A strange fascination for World War II in the Pacific overtakes many Catholic blogs in early August each year, so in line with that I throw out this question: should Hirohito have been tried as a war criminal? The video clip above is from the movie Emperor (2012) which is being released on Blu-ray and dvd next week and which has a fictional account of an American attempt to determine the extent of Hirohito’s involvement in the launching of Japan’s war of conquest which would claim over thirty million lives.
MacArthur had little doubt of Hirohito’s war guilt, but he also had little doubt that Hirohito’s cooperation was necessary for a peaceful occupation of Japan. Hirohito thus served as a figure head while MacArthur, the Yankee Shogun, remade Japan. This picture tells us all we need to know about the relationship between the two men:
MacArthur encountered considerable resistance to his decision not to prosecute Hirohito. Belief in Hirohito’s war guilt was an article of faith in America and in the other nations that had fought Japan. MacArthur played along with the fable promoted by the Japanese government that Hirohito had always been a man of peace, who was powerless in the face of the militarists who ran Japan. This myth, well bald-faced lie would be a more accurate description, was surprisingly successful. The first major scholarly attack on it was by David Bergamini’s 1200 page Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, published in 1971. Read a review of it here.
Bergamini, a journalist who had been a contributing editor of Life magazine, had been a guest of the Emperor along with his parents in an internment camp in the Philippines during World War II. The occupants of the camp were scheduled for extermination and were saved by the proverbial nick of time arrival of liberating American forces. Bergamini retired from Life to write books. His major project was Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy. Despite its garish title it was an in depth look at pre-war Japan and Hirohito’s involvement in leading the country to war. Bergamini, who was fluent in Japanese, interviewed many of the then living participants in the pre-war Japanese government, as well as examining diaries kept by highly placed figures in the Japanese government and the Imperial court. His conclusion was unequivocal: Hirohito was an ardent expansionist whose goal was Japanese supremacy in Asia, and the decision to launch Japan’s war of conquest was his. After the War a massive attempt to scrub the historical record had been undertaken in order to protect Hirohito.
Subsequent scholarship has supported Bergamini’s thesis, most notably Herbert Bix’s magisterial Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan.
Part of me is completely outraged that Hirohito did not end his life dangling from a noose. I am also outraged by the attempt to do violence to the historical record to whitewash Hirohito’s responsibility for a War that ended so many lives and wreaked so much devastation. However, I then think of my friend Ollie Zivney.
Ollie is a retired Methodist minister. In 45 he was a Navy Corpsman. He had served with the Marines in various tropical paradise locales including Guadalcanal. One of the first of the occupation troops sent to Japan, he helped set up a medical aid station in Hiroshima. After his time in the Pacific Ollie was deeply skeptical that the Japanese would accept the surrender and expected to come under attack. Instead he found the Japanese helpful to a fault, curious about America and deeply appreciative of the medicine and food he helped distribute. Shocked by this he asked the Japanese he encountered if they would have fought if the Emperor had not ordered the surrender. Every man, woman and child he put this question to answered yes, but that once the Emperor ordered the surrender they were happy to be friends with the Americans. Ollie came to love the Japanese people and became deeply appreciative of their culture, and he had no doubt that if MacArthur had moved against Hirohito that the war would have been on again throughout the length and breadth of the Home Islands.
Ollie’s testimony, and my own research, sadly makes me agree with MacArthur’s decision. Perfect justice would have called for Hirohito’s trial and execution, but perfect justice is rarely attained in this vale of tears, especially when the goal is to make certain not to add to a body count that already exceeded thirty million when the War, mercifully, came to a screeching hault 68 years ago this month.
The whole idea of war crimes trials is problematic, since it really boils down to “victors’ justice”. It is one thing to try individuals, such as concentration camp guards, for individual acts and punish them accordingly, even if these trials are before military tribunals. Churchill’s instinct was to summarily shoot captured Nazi leaders, rather than stage the Nuremberg show trials, and he had a point. Nuremberg was compromised from the start by the involvement of the Soviet Union (and Vyshinsky of all people!) and including “waging aggressive war” as a charge against the German leadership was hypocritical to say the least. None of the victorious powers could claim a history of only going to war in self-defence. The USSR had invaded both Poland and Finland in 1939, and neither the South African War of 1899-1902 nor the Spanish-American War of 1898 were morally justifiable, and the same can be said of US invasions of Canada and wars embarked upon by Britain to further her imperial and economic interests.
After the Napoleonic Wars Bonaparte was simply sent into exile, and calls to put the Kaiser on trial after WW1 were quickly stifled when the Dutch (sensibly) refused to release him.
I am not trying to excuse the appalling brutality of the Japanese in the Far East, or their treatment of Allied prisoners-of-war, but to condemn Japanese generals for failing to control their troops when the Allies were doing their best to disrupt command and control is perverse. And don’t overlook the fact that the Americans saw the Japanese as rivals in the Pacific and potential enemies before the rise of “militarism” in Japan, and their attitude was not unaccompanied by a degree of racial prejudice.
If Hirohito could have stopped the war by commanding the war to be stopped, why didn’t he?
>i>A strange fascination for World War II in the Pacific overtakes many Catholic blogs in early August each year,
A “strange fascination” with the atomic bomb drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not the Pacific campaign in general. Unfortunately, that “fascination”, for the most part, does not include an honest attempt at an accurate understanding of the historical circumstances that gave rise to that decision or an honest attempt to apply Catholic moral principles to that fateful event. While I understand and can sympathize with the difficulty in getting one’s mind around the idea of how something so destructive can be morally justified, this does not justify the treatment it has been given in mainly the mainstream Catholic blogosphere.
The idea that we were targeting innocents is proven false by the fact that Japan had completely erased the line between combatant and non combatant by turning the entire country into a military base. Hence, to deliberately target innocents in that circumstance would required weapons technology we do not even have today let alone back in 1945.
In fact, in my opinion (and this is just my opinion) that the only morally licit thing Truman could have done in that situation was to drop those bombs.
The refusal to to do an honest search for the truth on this and some other issues in the orthodox Catholic circles is a stain that will not be washed away by ignoring it and serves to undermine the otherwise good work many of these outlets do.
Hirohito’s actions were not the only thing whitewashed. The refusal of most Japanese today to acknowledge their dark history of this period is a blight. Among many examples, here’s is one I find most shocking. Back in 2005, I took what I call a “pilgrimage to the past” trip to Japan. I was stationed there aboard the USS Dubuque, which was homeported in Sasebo, an hour’s drive north of Nagasaki from Sept. of 1985 to May of 1988. Anyway I was taking a tour of teh Peace Park museum in Nagasaki and had a video timeline of the creation and eventual use of the atomic bomb. Part of this time line was footage of Pearl Harbor and the caption for it read. “The United States declares war on Japan and Germany.” Nothing about the unprovoked attack by Japan. My jaw dropped so hard it about knocked the floor out from under me.
I consider this a blight in large part because I too have an enormous respect for Japanese culture and their people. Some of the greatest kindness I have ever experienced was in Japan. One instance stands out in particular. I was stranded in Fukuoka broke with nowhere to stay for the night. Through I chance encounter, I was taken in by an English speaking Japanese family. They put me up for the night and took me to the MAC terminal the next morning to catch the bus back to Sasebo, where I had two paychecks waiting for me on the ship. The man of the house was a small businessman. I remember him showing me picture of a trip he and his wife took to the U.S. Thet rented an RV travelled throughout the South. He was a big jazz fan and proudly showed off pictures of him with the legendary jazz trumpet player Al Hurt.
Everytime I hear the gospel passage “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” I think of that family. I regret not staying in touch with them.
Another piece of revisionist history I get annoyed with is comparing Obama’s relieving of Gen McChrystal with Truman’s relieving MacArthur. The two aren’t even close. Truman was not only replacing a military commander he was, in effect, deposing a head of state. MacArthur was the de facto Emperor of Japan at the time.
While MacArthur’s career on the battlefield was legendary, (he was every bit the warrior general Patton was), his finest hour occurred off the battlefield in the way he dealt with Japan post WWII. In this light, I would say that how he dealt with the Emperor was closer to perfect justice then what trying him and executing him would have done. A pursuit of justice that creates an even bigger injustice (which an agitation of the Japanese people at that time would have been) is not justice at all.
Of course, this is probably easier to see almost seventy years in teh rear view then it was back then.
I find it amazing that the Japanese people were willing to sacrifice everyone to save one man whom they saw as a God. This is a complete inversion of Christianity, where one man who was God sacrificed himself to save everyone else.
“The United States declares war on Japan and Germany.” The Marshal plan rebuit Japan and Germany.
Mary, declarations of war are no longer permissible under the UN Charter, and as I understand it, the Japanese did issue a formal declaration of war against the USA, although it arrived after their pre-emptive strike on Pearl Harbor. Nations act in their own self-interest; the Marshal Plan was part of the Cold War, despite the fact that it was offered to the Soviet Union who predictably refused it.
However, it is possible to act out of self-interest and yet achieve a wider good; Britain did this in the 19th century and the eradication of slavery (including the Arab slave trade out of eastern Africa which had lasted over a thousand years) is just one of the greatest achievements of the Pax Britannica. Similarly, as a Cold War warrior I can attest to the crucial role of the United States in bringing down the greatest tyranny of the 20th century. No other nation could have done it, and I am still alive as a result of it.
The career of the “jurist” Vyshinsky as a shill for Uncle Joe is amply illustrated in the first volume of the Gulag Archipelago. That this scoundrel who could call on manufactured evidence at will, was ever on the panel at Nuremberg will forever stain whatever “truths” were discovered there.
Early in John Toland’s, The Rising Sun, you get the impression that the emperor was a figurehead used by the militarists to assist in brainwashing the Japanese people into mass-murdering drones. MacA. likely knew he couldn’t rule without the same figurehead.
I think an “insight” into MacArthur’s “soul” may be discerned in his conduct in relation to Gen. Yamashita (who routed him in the Philippines), sepcifically that man’s being hanged for war crimes that he likely had no contol over or even knowledge that they were being perpetrated. This is covered in a recent book on the Bataan Death March, and hellish Japanese POW camps, entitled, Tears in the Dark.
Alternatively, symbolic execution of justice was the only rational choice . . .
Also, the excellent book, Unbroken, provides a vivid account of man’s inhumanity to man. The main war criminal in that book escaped justice.
What happened to Yamashita was a travesty–balanced by the ironic coincidence that MacArthur’s generalship in the Phillipines in 41-42 was also a travesty.
The man’s gigantic ego was bruised, and a lot of people suffered for it, including Wainwright and the soldiers MacArthur left behind.
First, as a Catholic, I oppose the death penalty in each and every situation.
Second, as someone who has studied Japanese history quite a bit, I have to say that the emperor was a powerless figurehead, rather like Queen Elizabeth II, for, essentially, all of recorded Japanese history. While the Meiji restoration supposedly reversed all of that history, in fact it was simply a new group of people in power, only putatively democratic, at least in the beginning, but heavily in thrall to the military. The Emperor supposedly chaired cabinet meetings, but he never spoke and his opinion was never requested. At one point, the Emperor asked “Why do you not speak?” when a cabinet member was asked a question about how they were going to continue to resist the Allies that he could not answer. The cabinet was completely amazed, because most of them had never heard the Emperor’s voice before. Again, a figurehead. It was absolutely unprecedented for the Emperor to declare that the war had to end, that Japan had to surrender and for him to announce it on radio, in order to make the decision irreversible. As much as we Americans would like to think otherwise, contemporaneous documents show that the cabinet was barely aware of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What forced the Emperor to act, despite the contrary intentions of the cabinet, was the Soviet Union’s declaration of war on Japan. (Remember that the Soviet Union had not been at war with Japan, only Germany and its European allies, until August, 1945.) Without that, things would not have been so bad that the cabinet would have to bow to the Emperor’s decision to make the decision, rather than let them do so.
Emperor Hirohito, sometime biologist, was the eminence behind Unit 731, the notorious germ warfare unit that conducted pitiless experiments on the Chinese. Had the general hanged him, it would only be a discharge of natural justice.
Emperor Hirohito could be many things, but not a “powerless figurehad”… As another one who has studied Japanese history quite a bit, I must say that is an stereotype that is already discredited today. It is false that the Emperor’s opinion was never requested… because he expounded his opinions in every preparatory meetings before cabinet meetings or Imperial conferences.
Here is the analysis of Kenneth J. Ruoff, Director of the Center for Japanese Studies, Portland State University:
“If ‘war responsibility’ means participating in the policymaking process that led to the commencement and prosecution of an “aggressive” war (for many Japanese, the key issue was the responsibility for defeat, not complicity in an aggressive war), then there is growing evidence that Emperor Hirohito played a considerable role in this area. Thanks to Herbert Bix’s recent biography of Hirohito, much of this evidence is now available to the English-language reader.”
Ruoff also writes:
“Irokawa Daikichi (1925- ), Awaya Kentaro, and Herbert Bix have interpreted the new documents that provide information on the secret political maneuvering behind the palace gates as showing that is not exceptional for the emperor to exert his authority on a variety of fronts, large and small. Irokawa shows that Hirohito had strong opinions in such areas as diplomacy, war strategy, and personnel and on several occasions exerted influence. In August 1939, the emperor expressly designated two candidates, Umezu Yoshijiro (1882-1949) and Hata Shunroku (1879-1962), for the office of war minister in the Cabinet of Abe Nobuyuki (1875-1953), and Hata was selected. Irokawa wrote: “The emperor… was actively involved in the crucial affairs of state; he certainly was not the passive constitutional monarch that the official scholars (and Hirohito himself, in postwar years) have so convincingly portrayed.” Bix drew similar conclusions from his study of Hirohito’s Monologue.
One of the most surprising revelations of the Monologue was its portrayal of the emperor’s active involvement in war strategy.”
And, even from a critical view towards Bix, Professor Forrest E. Morgan writes:
“Bix rightly dispels the emperor’s popular image as a helpless, symbolic leader, who was a virtual puppet of Imperial Japan’s military oligarchs and unaware of how his government was prosecuting the war. Drawing from previously unexamined documents, he ably demonstrates that the emperor was fully aware of Japan’s political behavior and intimately involved in military planning even at the operational level. Based on Bix’s evidence, it is clear that the emperor was an active participant in Japan’s decision making process; however, Bix overstates that evidence when he protrays Hirohito as the driving force behind those decisions. Japanese decision making was a corporate process, versus the dominant-leader model that Bix depiction implies. Hirohito was not powerless, but he was not omnipotent either. Hirohito was a nationalist with expansionist ambitions, as was nearly every other political actor in Japan’s imperial government…”.
There is considerable controversy around Hirohito among historians, around the exact extent of the Emperor’s accountability for the war itself and the war crimes, but it is clear now that the old stereotype of Hirohito as a “powerless figurehead” is not correct.
Documentaries as “Hirohito’s War” from the series “Secrets of War” or “Emperor Hirohito” (BBC) which can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LDU33-SzQQ are very useful. Read also books as “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (Herbert P. Bix), “Inventing Japan: 1853-1964” (Ian Buruma), “The people’s Emperor: democracy and the Japanese Monarchy: 1945-1995” (Kenneth J. Ruoff), “Hirohito: Behind the Myth” (Edward Behr), “The Age of Hirohito: In Search of Modern Japan” (Daikichi Irokawa) or “Dokugasusen Kankei Shiryō II” (Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Seiya Matsuno).
Hirohito was not a “powerless figurehead”. As “The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia” asserts: “The weight of evidence is that Hirohito was not the pacifist he was depicted to be by postwar apologists. His ambitions were aligned with those of the military…”
Stuart Koehl, who often posts at byzcath.org and The American Spectator, effectively refutes the figurehead idea of Hirohito and the idea that the USSR caused the Japanese to surrender.
It was the Bomb that did it. Hirohito, for all of his crimes, realized what was at stake and pushed for the surrender. MacArthur was pragmatic, as Hirohito deserved the same fate as those tried in Nuremburg.