Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Read Online Free Page A

wariness. He left behind no abundance of texts with his signature on them, revealing his thoughts and enabling us to capture his responses to the major events that he lived through. On ceremonial occasions, it is true, he wrote waka poems in the style of his grandfather Meiji, of which so far more than 860, most of them written after 1945, have been printed. 7 But he published no reminiscences and usually expressed his ideas or intentions only through others, who found it disrespectful and inappropriate for a Japanese subject to write critically about him.
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    He was also a lonely man. He is said to have kept a diary faithfully from the age of eleven. Probably he did. But that diary—held tightly by the Imperial Household Agency—is not and probably never will be freely accessible to researchers. The same agency is now compiling the chronicles of Hirohito’s reign, but the work is proceeding “on the premise that it will not be made public…because it might constitute an infringement of the privacy of the people referred to, and those related to them.” 8 Also off limits is Hirohito’s correspondence with family members, the entire “Record of the Emperor’s Conversations” ( Seidan haichroku ) in its various versions, as well as a wealth of unpublished documents, such as diaries of people who served him, and that someday may illuminate Hirohito’s whole existence. Neither has the U.S. government opened to the public all the secret records it holds on Hirohito, such as, for example, his conversations with Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the folder in the U.S. National Archives bearing his name. 9
    To pry open Hirohito’s life and access his motives one must rely on his entourage of note takers and diarists, who worked closely with him, thereby came to know him well, and have actually published their notes and diaries. One must rely also on accounts by senior military officers and diplomats who recorded his words during the war years. Recently, due largely to the efforts of a new generation of Japanese scholars, the publication of hundreds of new documents, diaries, reminiscences, and scholarly studies pertaining to him during the war and postwar years, and the greatly changed valuation that the Japanese now place on the imperial institution, we in the West and in Japan have the chance finally to understand the intellectual, moral, and social forces that molded his life. Although far too many source gaps remain, these new materials justify retelling the story of Hirohito in the century of total war.
    The work of Japanese scholars also enables us to appreciate how isolated Hirohito was from the Japanese people. Although he became the center of fanatical national worship and was greeted by some as a living deity whenever he traveled on visits to different cities, he was never “popular” in any lay sense of that term. He operated within a bureaucratic monarchy, and was considered at once an “organ” of the modern centralized state yet also an entity whose “will” transcended all law. 10 Above all, the new materials make it possible for us to appreciate how Hirohito embodied—as no other Japanese did—the contradictory logic of Japan’s entire modern political development.
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    That development had begun in the time of Hirohito’s grandfather, Emperor Mutsuhito, known posthumously as Meiji, “the Great.” On becoming emperor in 1868, Meiji was made to serve as the polestar of the nation’s modern transformation. Eventually the way his powers were built up and institutionalized during the late nineteenth century shaped the parameters of Japan’s political development down through 1945. The imperial court was separated from the government and reorganized in accordance with models of European monarchy. A written constitution followed. Bestowed by Meiji in 1889 as his “gift” to the nation, the constitution asserted that