Book: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P Bix
Krishna
This is a Pulitzer prize winning book on Japan’s ruler during the Second World War. But the book starts so badly that you wonder ‘This won the Pulitzer?’ Eventually it does gets a lot better. Have patience.
This book describes the machinations of the emperor to take Japan on the warpath. And the whitewash that followed with American connivance after the war, albeit the emperor himself was made powerless as a constitutional and ceremonial monarch.
His grandfather was Musushito, called Meiji or “The Great”. Like the British Royals, he seems to have barely shown affection visibly to his grandchildren. In fact, they grew up in a courtier’s house. The crown prince was sickly all the time.
Hirohito was brought up to believe the supremacy of the throne and how everything in Japan owed to the monarchy. His upbringing reinforced it. It is interesting to see that he got the old Confucian world view and the modern warrior world view together as education. He gets a mixed message of the old Japanese hierarchy where the kings have to be obeyed blindly because they are descended from divinity (Sun) and, often in a conflicting way, modern education as well.
One definite problem with the book is its very slow narration. You suppress a yawn constantly while ploughing through the material.
It is also interesting to know how, after the first World War and the collapse of monarchies everywhere in Europe, Japan also had an anti monarchic feeling and two contrasting impulses within that camp – towards democracy and towards Communism.
His foreign trip and the assassination of the Prime Minister by a worker are described. The material is interesting but the book is boring. A rambling and disinterested style of writing reminds one of the tone and speech of the teacher in Charlie Brown cartoons. This story could have been made so much more interesting.
For instance, the endless discussion on his teachers and what they said is boring as hell. The Chinese possessions of Japan and how the powers tried to carve it up after World War I is the only interesting piece in this section of the book.
The very detailed administrative listing of where Hirohito went, what he studied, who said what to him, how they viewed the country around them is told in a very tedious way, with not an iota of excitement in many cases. Even the War of Independence of America is told in a fabulously great style in 1776 (reviewed earlier). Imagine what this story could have been, if the author had not decided to quote chronicles in what looks like a laundry list fashion!
The book picks up when they show how clueless Hirohito’s father was and how they tried to whitewash him straight out of history (Meiji and then Hirohito is the preferred version) and how Korea, a colony of Japan then, reacted to the ‘divine emperor’, as presented by the government propaganda, ascending to the throne. Also the descriptions of how uncharismatic Hirohito himself was, according to the author, are interesting. The Manchurian fiasco where the army starts to defy the parliament and the emperor himself and Hirohito’s weak response to it are both interesting, in that it sets the stage to understand Japan’s increasingly militaristic attitude before the World War II time.
In addition, this helps understand how Japan ended up against the Allies and in the Axis group.
What is interesting is how Japan occupied parts of China as late as the 1930s and even considered China not as a country but an agglomeration of territories and assumed the right to reorganize the territories as Japan wished, taking unto itself any parts it deemed fit.
The book gets better when the war looms. The expansionist military and the emperor produced a philosophy that predicates absolute obedience of all subjects to the emperor, sacrificing their “small ego”. The emperor is divine, all knowing and benevolent and would show “all nations their proper place”. You realize that the doctrine was frighteningly close to both the fascist philosophy of world domination under a powerful ruler towards a purist goal and traces of the Pol Pot philosophy of sacrificing every need of the people and, if required, the people themselves to the cause determined by the rulers as suitable for Japan, “the nation superior to all other nations on earth”.
Another place where the book gets very interesting is in the descriptions of the Japanese army’s atrocities and the rape of Nanking, and how everyone in the government were aware of it but did nothing about it. Hirohito later denied being briefed about it at all but the author presents compelling, though circumstantial evidence about how this is highly improbable.
In addition, we see that, after making an anti-communist pact with Japan in 1936, Nazi Germany blithely turned around and made a nonaggression pact in 1939 with Russia, completely contravening the earlier pact with Japan! And we all know what happened to that pact with Russia only a few years later.
An interesting tidbit : General Abe, a forefather of the current Prime Minister of Japan, was a PM at the height of the Japan’s military muscle flexing!
Then come the atrocities which the author lists as sanctioned by Hirohito including large scale annihilation of Chinese civilians and use of chemical and even biological weapons. It was a shocking waste of lives on a massive scale.
And the plans to just take over the Dutch and British colonies in Asia once the Germans won over the British in Europe make a chilling read. The circumstances where Japan pushed war with the US and England, and also treacherously planning to backstab the Soviet Union with whom they too entered a non-aggression pact are all interesting. Hirohito takes the driver’s seat, orchestrates the now infamous Pearl Harbour attack and aligns his country firmly with the Axis powers.
His obstinate refusal to accept the fact of certain defeat and ordering all Japanese to fight and die rather than surrender are all vividly brought out. He ignored many occasions where he could have sought peace and even after the atom bombs destroyed two cities, was engrossed with rescuing the symbols of his power (mirror, a curved jewel and a sword) by bringing them into the palace near his person.
The whitewashing of the Emperor’s role after the defeat is interesting, as are the efforts to preserve the racial purity of Japanese from violent attacks by the “sex starved and frenzied” Allied soldiers by offering them all the prostitutes (volunteered from Japanese women) they needed.
The whitewashing of Hirohito’s role in the war is beautifully explained and we understand how it suited McArthur, the general overseeing Japan’s transformations and the conservative elite of Japan themselves. The transformation of the Emperor as a figurehead despite his desire to play the absolute monarch even after the war is well told.
We understand the current controversy over the Yakusuni Shrine and the visits of the LDP Prime Ministers in cotext. The LDP is like the “whigs” who supported continued UK rule in USA and the DPJ are the leftist and anti-monarchist group that morphed into libertarians. The ancient custom of emperor worship did not really go away easily and the easing out of the emperor from his political role was a struggle with many politicians and a significant section of the older people being against the diminution of the emperor’s role.
The end of the book spells it all out for you, including Hirohito’s refusal to quietly go into the ceremonial role right up to the very end.
An interesting mix of boring and absorbing portions, this book gets a 6/10 from me.
- – Krishna