Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

  MacArthur confirmed both death sentences and later wrote that “the remaining United States cases of this kind were tried by the International tribunal in Tokyo.” For him there appeared to be little difference between an American military commission and an international war crimes tribunal.5

  I

  Brigadier General Fellers had joined MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command in Australia in late 1943, after having worked for a year in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor of the CIA. Immediately on landing in Japan (in the same plane that carried MacArthur), Fellers went to work to protect Hirohito from the role he had played during and at the end of the war. Fellers’s overriding goals were to confirm the effectiveness of his own wartime propaganda program, and, at the same time, to shield Hirohito from standing trial.

  Fellers conducted private interrogations of about forty Japanese war leaders, including many who would later be charged as the most important Class A war criminals. His interrogations were carried out mainly in visits to Sugamo Prison in Tokyo over a five-month period—September 22, 1945, to March 6, 1946—through two interpreters. Fellers’s activities placed all the major war criminal suspects on alert as to GHQ’s specific concerns, and allowed them to coordinate their stories so that the emperor would be spared from indictment.6 Thus, at the same time the prosecuting attorneys were developing evidence to be used in trying these people, Fellers was inadvertently helping them. Soon the prosecuting attorneys found the war leaders all saying virtually the same thing. The emperor had acted heroically and single-handedly to end the war. This theme (unknown to them) coincided with Fellers’s goal of demonstrating the effectiveness of his own propaganda campaign against Japan.

  Equally helpful to Japan’s wartime leaders in protecting Hirohito were the interviews conducted by civilian and military members of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) between late September and December 1945. The purposes of the Survey were to assess the effectiveness of aerial bombardment on Japan’s decision to surrender, and the impact of the atomic bombs in particular. USSBS members also sought to fathom the workings of Japan’s wartime political system. Needless to say top Japanese political and military leaders, such as Privy Seal Kido; former prime ministers Konoe, Yonai, and Suzuki Kantar; as well as Suzuki’s secretary Sakomizu, Kido’s secretary Matsudaira Yasumasa, and Adm. Takagi Skichi, viewed their interactions with the survey as a way of protecting the kokutai. Extremely cooperative in answering questions, they became the main source of evidence on the surrender process and were able to use their interrogations to shape official American perceptions of Hirohito’s role in ending the war.7

  On the same day Fellers concluded his private interrogations of the indicted, he summoned Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa to his office in the Dai Ichi Life Insurance Building. Yonai had recently served as navy minister in the Higashikuni cabinet and had met MacArthur.8 On March 6, 1946, Yonai and his interpreter, Mizota Shichi, went to Fellers’s office and were told that some Allied countries, particularly the Soviet Union, wanted to punish the emperor as a war criminal:

  To counter this situation, it would be most convenient if the Japanese side could prove to us that the emperor is completely blameless. I think the forthcoming trials offer the best opportunity to do that. Tj, in particular, should be made to bear all responsibility at his trial. In other words, I want you to have Tj say as follows:

  “At the imperial conference prior to the start of the war, I had already decided to push for war even if his majesty the emperor was against going to war with the United States.”9

  Admiral Yonai responded that he certainly agreed. The best way to establish his majesty’s innocence would be to have Tj and Shimada take all responsibility. “However, as far as Shimada is concerned, I am already convinced he is prepared to take full responsibility.”10

  There was a reason for Yonai’s confidence in Admiral Shimada. The Shidehara government had been implementing its own policy of immunizing the emperor from war responsibility and, through Suzuki Tadakatsu, head of the War Termination Liaison Bureau in Yokohama, had already secured Shimada’s consent to take responsibility for the opening of the war. A similar assurance from Tj had apparently not been forthcoming.

  Two weeks later Mizota penned a memorandum concerning a second conversation with Fellers on March 22 in which Fellers said:

  The most influential advocate of un-American thought in the United States is COHEN [sic] (a Jew and a Communist), the top adviser to Secretary of State Byrnes. As I told Yonai…it is extremely disadvantageous to MacArthur’s standing in the United States to put on trial the very emperor who is cooperating with him and facilitating the smooth administration of the occupation. This is the reason for my request…. “I wonder whether what I said to Admiral Yonai the other day has already been conveyed to Tj?”11

  The explicit anti-Semitism of Fellers (like his and MacArthur’s hatred of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Deal, and all liberals), and how he and MacArthur transmitted their bigotry to Japan’s leaders, had not been reflected in the draft version of the new constituion and had no influence on the conversion of the monarchy to “symbol.”12 But MacArthur’s truly extraordinary measures to save Hirohito from trial as a war criminal had a lasting and profoundly distorting impact on Japanese understanding of the lost war.

  Months before the Tokyo tribunal commenced, MacArthur’s highest subordinates were working to attribute ultimate responsibility for Pearl Harbor to Gen. Tj Hideki. So too were Tj’s own army colleagues. Back in September, Tj, on receiving word that his arrest was imminent, had attempted suicide. While he was recovering, his former subordinates had again gotten word to him that he had to live in order to protect the emperor. Tj understood, and wanted to own up to his disgrace by shouldering all responsibility for the defeat. Since his testimony would be vital, either absolving or implicating Hirohito, it could not be left to chance.

  Apparently it was Maj. Gen. Courtney Whitney who first confronted the problem of Tj’s testimony about the emperor’s war responsibility. According to Shiobara Tokisabur, Tj’s defense lawyer, sometime before Tj began giving his pretrial depositions (and probably before Yonai and his interpreter had met Fellers), Whitney had told Yonai that MacArthur and President Truman “wanted to protect the kokutai by making the emperor bear no responsibility.” But there was “considerable opposition” in the United States to doing that. Tj could either answer his American interrogators in a way that encouraged the emperor’s opponents or he could help to control the situation.13 Whitney’s remarks reflected MacArthur’s hypersensitivity to any interference from the United States in the conduct of the occupation, as well as the supreme commander’s determination to use the Tokyo trials as his instrument for waging peace.

  Yonai reported this conversation to lawyer Shiobara, and the latter promised to help Tj plan his defense with American public opinion in mind. Subsequently, both in his depositions and in his court testimony, Tj followed the Japanese government’s official line on the emperor’s role in 1941: namely, that only the advisers to whom the emperor delegated authority bore responsibility for the decisions made then, and “since the highest organs of the state had decided there was no alternative, the emperor had to give his sanction” to war.

  Years afterward, Tj’s defense counselor revealed that at the time Whitney, Yonai, and even the chief prosecutor had been pressuring Tj to testify the way MacArthur wanted, Hirohito had checked up on their progress in a phone call to Prince Higashikuni.14

  II

  A difficult situation had met American chief prosecutor Joseph B. Keenan and his staff when they gathered in Tokyo on December 6 and 7, 1945, to organize the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) and the International Prosecution Section (IPS), two groups that would soon be staffed by judges and prosecutors from eleven nations. GHQ had just gotten around to ordering the Japanese government to preserve official top-secret documents that could have a bearing on war crimes. Since the Occupation was
operating indirectly through the Japanese government, IPS officials were unable to check pertinent ministry records until January 3,1946.15

  More important, Keenan found that MacArthur had been directed by a policy paper sent to him from Washington on September 12, and a Joint Chiefs order based on it of October 6, to draft a charter for an international court and to establish a unified prosecution organ (the IPS). The policy document (SWNCC 57/3) restricted what the IPS could do and reserved to MacArthur alone “the power to reduce, approve, or…alter” any punishments meted out. Its last paragraph, no. 17, instructed him to “take no action against the Emperor as a war criminal” without an explicit directive from Washington, thereby leaving open the possibility of his indictment. The supreme commander was to operate under orders from Washington and at the same time be an international civil servant, the representative of those Allied Powers who had signed the instrument of surrender and would now be asked to send judges and prosecutors. MacArthur’s dual role and the way he played it added to the complexity of the ensuing trial. It blurred the nature of the tribunal’s authority, and made it inevitable that the defense would claim that the Tokyo trial was, de facto, an American proceeding.16

  At the beginning of 1946, the financial resources of the Imperial Household Ministry had been frozen, its staff downsized, and its sources of information curtailed. In order for Hirohito and his advisers to plan effectively for the forthcoming war crimes trials, new information sources had to be tapped. Consequently Matsudaira Yasumasa drew on the expertise of a secret Army Ministry research group that since the surrender was continuing its work but within the legal section of the Demobilization Bureau. Col. Matsutani Makoto, leader of the group, had participated in wartime planning and had served as secretary to Army Ministers Sugiyama and Anami, as well as Prime Minister Suzuki. The colonel had tried unsuccessfully to reach Hirohito, via Kido’s secretary, with the plea that as the war was obviously lost, it had to be ended. Now Matsutani and his group were examining damage-control measures for the forthcoming war crimes ordeal.

  Their work began with a series of secret conferences held on January 3, 4, and 5, 1946, that were attended by elites from the private and imperial universities, the Bank of Tokyo, the Foreign Ministry, Finance Ministry, and Ministry of Commerce and Industry, as well as by Matsudaira, representing Hirohito. Also present and contributing significantly to the conference’s objectivity were Marxist historian Hirano Yoshitar and political scientist Yabe Teiji—the former, Marxist or not, had stoutly supported the War of Greater East Asia, while Yabe was a longtime advocate of Japanese-style fascism. The conferees concluded that during the American occupation, Japan’s politics, economy, and thought would develop steadily and positively for about two years. Debate on the monarchy would gradually intensify in step with Soviet exploitation of ideological confusion.

  Their final report emphasized the need to spread but also control “cooperative democracy” in every area. The moderating assumption was that any real revolution in popular consciousness could be avoided if the emperor were retained as a “centripetal force” and “symbol”—in other words, as a concession to the irrational and traditional aspects of Japanese society. The war crimes trial would be a “political” spectacle, best dealt with from behind the scenes. Friendships with the judges and the lawyers for both the prosecution and the defense should be cultivated. The line for the defense should emphasize the army’s sole responsibility for the war, and no hint of responsibility should be allowed to touch Hirohito. The trial should be used to preserve and defend the state, and to this end individual defendants should be given minor priority.17

  Nevertheless, Hirohito and his aides could not be sure he would escape interrogation either as witness or defendant, so in March 1946, five of his aides helped him to prepare his defense. The Japanese press was then filled with speculation that the war trial indictments would focus mainly on responsibility for spreading the war to the United States and Britain. Thus Hirohito and his aides felt the need to defend mainly on this issue rather than his role in the China war. Questions that MacArthur’s headquarters wanted answered were conveyed to them by the newly appointed liaison officer between the palace and GHQ, Terasaki Hidenari, whose American wife had spent the war years in Japan and was a relative of General Fellers. The emperor’s aides posed these questions to him and took down his responses.

  There were five dictation sessions extending over eight hours. Terasaki then wrote out, in pencil, certain portions of this longer stenographic transcript on the basis of notes compiled and selected largely by Inada Shichi, the director of the Imperial Palace Records Bureau. Terasaki’s account is dated June 1, when the Tokyo trial had been in session for nearly one month. Work on the larger dictated text—originally entitled “The Emperor’s Account of the Secret History of Shwa”—from which Inada made his notes, continued into late July. After that time the text, which Terasaki had no hand in making and may never even have seen, was retitled “Record of the Emperor’s Conversations” [Seidan haichroku].

  The political intention behind the initial “monologue” was first to defend Hirohito from the Tokyo tribunal and second to generate information the Americans could use against those who would actually stand trial for Japan’s war crimes. Hirohito approved of these purposes. He wanted his views clearly conveyed to General Headquarters, but he also wanted to defend General Tj Hideki, whom he knew was being set up to take the fall for him.

  During the first dictation session on March 18, Hirohito called attention to racial tensions in the background to the Pacific War. He began by noting that the Great Powers had rejected “Japan’s call for racial equality, advocated by our representatives at the peace conference following World War I. Everywhere in the world discrimination between yellow and white remained, as in the rejection of immigration to California and the whites-only policy in Australia. These were sufficient grounds for the indignation of the Japanese people.” Hirohito seemed to be criticizing the principle of white supremacy that he believed underlay U.S. Asian policy. He ignored, of course, what Japan’s delegates had really advocated at Versailles: racial equality for Japanese only, not people of color all over the world.

  He then expounded on seven questions that his aides knew were going to be dealt with by the tribunal. He started with an incident about which he and his government had, before the defeat, deliberately misinformed the Japanese people: Chang Tso-lin’s assassination by staff officers of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria and the resignation of the Tanaka Giichi cabinet (1927–29). He spoke next about the London Naval Conference of 1930, the Manchurian Incident of 1931, and the Shanghai Incident of 1932. He continued with the February 26, 1936, incident, the decision to “limit the army and navy ministers to active-duty officers,” and “Peace Negotiations with China and the Tripartite Pact.”18

  At the second session Terasaki informed everyone in the room that General MacArthur had sent a secret telegram to Washington in January exonerating the emperor of war crimes. He probably would not be indicted but could still be called as a witness. The work of preparing to counteract the Tokyo tribunal must continue. That day, March 20, Hirohito answered seven questions addressed to him by his aides concerning the causes of the collapse of the cabinets of Abe and Yonai, the Tripartite Pact, the Imperial Conferences of July 16 and September 6, questions about Tj, and the Pearl Harbor attack plan.19

  During his third session two days later, Hirohito continued expounding on the Tj cabinet, Tj’s efforts to prevent war, the imperial rescript declaring war, and disunity between the army and navy.20 He heaped lavish praise on Tj, calling him “a man of understanding” who “became notorious as a sort of despot because he held too many posts, was too busy to communicate his feelings to subordinates, and made excessive use of the military police.” Hirohito also admitted that he had resisted removing Tj because Tj “had been in contact with people all over Greater East Asia and without him [we] would have lost our ability to control their hearts.”21 The ne
xt two dictation sessions were held on April 8, at which time the five aides again listened to Hirohito’s recollections from afternoon to evening. There was also a sixth dictation session, on April 9, that was not included in the “Monologue.”

  By this time, Hirohito was also preparing for his second meeting with General MacArthur, which he wanted to have before the Tokyo trial opened. A tentative date had been set for the meeting, April 23. Terasaki was to serve as the interpreter. But on the twenty-second, Terasaki had to ask Fellers for a postponement due to the unexpected resignation of the Shidehara cabinet. The cancellation deprived Hirohito of the chance to see MacArthur prior to the trial and to explain in person his purposes during the first twenty years of his reign. In this situation (as NHK documentary writer Higashino Shin hypothesized), Terasaki made available to Fellers his own brief (undated and untitled) summary, in English, of key points from the emperor’s previous dictation sessions. Terasaki had intended to use this material as reference in interpreting for the cancelled meeting. As Fellers was personally duty bound to keep MacArthur informed of precisely such matters, “there is a very strong possibility that MacArthur read the English version.”22 He may also have read Terasaki’s longer version of the “Monologue,” though that document has not, so far, turned up in the papers of MacArthur or other American participants.

  In the longer Japanese version, the emperor addressed thirty topics; the shorter English version contains only ten and puts emphasis on the emperor’s powerlessness, omitting completely his role during the China war. The aim of both documents is clearly to present the argument that Hirohito had not been able to prevent the opening of war, and to explain why he could act independently only when the cabinet was not functioning.