Detail All of Hirohito’s Role

One of the most carefully nurtured myths of the post-World War II era is that Japan’s Emperor Hirohito was little more than a figurehead, a passive front man, for the militarists who waged aggression across Asia in the 1930s and ‘40s. In fact, as historians long ago began to discover, Hirohito was closely involved in the war that was fought in his name and that ended only when he reluctantly decided in August 1945 to accept Allied terms for Japan’s surrender.

The emperor’s intimate wartime role was understood at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Nonetheless, the decision was made in Washington, and strongly endorsed in Tokyo by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the supreme Allied commander in occupied postwar Japan, to keep the emperor on the throne and implicitly absolve him from any war guilt. The United States thus colluded in the fabrication of a myth that many, especially in Japan, believe to this day.

In a book to be published later this month, “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan,” Herbert P. Bix sums up the enduring consequences arising from the cover-up of the emperor’s willing participation in Japan’s brutal expansionism. Hirohito, Bix writes, “became the prime symbol of his people’s repression of their wartime past. For as long as they did not pursue his central role in the war, they did not have to question their own.”

History texts used by generations of Japanese students have provided only a scant and sanitized version of the suffering experienced by the peoples of China, Korea, the Philippines and other countries that fell under Japanese rule. While Japan has officially “regretted” wartime events, it has never officially apologized for the aggression and crimes it committed. The culture of denial that took root in 1945 persists.

Hirohito was not deposed and tried as a war criminal along with other militarists because the United States feared upheaval in Japan if that happened. Early in the occupation, historian John Dower noted last year in “Embracing Defeat,” MacArthur told Washington with typical overstatement that he would need another million occupation troops to keep order if the emperor were removed. Protecting the emperor became central to U.S. policy. MacArthur’s aides colluded with defendants at the war crimes trials to keep Hirohito from being implicated.

Now Bix, Dower and others, including Japanese historians, have cast important new light on this period. But much of what should be known remains locked in U.S. and Japanese archives, shielded by claims of national security. Those claims are no longer tenable, if they ever were. The full story deserves to be revealed, to fill out the historical record and so that Japanese and Americans can learn the sordid truth of what their governments did more than half a century ago.