1926. Nor was he the head of the imperial house whose position and authority were challenged in 1936 or the newly secularized head of a defeated state in 1946. Those who argue that Hirohito was merely a figurehead emperor can point with justifi- 180 • Hirohito and War cation to his activities during his regency and at the beginning of his reign as emperor. But one should differentiate between a newly appointed regent in his early twenties and a reigning emperor in his midthirties and early forties who had been on the throne over ten years— as was the case with Hirohito when war broke out first with China and later with the United States and its allies. Consider, too, the differences between the 1940s and the 1980s just before Hirohito died. Only shallow paradigms—the Shòwa Emperor as an enlightened monarch above the fray or Hirohito as an Asiatic Machiavelli—support the thesis that Emperor Hirohito consistently conducted himself as a westernized constitutional monarch or a scheming nationalistic warlord. To maintain that the emperor, during the prewar years, “was absolutely consistent in using his personal influence to induce caution and to moderate, and even to obstruct, the accumulating, snowballing impetus toward war,” as the American historians Stephen Large and Charles Sheldon would have it,1 is to make the emperor into a god, which almost everyone agrees he was not. Large himself says elsewhere that the emperor was a mediocre man.2 Yet it is equally tenuous to make him into a “Fighting Generalissimo” and assert, as the historian Herbert Bix does, that “it was the emperor, more than anyone else, who delayed Japan’s surrender.”3 The present study offers an alternative point of view. Distinguished from a “head of state” in the Western sense of the term, Hirohito is presented here as the emperor of Japan and head of the imperial house. He was educated in this belief and was both empowered and obliged by Japanese tradition to serve not only his country but also his house as best he could. Often the latter took precedence over the former. Depending on the constellation of forces around him, he sought peace or made war, referring always to the constitution but preoccupied mainly with assuring the position and continued existence of the imperial house in Japan. Schooled in the traditions of the Japanese imperial house, educated to be a modern head of state, Hirohito was influenced by both: ancient imperial-line tradition and modern education reinforced one another as he approached the problems of state. Many tend to assume there is a tension between tradition and modernity in a person’s character—a source, ultimately, of inner dissonance. One should not make this assumption with the Japanese emperor. In Hirohito these strains were complementary. The imperial tradition was the source of his position, power, and well-being. Modern Western learning, especially constitutional theory, the natural sciences, and military strategy, was a means Conclusion • 181 to preserve and enhance this position—the supremacy of the imperial house in Japanese society—and likewise Japan’s position in the world. This complementary relation between modern Western learning and the imperial tradition is an important aspect...