Hirohito: The Trial of The Emperor

By Jean Sénat Fleury and TBD

Hirohito: The Trial of the Emperor is a book of information and training, a reference book that should be read as an educational tool on Japan’s war in South East Asia and the Pacific. The book opens the debate on Hirohito’s responsibility during World War II with a posthumous trial against the Japanese emperor before the Pe

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lettra Press LLC
• Release date: Mar 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781951913304

Jean Sénat Fleury

Judge, teacher, and writer, Jean Sénat Fleury lives in Boston, Massachusetts. Graduated at the Magistrate and Education Training Program in Paris and Bordeaux (France), he has been a trainer at the National Police Academy (1995-1996) in Haiti, and director of studies at the Magistrate school in Pétion-Ville (2000-2004). He is the author Hirohito: The Trial of the Emperor Hirohito Jean Sénat Fleury of several books: Jean-Jacques Dessalines: Words Beyond the Grave, Toussaint Louverture: The Trial of the Slave Trafficking, Adolf Hitler: Trial in Absentia in Nuremberg, The Trial of Osama Bin Laden. Mr. Fleury immigrated to the United States in 2007. He obtained a master's degree in public administration and another degree in political science at Suffolk University. In 2014, he became director of the Caribbean Arts Gallery and a charitable organization called Art-For-Change

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Hirohito

This book is written to provide information and motivation to readers. Its purpose is not to render any type of psychological, legal, or professional advice of any kind. The content is the sole opinion and expression of the author, and not necessarily that of the publisher.

Copyright © 2020 by Jean Sénat Fleury.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or distributed in any form by any means, including, but not limited to, recording, photocopying, or taking screenshots of parts of the book, without prior written permission from the author or the publisher. Brief quotations for noncommercial purposes, such as book reviews, permitted by Fair Use of the U.S. Copyright Law, are allowed without written permissions, as long as such quotations do not cause damage to the book’s commercial value. For permissions, write to the publisher, whose address is stated below.

Printed in the United States of America.

ISBN 978-1-951913-29-8 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-951913-30-4 (Digital)

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Contents

Foreword

Prologue

Chapter 1 The Second World War: Political and Economic Context

Japan: The Road to War

The Korean Occupation

War in the Pacific

Japan and Germany

The Attack on Pearl Harbor

The Japanese Advance in the Pacific

Report on the Second World War

The Consequences of the War

Chapter 2 The International Military Tribunal for the Far East

The Establishment of the Tribunal

The Composition of the Court

Preparing for Trial

The Verdict

Trial Timeline

The Condemned

Chapter 3 Reflection on the Tokyo Trial

Chapter 4 The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal Special Session to Trial Hirohito

The Open Session

President’s Speech

The Rapporteur

Reference Legal Texts

Potsdam’s Statement

War Crimes

Bataan’s Death March

Crimes Against Humanity

Japanese Atrocities: Unit 731

The Use of Women as Sex Slaves

The Drug Trafficking

The Imperial Family

Officers and Dignitaries

The Great Absent

Situation Postwar

Chapter 5 The Verdict

The Reprise of the Audience

The Court

On the Notion of Crime against Peace

On War Crimes

On the Notion of Crime against Humanity

The Utilization of the Chemical Weapons

Drug Trafficking

Unit Crimes 731

Recognizes

Appendices

Comfort Women

Hirohito, Hostage or Puppet?

Potsdam Declaration

Japan Empire Capitulation Speech

Japan Capitulations Acts

Conventions

Nuremberg Trial and Tokyo Trial

The Tokyo Trial

Bibliography

About the Author

Revisiting history: it is not the privilege of a few or a negotiable right poorly granted or questioned by the State. It is, first of all, a necessity. It is also the inescapable current brought by the evolutionary points of view of the successive generations. It is, at the same time, an indispensable step if one wants to keep alive the memory of the People.

– Jules Roy, The Trial of Marshal Pétain

As for the people I am accusing, I do not know them, I have never seen them, I have no rancor or hatred against them. They are for me only entities, spirits of social malfeasance. And the act I am doing here is only a revolutionary way to hasten the explosion of truth and justice.

I have only one passion, that of light, in the name of humanity that has suffered so much and who has the right to happiness. My fiery protest is only the cry of my soul. So, let’s dare translate me into the Assize Court and let the investigation take place! I wait.

– Emile Zola, I accuse!

In memory of several million people, soldiers, and civilians, that the troops of the Japanese Army had murdered during the first period of the twentieth century, especially during the Nanking Massacre, where about 250,000 people were killed by the Japanese Imperial Army and the Japanese Imperial Navy.

In memory of the victims of Unit 731, Pearl Harbor, the death march of Bataan, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, I write this book, with the hope that the story will open the eyes of the present generation on the atrocities of war and make our leaders aware of the value of peace in the world.

Foreword

On January 7, 1989, Hirohito’s death marked the end of his sixty-three-year reign, the longest and most controversial reign in Japan’s history after a period of turmoil and major change. The emperor’s death also fueled a long and controversial debate about his role and responsibility, real or perceived, in Japan’s wars in the Pacific between 1868 and 1945. The literature portrays Hirohito’s image as that of a constitutional monarch who passively endorsed the entry into war in order not to go against the majority opinion, in favor of wars within his government.

The subject is still sensitive in Japan, even if today’s youth deliberately prefer to participate keenly in the Reiwa Era initiated in 2019, a hopeful era with the promise of harmony among all beings. In fact, the really expected response to the controversy is Why, after the Second World War, did the emperor escape the lawsuit brought by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East against the Japanese warlords? But then, what was he guilty of? No clear answer emerges, as the analyses differ among historians, intellectuals, and the official press, including those of the Imperial Household Agency.

In his book, Hirohito: The Trial of the Emperor, Jean Sénat Fleury invites the reader to the fictitious trial of the fallen emperor, a trial claimed without success by most Western nations after the war. However, in order to fully understand the contours of Hirohito’s history and personality, a contextual reminder is required.

A Look Back at History

On the death of his father in 1926, Hirohito became, at the age of twenty-five, the 124th emperor of Japan, a direct descendant of Amaterasu, the sun goddess. His accession to the throne marked Japan’s entry into the Shōwa Era, meaning Radiant Peace. In fact, in his coronation speech in 1928, the emperor effectively announced his intention to cultivate the friendship of all nations for the maintenance of world peace. That same day, Hirohito leaves the world of the living. And according to a thousand-year-old tradition, he became a monarch of divine essence, whose article 3 of the Constitution of February 11, 1889, enshrines the "sacred and inviolable" character of his person.

According to the imperial custom, the young prince was not brought up to court. It is entrusted to the family of Admiral Count Kawamura. From an early age, the illustrious warrior of military history, Gen. Nogi Maresuke, a hero of the Sino-Japanese War, and the war with Russia, was one of his tutors. In fact, this military education fits very well with the context. Indeed, the conquering Japan won a series of military victories. First against China (1894–1895), Russia (1904–1905), and Korea, which Japan colonized in 1895 before annexing it permanently in 1910. At the age of eleven, during the Meiji Era, Hirohito was crown prince upon the death of his grandfather, then symbolically elevated to the ranks of second army lieutenant and marine teacher in 1912.

Educated from an early age to military principles, Shintoism, and respect for the divine character of its imperial condition, the Daigensui, Hirohito, at the head of an increasingly powerful Japanese army drove his country to war and expansionism. As a legacy of his military training, it is better understood that his closest advisers, were mainly from the military background: Makino Nobuaki (1861–1949), Saionji Kinmochi (1849–1940), and Kido Kōichi (1889–1977). These officials all belong to the executive Branch, which includes, among others, the army and navy, which could, independently, enter into treaties with foreign nations, declare war, or recruit military and civilian officials.

The Emperor’s Responsibility

The institutional characteristic of imperial Japan makes it a monarchical constitution headed by an emperor, having to act as a constitutional monarch whose decision is guided by his advisers. In addition to being the ruler of a state and the commander-in-chief of the Japanese Imperial Forces, his divine status made him, and will make him until his death, the symbol of the state, cultural identity, and unity of the Japanese people.

The events that marked Japan’s entry into World War II began in 1931 with the conquest of China and culminated in 1941 when Japan’s surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor.

The question of the emperor’s responsibility in Japan’s war engagement is not historically decided, although he is the supreme commander of the army and navy under the Meiji Constitution.

For some historians, although reluctant to see Japan enter World War II, Hirohito seems to have rejoiced at the success of the Pearl Harbor offensive in December 1941 and the victories that followed in Southeast Asia.

Conversely, another stream of thought claimed that the emperor was extremely involved in the preparation of this attack.

In order to definitively absolve Hirohito of any possibility of trial, some constitutionalists have advanced the idea that the emperor be legally absolved of liability because of his divine essence, so he could not be prosecuted in the sense of article 3 of the 1928 constitution.

Finally, still others have speculated that it may have been manipulated by politicians and the military during this period. However, this assumption seems to be contradicted by Hirohito’s long eight-hour radio monologue in 1945. During this broadcast, the emperor recalled the events that took place since the assassination of Chang Zolin, the Manchurian War in 1928 until the end of the Pacific War on August 1945, thus confirming his knowledge of the decisions taken by the decision-makers in national strategies. In support of this hypothesis, former ambassadors explained that although he was recognized as an all-powerful sacred being, the emperor’s power was, in fact, limited by ministers and the military.

Japan’s Overwhelming Humiliation

In response to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Tokyo was bombed by the U.S. Army on March 1945. Then it was the turn of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be completely destroyed on August 6 and 9 of the same year.

The unimaginable, advocated by the Bushido ethic becomes inescapable. The defeat of the Japanese army is already in effect.

A sacrifice is required. The emperor resigned himself to peace by asking his people to accept the unacceptable by announcing his desire to end the war. It is not a question of capitulation, mentally and officially. However, Japan’s best interests impose that they accept the unacceptable humiliation, any shame in the eyes of the world.

We must try to imagine the inner torments of this High Monarch in the certainty of his deity, his absolute authority, in the face of a dramatic reality with catastrophic long-term consequences, both internally and internationally.

After the surrender of Japan, the emperor publicly renounced his divine essence. The country, on the other hand, has renounced war and militarization. The American occupier drafted a new constitution in 1946 and, under article 9, the emperor owes his duties to the will of the people in whom sovereign power resides.

With no political future at the national level, Hirohito turned to international politics. It would seem that the dramatic consequences of the war in Japan have long haunted him, and that he has also long sought to redeem himself in the eyes of his people. Three times he unsuccessfully offered to abdicate. His travels abroad to promote Japan seem to have been an opportunity for him to redeem himself, to express his personal regrets, if not to explain himself.

Red Scare

The 1940s, it should be remembered, were also in the United States, the germination years of McCarthyism, the Red Scare. They fear more than any of the expansion of Communism, not only on their territory, but also, in the rest of the world over which they intend to exercise their supremacy. After Japan renounced the war, the Americans resisted international pressure and refused to bring Hirohito before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. The emperor is kept at the head of the country where he will be most useful to prevent the expansion of Communism in the area, and to guarantee the unity of the people and the stability of an occupied Japan.

Conclusion

The structure of the Meiji Constitution and the de facto divine status inherited by birth placed Hirohito at the top of the state. He is the supreme commander of the army and navy, who reports to the executive branch of power, which has the broadest autonomy. Although he has to worry about politics, the emperor does not always control the final decisions made on his behalf. When its approval is sought, it respects only the constitutional formalism imposed, and its refusal, generally expressed by silence, is considered in certain circumstances as an implicit approval. However, although some enjoy autonomy, including the executive branch, all branches of government, including the Diet and the cabinet, had to refer it first to the emperor. The army and navy, under crucial circumstances, have taken its lack of response for implicit approval of the strategies at work.

So, what was Hirohito guilty of having earned him a trial? Historians have given us to see a being with an ambiguous personality, full of contradictions. No doubt the result of the intimate combination among his military education, his divine essence, the weight of Shintoism, and the ethics of the Bushido. Has he escaped the International Military Tribunal for the Far East? Geopolitics or realpolitik. This fictitious trial attempts to answer this question.

Charley G. Granvorka,

August 2019

Prologue

Famous or notorious, several criminals in the history who have escaped justice passed judgment in my books. This is my goal when I write fictitious trials in which conflicting proceedings are opened in an invented court and the whole thing is played as if the hearing is real. I opened the series in Toussaint Louverture: The Trial of the Slave Trafficking. I tried Napoleon Bonaparte and several other dignitaries of the French monarchy. I wrote several months later two historical novels: Adolf Hitler: Trial in Absentia in Nuremberg and The Trial of Osama bin Laden. In this new book, Hirohito: The Trial of the Emperor, I prosecute Hirohito, the emperor of Japan who had a large part of responsibility in the Pacific War during the Second World War.

Inventing the trial of Hirohito, the emperor who had evaded justice for war crimes committed under his empire during the period of Japanese imperialism mainly during the first part of the Shōwa Era, is a way to honor the memory of several million people, soldiers, and civilians, that the military of the Japanese army had murdered during the Second World War.

Why a trial…?

Crown prince of his father, Taishō Yoshihito, Hirohito ascended the throne in 1926 after five years in the regency. Emperor with a divine power, according to article 1 of the Imperial Constitution, he chose the name Shōwa to call his regime. During the first part of his reign, he gave unconditional support to the expansionist policy of the military clan, and gave his approval to the conquest of Manchuria (1931), the military intervention in China (1932), and the withdrawal of Japan from the League of Nations (1933). As head of the Imperial Army, he led Japan into war in 1941. After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Declaration of War by the Soviet Union against Japan, Hirohito ended the war by accepting the Potsdam Proclamation of July 26, 1945. The surrender of Japan was announced by Hirohito on August 15, and formally signed on September 2, 1945.

The expansionist policy practiced by Japan during the first part of the Shōwa regime (1931-1945) led to the alliance with Germany. Dissatisfied with the treatment of the Japanese empire by the Western powers during the Treaty of Versailles, Japan left the SDN in 1933. Japanese politicians had established an ideology based on the supremacy of the Japanese race and its right to dominate Asia. This racist ideology presented Japan as the center of the world and sat on the imperial institution of the emperor, being divine and descended from the goddess Amaterasu Omikani. To establish the dictatorship and turn Japan toward a policy of expansionism, urgent measures were adopted. On November 27, 1929, Hirohito approved Adm. Katō Kanji’s report for the construction of a navy with the capacity to compete with the U.S. Army Navy in the Pacific.

On February 25, 1933, the Japanese began the Jehol campaign and occupied all of the provinces of Manchuria. They continued to advance in Hopei in April, and negotiated in May the creation of a demilitarized zone in the North of this region. Japanese forces then took control of the Great Wall, while maintaining garrisons around Tien-Tsin. On December 29, 1934, Japan denounced the London agreements on the reduction of naval armaments. On January 15, 1936, Japan left the Naval Disarmament Conference held in London because its interlocutors refused it parity with the United States.

As head of the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy, Hirohito engaged Japan in the Second World war in 1941. After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Soviet Union’s declaration of war against its empire, on August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered. On September 2, 1945, aboard the Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Gen. Yoshijirō Umezu signed capitulation to Gen. Douglas MacArthur by unconditionally accepting the Potsdam Proclamation of July 26, 1945.

Despite increasingly concordant information that confirmed Hirohito’s active role during the war, the question of his responsibility for the crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific continued to the subject until today of great debates among historians. What role did Hirohito play during the Second World War? For some scholars and historians, the emperor reigned over Japan in accordance with Article 1 of the 1889 Constitution. He was certainly, according to the Meiji Constitution, the supreme commander of the Army and Navy, but manipulated by the military, did he not exercise power? For others, on the other hand, Hirohito carefully and thoughtfully supervised the affairs of the state? He was deeply involved in the governance of the country, and in the strategic plans of the army.

Japanese historian Awaya Kentaro answered this question very well. According to him, Hirohito not only gave advice in all important decisions of the government and the army, but he closely supervised his orders to be sure they have been respected. He favored the coming to power of trusted men, Kido, Konoe and Tōjō, and he followed daily through the emissaries – Kawai, Makino, Chichibu, Chinda, Ichiki – diplomatic, political, and military affairs. His intervention to end the war despite threats of rebellion from a group of fascists in the military, such as, Kosono, Ugaki, Hatanaka, Haga, Mori, Anami, Shiizaki, Ida, Takeshida, Toyoda, Onishi, Arao, Koga, Ishihara, Mizutani, suggested that he could have changed the course of events sooner if he had the will, and he could have avoided the destruction of several Japanese cities, including Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, by the American Air Force.

In writings and memoirs that cover his degree of maturity as commander-in-Chief of the Army, the emperor’s closest advisers namely, Baron Harada Kumao, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, and Marquis Kōichi Kido, in contrast to the opinion of the venerable Saionji Kinmochi, said they admired the will of the young monarch who decided to play an important role in the political life of the Japanese empire, especially in the control of the army.

Unlike his father, Yoshihito Taishō, known as an erased monarch, Hirohito gave the last words in the major political decisions that engaged Japan. The emergence of documents long buried in the personal papers of one of his assistants, Terasaki Hidenari, published in 1990 by his daughter under the title The Monologues of the Emperor, confirmed with more veracity the important role that Hirohito played during the war. In these documents, we found the answers that he made in 1946 to the questions of his five closest advisers who prepared him in case that he was summoned as a witness by the International Tribunal for the Judgment of Japanese War Criminals in Tokyo. This plan would help him to reject any personal responsibility in the war against China and in the attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Hirohito, contrary to what was said, was not a puppet.

In the Meiji Constitution of 1889, the emperor is sovereign and he is at the center of the legitimacy of the state. During the first part of the Shōwa era, according to the Meiji Constitution, Hirohito exercised the Supreme Command of the Army and Navy (Article 11). He was legally supreme commander of the imperial headquarters, and since 1937, he participated in all military decisions that were made.

According to the Sugiyama memo, the diaries of Fumimaro Konoe, and Kōichi Kido, during the Second World War, Hirohito had many informal meetings with his chief of staff and his ministers. These documents showed that he was kept informed of all military operations and frequently he asked senior management several questions about the deployment of troops, and sometimes, he gave his opinion on how to conduct the war. For example, in July 1937, he signed the imperial decree that allowed Japan to go to war against China. On September 27, 1940, he approved the agreement of the Japanese government with Rome and Berlin, the Tripartite Pact. Immediately after, with his consent, Japan invaded Indochina in September 1940. US Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who has pursued a dual policy since 1939, issued an embargo on oil deliveries to Tokyo. Hirohito, sulking the American threats that demanded of Japan the withdrawal of its troops in China, and other occupied territories in South-East Asia and the Pacific, signed on behalf of the Japanese people, a neutrality agreement with the Soviet Union on April 13, 1941, Hirohito endorsed then the decision of the High Staff of the Army and Navy for the invasion of Malaysia and the Philippines.

On October 17, 1941, Hideki Tōjō replaced Fumimaro Konoe as Prime Minister. Two months after the new government took office, the Pearl Harbor attack was planned. It was approved by Hirohito and executed to destroy the US fleet in the Pacific. The day after the attack, on December 8, 1941, Roosevelt declared war on Japan. Three days later, Hitler, in support of the Japanese empire, declared war against the United States.

According to historians Yoshiaki Yoshimi, professor of modern Japanese history at Chuo University in Tokyo, and Seiya Matsuno, the editor of a report published in the Japanese press in July 2019, Hirohito authorized by specific orders, forwarded to the head of state-Major of the army, Prince Kan’in Kotohito and Gen. Hajime Sugiyama, the use of chemical weapons against civilians and Chinese soldiers. He approved the use of toxic gases several times during the Wuhan invasion in 1938. The use of the same weapons was also allowed during the Changde invasion.

According to historians, Akira Fujiwara and Akira Yamada, Hirohito has made direct interventions in several military operations. For example, he pressed Sugiyama several times, from January to February 1942, to increase the number of Japanese troops in the Philippines. During the same period, he ordered the general to launch an attack on Bataan. In August 1943, he expressed his anger at Sugiyama who was unable to stop the American advance on the Solomon Islands, and asked him to consider other places to attack.

Most of Hirohito’s imperial interventions were made by direct orders, such as the crushing of the rebellion during the February 26 incident. The Japanese archives, updated since the nineties, demonstrated that indeed, each order to use chemical weapons must receive the express approval of the emperor. They also showed that the decision to suspend the international rights of civilians was indeed authorized by a specific Hirohito directive to Prince Kan’in in August 1937.

Hirohito: An ambiguous character

Hirohito, under the name the war was fought, was preserved from the indictment, and the royal family, such as Prince Chichibu, Prince Asaka, Prince Takeda, and Prince Higashikuni, was exonerated in the proceedings. Only Prince Konoe and the guard of the Seals Kido, were arrested during the trial. The issue has been the subject of much debate to date. What was Hirohito’s exact role in Japan’s war in the Pacific and Southeast Asia? Was the emperor only the providential monarch who put an end to hostilities during the Second World War, that is, a monarch who could not violate the recommendations of the high command of the Japanese army and government, or a devious manipulator who has been the architect of successive plots since the 1930s, facilitating the emergence of fascism, and engaging Japan in the path of militarism and expansionism like Germany and Italy?

For some, Hirohito was a convinced Pacifist who suffered in his soul because of his limited power to put an end to the suffering and ill-treatment endured by civilians and prisoners during the war. Held by the dignity of his divine emperor status, he could not intervene openly in public affairs. For other observers, often foreigners, Hirohito was a fierce dictator in the lineage of Hitler, who had the ambition to occupy the territories of all the countries in the Pacific and Southeast Asia to spread Japan’s hegemony in the region, and, to get there, he directed the generals in the Army in the great decisions to be taken in the conduct of the war.

In fact, during 1928, Hirohito made several tours and visits to the army and navy academies, and many times he participated in graduation ceremonies. From 1928 to the start of World War II, as supreme commander (daigensui), he made about four to six trips annually in connection with special military reviews and exercises. The goal of each tour was to mobilize the nation and, at the same time, to highlight his divine and militaristic emperor images. To protect and welcome his visits, local officials ordered the most careful advance preparation. They formed special committees, and mobilized all resources, laid out red carpets for the emperor to walk on, swept and decorated the streets along which his motorcade would pass, and disinfected and purified the limousine in which he would ride. In his presence, all eyes had to be looking down.

On the road of the war, naval officers presented him the plan on how to meet the navy’s national defense requirements. Adm. Katō Kanji, the leading opponent of the Washington Naval Treaty, began to pressure him to enlarge the geographic sphere of national defense. Katō advised him that the safety of the empire’s homeland required confronting American naval forces deployed in the Western Pacific rather than in waters closer to home as specified in the 1923 policy. Hirohito approved Katō’s report delivered to him on November 27, 1929. He accepted the idea to build a big navy with the capacity to win any decisive naval battle against the United States.

In July 1929, under the influence of the palace staff, he fired prime minister Gen. Tanaka Giichi and his Seiyūkai government, and nominated in his place prime minister Hamaguchi Yūkō. Giving full support to his naval chief of staff and vice chief of staff, Adm. Katō and Vice Adm. Suetsugu, he denounced the treaty signed at the Washington conference limiting the naval tonnage of the Japanese navy. Katō and the navy general staff had pushed the emperor to refuse any limit on the navy’s heavy cruiser tonnage of less than 70 percent of the individual cruiser strengths of the American and British fleets.

Marxist historians, namely, Kamei Katsuichirō, Takeyama Michio, Matsuda Michio, Inoue Kiyoshi, Tōyama Shigeki, Toma Seita, Minzoku Ishiri, Suzuki Shirō, Eguchi Bokuro, Matsumoto Shinpachiro, and Ishimoda Shō, have traced the inherently criminogenic character of the imperial system. These Marxists made the ruling class in Japan responsible for the war, and they called for a reappraisal of the importance of the spirit of the time, its psychological context, and its influence on decisions. For these Marxists, the historical narrative must serve to anchor a true democratic consciousness among the majority of the Japanese, and this justifies that we insist on the historical reconstruction of the Shōwa era, and on the responsibility of the dominant layers of society in the world.

Other Japanese intellectuals, such as Maruyama Masao, folklorist Wakamori Tarō, Shinohara Hajime, philosopher Matsuzawa Hiroaki, and Nezu Masashi, were also at the center of the debates of the historical consciousness of post-war Japan. Many of them have written about the demonic personality of Hirohito, who did not hesitate between January and December 1941 to launch his country into war while recognizing the stakes and risks to which Japan was exposed in taking this direction.

According to historians and experts of the war – Herbert Bix, John W. Dower, Awaya Kentaro, Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Yoshida Yutaka, Tokushi Kasahara, Saburō Ienaga, and Onuma Yoshiaki – and some revelations from people close to the Imperial Palace, it emerges that Hirohito was not the toy of the unscrupulous military. He had great influence in the decisions taken by the government and the high commander of the