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 depicts 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 late friend Ollie Zivney.
Ollie was 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 halt 76 years ago this month.
Not buying.
While I don’t like lies, either, the truth is still there to be found– and to not just abandon the role of proud warrior, but to publicly display that you were NEVER a warrior, that you were weak, and helpless, and controlled by those who were beaten by the Americans….
That’s a different kind of death.
It’s a destroying of the offender that functioned to repair some of the harm done, instead of only punishing the offender.
Especially given the Japanese idea that it is better to die than to live with dishonor? And their bar for “dishonor” is hilariously low? And to pull this off, Hirohito had to live. And publicly reject the very idea of Japan being a superior force that not just could but should be in control?
It’s as if Hitler had lived through WWII, and worked the rest of his life in a nursing home for disabled Jews.
Autocorrupt bites. That was hellacious, not “hilarious.” There’s nothing amusing about it.
“I believe that most Americans view with discomfort the war trials which have just been concluded in Germany and are proceeding in Japan. They violate that fundamental principle of American law that a man cannot be tried under an ex post facto statute.
The trial of the vanquished by the victors cannot be impartial, no matter how it is hedged about with the forms of justice. I question whether the hanging of those who, however despicable, were the leaders of the German people will ever discourage the making of aggressive war, for no one makes aggressive war unless he expects to win. About this whole judgment there is the spirit of vengeance, and vengeance is seldom justice. The hanging of the 11 men convicted will be a blot on the American record which we shall long regret.
In these trials we have accepted the Russian idea of the purpose of trials – government policy and not justice – with little relation to Anglo-Saxon heritage. By clothing policy in the forms of legal procedure, we may discredit the whole idea of justice in Europe for years to come.
In the last analysis, even at the end of a frightful war, we should view the future with more hope if even our enemies believed that we had treated them justly in our English-speaking concept of law, in the provision of relief and in the final disposal of territory. I pray that we do not repeat this procedure in Japan, where the justification on grounds of vengeance is much less than in Germany.”
– From a speech by Senator Robert Taft, at Kenyon College, condemning the war crimes trials of Axis leaders, as being against the principles of Anglo-American law (October 5, 1946)
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classic-podium-the-trial-of-the-vanquished-1077068.html
There are three videos on YouTube covering the situation in Japan. The YouTube channel Military History Visualized has a long interesting interview of D.M. Giangreco on the Invasion of Japan, Lend Lease and many more topics. It is titled “D.M. Giangreco on the Invasion of Japan, Lend Lease & much more”
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It has a list of topics and timestamps. He brings up logistics. He says that the Japanese military had a strategy of maximum bloodletting to stretch out the war. He said that the emperor had to send out personal envoys to deliver the surrender instructions to forces out in the field to insure compliance. He said that the US didn’t take Berlin because the loss estimate for Berlin would have been 100,000 troops that were needed for the Pacific Theater and disrupt the European Theater as well. He claims that it was understood that the Potsdam Declaration was directed solely against the military and not the emperor. He addresses the pluses and minuses of alternative history. He said that some of the alternative histories ignore the logistics needed to support alternative scenarios. Mark Felton Productions has an interesting video on YouTube about the atomic bombings of Japan titled: “Third Atomic Bomb Attack – Japan 1945.”
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He goes into the military situation on the Japanese homeland. He also covers the intransigence of the Japanese government to surrender. Even after the Emperor had decided to surrender there was an attempted military coup to stop the surrender and continue the war. He covers the post war period in Japan where tensions were still high. A third video titled “Douglas MacArthur And Japan – The First Eight Weeks” is a presentation by Christopher L. Kolakowski, Director of the MacArthur Memorial about the eight weeks from mid-August to mid-October 1945.
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The videos do support many of the assertions in this article.
Seems to me (feeble memories) that much of the decision was to use Japan as “a barrier” to an encroaching USSR. Just a handful of years later (1953) the kimono’s were already exchanged for bobby sox and long skirts as the westernization of Japan became a reality. Killing the emperor might have altered that key reality.
The only thing worse than letting Hirohito skate was executing him.
And something to consider: executing a head of state for launching a war–even a brutal one like Imperial Japan’s–would have been unique.
Then again, WWII was the greatest slaughter in history. It’s probably just as well for Hirohito that Hitler committed suicide. The pressure to execute Hirohito alongside the paperhanger would have been hard to resist.
As it was, I think Don L’s point about the Soviets and the Cold War was the deciding factor. It forced some difficult compromises and looking away from the actual record to face the postwar reality. See also Franz Halder and the “myth of the clean Wehrmacht.”
Full disclosure: My late wife and her family were internal refugees during the war and spent three years in the jungles of Mindanao to escape a Japanese death sentence. I regard the sparing of Hirohito as a most distasteful example of realpolitik but essentially necessary. As a matter of fact, the Meiji Restoration of 1868, intentionally or otherwise, insulated the throne from political decisions in such a manner as to provide personal deniability for the emperor. He, of course, had personal opinions but like the British Monarchy which it was patterned after, did not allow for spoken comments on policies themselves. For those distressed by Hirohito’s seeming lack of accountability, it should be noted that he was, as we will be, subjected to the highest level of accounting.
I have always thought the war crimes trial were wrong in regards to acts the combatants did prior to war internally and the acts of war itself. Some atrocities, such as those done to the Jews were in fact legal. Very, very wrong and (they will suffer for eternally for it) but are probably no different than abortion in our country. However, violating international conventions, which they agree to abide, were crimes in which many people could and should be tried. I think the ancient practice of bringing the defeated generals and kings back in chains to be executed would have been a simple solution and more honest one without the falsity of a courtroom trial. Would that have caused problems? Yes, but war is never easy.
Some atrocities, such as those done to the Jews were in fact legal.
No they were not. The Germans took pains to hide the death camps, and there was never any German legislation, or what passed for legislation in the Third Reich, calling for the “legal” extermination of the Jews or any other ethnic groups.
I was gravely mistaken. Thanks for the correction!
To Donald Link.
My mother’s family were also POWs in the Philippines. Look for my mothers older sister, Mary Ann Ladic (now Kouky) in the Lincoln Library. Because of that I grew up with a bit of animosity toward the Japanese. My wife’s mother married a Japanese man, a Hiroshima survivor and an American immigrant. He was a very good loved man. Strange what life puts in front of you.