Название: Emperor Hirohito and the Pacific WarАвтор: Noriko Kawamura
Издательство: University of Washington Press
Год: 2016
Страниц: 315
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf, mobi, epub
Размер: 10.1 MB
This reexamination of the controversial role Emperor Hirohito played during the Pacific War gives particular attention to the question: If the emperor could not stop Japan from going to war with the Allied Powers in 1941, why was he able to play a crucial role in ending the war in 1945? Drawing on previously unavailable primary sources, Noriko Kawamura traces Hirohito actions from the late 1920s to the end of the war, analyzing the role Hirohito played in Japanese expansion. Emperor Hirohito emerges as a conflicted man who struggled throughout the war to deal with the undefined powers bestowed upon him as a monarch, often juggling the contradictory positions and irreconcilable differences advocated by his subordinates. Kawamura shows that he was by no means a pacifist, but neither did he favor the reckless wars advocated by Japanese military leaders.
World War II created many heroes and villains. Emperor Showa, better known in the United States as Emperor Hirohito, has been one of the most controversial figures in the history of the war that Japan waged in Asia and the Pacific.1 Unlike US president Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill, both of whom were elected by their own peoples and held a democratic mandate to defend their countries during wartime, and unlike Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, who emerged from political obscurity to seize dictatorial powers and to wage war, Emperor Hirohito was born to the throne and was trained from childhood to reign as monarch and to preserve the unbroken imperial line. Under the prewar Meiji Constitution of Japan, the emperor was both sovereign of the state and commander in chief of the Japanese imperial forces—but above all, he was the manifestation of divinity and a symbol of the national and cultural identity of Japan. Japan fought the Pacific War to the bitter end in order to preserve its kokutai (national polity), for which the myth of imperial rule served as core.
As told from the United States’ point of view, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and pulled the United States into what Americans call the Pacific War on December 7, 1941, Emperor Hirohito became the country’s public enemy number one. Polls taken between 1943 and 1945 indicated that a third of the US public thought Hirohito should be executed, and even after Japan’s surrender, the US Congress passed a joint resolution demanding that he be tried for war crimes. However, General Douglas MacArthur—Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP)—and his staff wanted to spare the emperor from the war trials and use him for their own political and military expediency. Thus, the American occupiers were interested in finding the answers to one particular question: If the emperor possessed the power to stop the war on August 15, 1945 (as he did through his seidan [sacred imperial decision] to end the war), why did he permit the war to start in the first place?5 Finding the answer to this particular question was vitally important to MacArthur and his staff and reflected their own assumptions and preoccupations.
Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Aftermath of the Paris Peace Conference, 1919–1933
Chapter 2 Crises at Home and Abroad: From the February 26 Incident to the Sino-Japanese War
Chapter 3 The Road to Pearl Harbor
Chapter 4 An Uneasy Commander in Chief
Chapter 5 Imbroglio: Moves to End the War
Chapter 6 The “Sacred Decision” to Surrender
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A well-balanced analysis of the controversial role Emperor Hirohito played during the Pacific War, drawing on previously unavailable primary sources. . . . Kawamura does a fine job of describing Emperor Hirohito's complex positions and his historical situation. --Takeshi Suzuki "Pacific Affairs "
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