Public TV’s ‘Hirohito’ Draws Fire

A newsreel from the spring of 1946: “Twenty-eight Japanese war criminals, including former Premier Hideki Tojo, go on trial in Tokyo to answer for the aggressive cruelty which they sponsored. The trial is comparable to that of the Nazi warlords in Nuremberg, and the prisoners are charged with crimes against humanity and peace, and finally with just plain murder.”

Narrator: “ The biggest absentee, of course, was Hirohito himself. . . .”

From “Hirohito: Behind the Myth”

Next week--after the solemnity and pageantry of today’s state funeral for Emperor Hirohito is over, and all the kings, presidents and other leaders from 163 nations, along with the global representation of TV crews, have packed up and gone home--”Hirohito: Behind the Myth” will come noisily to public television.

Such is the content of this controversial “re-examination” of the late Japanese emperor who reigned for more than six decades through the rise of Japanese militarism, World War II, Japan’s postwar recovery and economic expansion, that the BBC withheld its broadcast for more than two weeks after his death on Jan. 7. And PBS is waiting until after the funeral and will do a wrap-around commentary to better balance the production.

Written and narrated by Edward Behr--author of “The Last Emperor,” upon which last year’s Oscar-winning movie about China’s Pu Yi was based--the BBC production gives the strong impression that Hirohito was “fully responsible for the war,” that he “could have called off Pearl Harbor” and that he could well have been put in the dock as a war criminal.

Behr’s 500-page book “Hirohito: Behind the Myth” will be published later this year. The 65-minute program, “Behind the Myth,” will air on KCET-TV Channel 28 Thursday at 7:35 p.m.

At least two specialists on Japan--Edwin O. Reischauer, former Harvard historian and ambassador to Japan from 1961 to 1966, and John Toland, author of the 1970 Pulitzer-winning “The Rising Sun”--say that the program should not be shown because it is severely flawed in content and context.

Other historians have expressed their major criticisms, but still believe it should be broadcast because, 44 years after the end of World War II, it will further understanding of a watershed period of the 20th Century.

Barry Chase, PBS vice president for public-affairs programming, said he thought it was useful to bring the role of Hirohito into question. He also suggests that Behr’s “moderate” interpretation of Hirohito between the two extremes--where wartime propaganda equated him with Hitler, and that of the more recent marine biologist period--will eventually be accepted by history.

But after seeing the final version in November, he said, he decided to put it “into a (discussion) package to permit some sort of extension of the discussion it would prompt.” PBS has arranged to tape on Monday--interspersed with funeral footage--a round-table discussion with Behr; Carol Gluck, professor of history at Columbia University; Akira Iriye, professor of history at the University of Chicago and visiting professor at the University of Hawaii, and CBS correspondent Robert Krulwich.

The film raises questions that have engrossed historians for years and brings to the forefront attitudes about Japan that still prevail in countries like Great Britain where the decision to send Prince Philip to the funeral raised a fury. Behr himself is British.

“My feeling is the emperor should have been tried, from the standpoint of a lawyer,” Robert Donihi, one of the 16 American prosecuting lawyers at the Tokyo trials says toward the end of the program, “that . . . there was evidence enough to proceed to trial against him, and that had he been tried, he would have been convicted, most likely would have been hanged.”

Donihi quickly explains, however, that the prosecutors had no complaint with the 11 involved nations’ decision not to bring Hirohito to trial. (In his memoirs, Gen. Douglas MacArthur wrote that tragic consequences would have followed, “such an unjust action,” including guerrilla warfare and the need for at least 1 million reinforcements.)

Even what to label “Behind the Myth” is at issue. Is it a documentary, as Behr, PBS and others consider it, or a docudrama because, interspersed through Allied and Japanese newsreel footage are scenes of actors who, as in a silent movie, play Hirohito and other key figures behind a shimmering screen? Actors also speak words of dead diary writers.

“So unsound, such bad history,” Reischauer contended in an interview. Considering the kind of “bad” justice meted out at the war-crimes trials, a war criminal charge might have held, Reischauer added, but taking “the same case under more normal circumstances they couldn’t possibly have found him guilty. (Hirohito) really didn’t have any deciding power.”

“Twisted,” Toland said in a separate interview, and “(Japan)-bashing. . . . To me it’s a shocking thing to try and destroy a man’s character. Hirohito’s probably going to be looked upon as one of the best emperors in the business. As far as humanitarianism and democracy, he did not think of himself, he only thought of his people. . . .”

Reischauer, Toland and other historians have already seen a videocassette of “Behind the Myth” courtesy of Boston’s WGBH-TV, the presenting station, or from colleagues.

It is precisely the “myth” of Hirohito, as Behr puts it--of “the peace-loving marine biologist reluctantly forced into war”--that Behr challenges.

“There’s plenty of evidence to show,” Behr says at the top of the broadcast, “that he was neither quite the puppet nor the pacifist that his image-builders have made him out to be.” He also suggests that Hirohito’s main concern was survival.

“It’s a flawed film but a film which deserves an airing,” said John Dower, professor of history and Japanese studies at UC San Diego and author of “War Without Mercy.” “It shouldn’t be a taboo subject anywhere. A lot of the reason the actual role of the emperor is obscured is that the Americans as well as Japanese blocked serious research of this subject. . . . There was , in effect, a cover-up at the end of the war.”

What bothers historians of varying shades of opinion are questions not only of fact, but of context and interpretation. “In history, the interpretation is as important as the facts,” said Gluck of Columbia.

On a point of fact, the program maintains that when the emperor made his surrender broadcast on Aug. 15, 1945, when his voice was heard for the first time asking his people in those now-famous words to “bear the unbearable,” the emperor spoke in a language people didn’t understand, and an Army spokesman had to explain what Hirohito said. “That’s obviously wrong,” said Iriye, “because I was at the time in Japan. I heard it at home on the radio. I was 10 years old. Even a 10-year-old like myself understood part of it, and my mother, who listened too, understood.”

Behr explains at the start of “Behind the Myth” that, while researching the life of Hirohito, he “discovered a wealth of contradictory detail” in Japanese documents and diaries that “had been ignored or perhaps deliberately overlooked.” But historians including Dower maintain that “a lot of the ‘new finds’ are old things,” and Behr “has simply misrepresented the originality of what he is finding.”

“Then why all the fuss?” countered Behr in a recent interview from London. “Why is this film raising such huge controversy by simply excerpting passages from the Sugiyama Memorandum (written by the army chief of staff who killed himself in 1945 and published in 1971) and the (Marquis) Kido diaries?”

What did Hirohito know about Pearl Harbor and when did he know it? “The official Japanese line is that Hirohito had no advance knowledge of Pearl Harbor and was in any case unable to prevent it,” Behr says in his narration. “The facts, as I discovered them, point to a completely different story.”

Yet historians in the United States and Japan have long written about Hirohito’s advance knowledge, experts say. They include Kiyoshe Inoue, professor at Kyoto University and a participant in Behr’s program who wrote the book, “The War Responsibility of the Emperor” in 1975.

At the heart of the Hirohito controversy are questions of his power--and war responsibility. According to many historians, Hirohito, despite the fact that he had had divine status, was a constitutional monarch with limited power.

Marius Jansen, professor of Japanese history at Princeton, considers the program “oversimplified” with one theme, which is “to denigrate the late emperor.” He sees Hirohito “as having a very limited role, largely approving decisions that his government had made, and that’s the way he construed his office. So the question which the film raises--how could Hirohito be so powerful in 1945 (in ending the war) and so weak the rest of the time?--is answered by the fact that in 1945 the government was split down the middle and asked him to make a decision. . . .

“One wishes there were more evidence of (Hirohito’s) opposition to what was done,” Jansen added, “but there was no reason to believe he was in fact personally involved in the conduct of affairs.”

David Titus, professor of government and Japanese politics at Wesleyan and the author of “Palace and Politics in Pre-War Japan,” compares the emperor’s power with that of the Queen of England. “The emperor could only do what the British monarch could do. He had the right to be informed, the right to warn and encourage, and that he did against the war.”

Iriye said, however, that while Hirohito may have indicated his desire for peace, that obviously had not worked. “So I guess my question is: “Might there not have been some other ways in which he might have prevented war against the U.S.?”

“The fact remains,” Iriye said, “the emperor had to sign all those documents, he had to approve these imperial decisions. If he had felt very strongly about something, might he not have spoken up? I also think it’s important to keep in mind that before 1941, there had been a long war with China, and it seems to me that because the war with China had started in 1931, having gone on for some 10 years at some enormous sacrifice on the part of the Chinese, if the emperor had really been concerned with peace and friendship, he might have tried harder to stop the war in China from expanding.”

Iriye faults Behr for “making too much of the emperor’s preoccupation with his own personal survival and that of the emperor institution. He also had in mind the question of what was good for the country.”

Gluck, meanwhile, contends that war responsibility “by definition must be shared. Wars don’t start with one man, not even Hirohito. Because of World War II, in which there were such strong leaders--primarily Hitler but also Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill--Hirohito was included in that company, which was understandable during the war but is not true to the history of the political system in Japan.

“What’s unconscionable about this film is that it too simply ties up the question of war responsibility in one individual package called Hirohito, and that’s bad history.”

Aside from 1930s and 1940s footage of Hirohito on his white horse and shouts of banzai from a frenzied populace, “Hirohito” offers some tantalizing material.

There is the assertion by Behr, which some historians question, that on one occasion his father “got the young Hirohito drunk on sake and on another sent the 11-year-old boy one of his concubines to initiate him sexually.”

And there’s Faubion Bowers, who had been a major on MacArthur’s staff, saying that when Hirohito paid call on the supreme commander’s headquarters in September, 1945, in Tokyo, MacArthur “strode toward him and said, ‘You are very, very welcome, sir.’ And I was astonished because it was the first time I had ever heard MacArthur say sir to anyone.”