Hirohito

Hirohito, known in Japan since his death as Emperor Shōwa, reigned from 1926 to 1989, the longest reign of any Japanese monarch in recorded history. Japan's wars in China and the Pacific were fought in his name, and he presided over the decisions that led to them and, in August 1945, to surrender. After the war he was kept on the throne by the American occupation, recast as a powerless "symbol of the state", and lived to see Japan become one of the world's richest countries. How far he was personally responsible for Japanese aggression and war crimes remains one of the most debated questions in modern Japanese history.

Hirohito was born on 29 April 1901 at the Aoyama Palace in Tokyo, the eldest son of Crown Prince Yoshihito, later Emperor Taishō, and grandson of Emperor Meiji. Following court custom he was raised away from his parents, at first in the household of a retired admiral, and then educated at the Peers' School under General Nogi Maresuke and at a special institute for the crown prince headed by Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō. He developed a lifelong interest in marine biology.

In 1921 he became the first Japanese crown prince to travel abroad, touring Britain and Europe for six months. Because his father's health had collapsed, he was made regent the same year. In 1924 he married Princess Nagako of the Kuni family, and the couple eventually had seven children. On 25 December 1926 his father died and he became emperor, taking the era name Shōwa, "enlightened peace".

Under the Meiji constitution the emperor was sovereign, sacred and supreme commander of the armed forces, but by convention he acted on the advice of ministers and military chiefs rather than issuing orders of his own. The 1930s tested this system. The army in Manchuria staged the Mukden Incident in 1931 and occupied the region without government approval, and young officers assassinated politicians. When rebel troops killed several ministers in Tokyo on 26 February 1936, Hirohito insisted that the uprising be crushed, one of the few occasions on which he openly imposed his will.

In July 1937 the Empire of Japan went to war with China. Hirohito approved the escalation and followed operations closely; an Imperial General Headquarters was set up in the palace. Documents published since the 1980s show that he sanctioned the use of poison gas against Chinese forces on repeated occasions. The massacre at Nanjing in December 1937 was carried out by an army fighting under his command, though there is no evidence that he ordered it.

As relations with the United States, Britain and the Netherlands worsened, the decision for war was taken at imperial conferences in the palace in 1941. On 6 September Hirohito expressed doubts and read a poem by his grandfather favouring peace, but he did not block the plans, and on 1 December he gave formal approval for war. On 8 December, Japan time, Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor, Malaya, Hong Kong and the Philippines, opening the Pacific phase of the Second World War.

Throughout the war Hirohito received detailed briefings, questioned commanders, and at times pressed for offensives or for a decisive victory before any peace talks. By 1945 Japan's cities were being destroyed by American bombing. After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet declaration of war, the government was deadlocked, and on the night of 9–10 August Hirohito broke the deadlock by stating that Japan should accept the Allied terms. His recorded broadcast on 15 August, the first time most Japanese had heard his voice, announced the surrender without using the word, and a group of army officers tried and failed to seize the recording beforehand.

For decades after 1945 the dominant image, promoted by both the Japanese and American governments, was of a peace-loving constitutional monarch manipulated by militarists, whose one free act was to end the war. Since his death, the opening of diaries, memoirs and court records has changed that picture. Historians such as Herbert Bix, whose biography won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, and Japanese scholars including Yoshida Yutaka and Yoshimi Yoshiaki argue that Hirohito was an informed and active participant in war policy who could have exercised more restraint, and who delayed surrender in 1945 partly to protect the monarchy. Others, such as Peter Wetzler and Noriko Kawamura, stress the limits on his power, the consensus-based system and his genuine anxieties about war, while accepting that he shared in its decisions. The current consensus is that he was neither a dictator like Adolf Hitler nor a mere puppet: he was well informed, he approved the major decisions, and he bore significant responsibility for them.

General Douglas MacArthur, who headed the American occupation, judged that the emperor would help Japan accept reform peacefully. Hirohito was not indicted at the Tokyo war crimes trials, and occupation officials and Japanese leaders took care that evidence implicating him was not pursued, a decision criticised then and since. In a statement on 1 January 1946, often called the Humanity Declaration, he denied that the emperor was a living god. The 1947 constitution, drafted under American direction, made him "the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people", with no political powers.

He spent the following years touring the country, presenting a modest, civilian image, and pursued research on hydrozoa, publishing several scientific works. He made state visits to Europe in 1971 and to the United States in 1975, where he met President Gerald Ford. He stopped visiting Yasukuni Shrine after 1975; notes by a palace official published in 2006 suggest he objected to the shrine's enshrinement of convicted war criminals in 1978.

Hirohito died of cancer at the Imperial Palace on 7 January 1989, aged 87, and was succeeded by his son Akihito. His reign spanned militarism, total war, defeat, occupation and the economic miracle of postwar Japan. In Japan his memory remains politically sensitive, and his birthday is now a public holiday, Shōwa Day. In China, Korea and elsewhere in Asia, the fact that he was never held to account is often cited as part of Japan's incomplete reckoning with its wartime past.