Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Read Online Free

more than 3.1 million Japanese lives, and more than sixty thousand Western Allied lives. 6
    Events had not turned out as he had anticipated and hoped. Yet when his turn came to provide explanations of the role he had played in those events, and to set the record straight, he and his aides were far from candid. They skillfully crafted a text designed to lead to the conclusion that he had always been a British-style constitutional monarch and a pacifist. Hirohito omitted mention of how he and his aides had helped the military to become an enormously powerful political force pushing for arms expansion. He ignored the many times he and his entourage had made use of the Meiji system of government by consensus to stifle a more democratic, less militarized political process. He intentionally fudged the details about his role as both a military leader and a head of state, blurred his motives, and obfuscated the timing of his actions and the logic that informed them. He was silent too about how he had encouraged the belligerency of his people by serving as an active ideological focus of a new emperor-centered nationalism that had grown up around him.
    The aide who wrote the introduction to the “Monologue” claimed that the emperor had limited himself to describing briefly “the background causes and the immediate causes of the Greater East Asia War, its development, and how it came to an end.” That too was untrue. Not included in Hirohito’s explanation were the many ways he and his court entourage had destabilized the party cabinet system that had developed during the middle and late 1920s by insisting on selecting the next prime minister and forcing on him their own national-policy agenda. He omitted discussing how the war in China had begun, his direct leadership role in its expansion,and the conduct of Japanese forces on the ground and in the air. Hirohito also remained silent about the many experiences and circumstances that had most strongly affected his life, the values he placed on them, and the ideas that had shaped his actions and made him the person he was. In his single-minded dedication to preserving his position, no matter what the cost to others, he was one of the most disingenuous persons ever to occupy the modern throne.
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    This work attempts to study precisely those formative events and ideologies that underlay, deeply or near the surface, Hirohito as a monarch and a man. It focuses on the forces that shaped his thoughts and actions, as well as those of his close palace aides before, during, and long after the Asia-Pacific War (1931–45). It seeks to describe his actual role in policy making when he was at the center of events; and it is necessarily complex, for my concern embraces not only the modern, divinely legitimized monarchy that was constructed under Hirohito’s grandfather, the emperor Meiji, and used to convert the Japanese people to militarism, war, and the values of subjecthood. It embraces also the reformed monarchy, which was artfully disconnected from the war and its official remembrance, and which has continued its existence down to the present day. It traces the impact of both the sacred and the secular monarchy on Hirohito, his interaction with the various organs of the state, and the monarchy’s continuous transformation under him. Ultimately I am concerned with the whole of Hirohito’s long life, for he illuminates, more than any other Japanese figure, the broader world of Japanese politics and government-military relations. His life has much to tell us about the changing political attitudes of the Japanese people over the past century.
    This is not, however, an orthodox political biography. Hirohito was not a gregarious, outgoing person with a wide assortment of friends fond of writing candidly about him. He was a reticent person who spoke most eloquently sometimes by not speaking at all.Socialized to public opacity, he was trained also to private