The Happy Monarch

HIROHITO: EMPEROR OF JAPAN by Leonard Mosley. 371 pages. Prentice-Hall. $7.95.

According to ancient doctrine, Hirohito is the 124th direct descendant of Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess. All his childhood was a drill in the warrior-centered Shinto religion. When he was eleven, his grandfather, the Emperor, died, and General Nogi, one of Hirohito's beloved tutors, gave him a final traumatic lesson in Shinto. After sitting with him for more than three hours and reviewing the boy's studies, the old general went home to his wife. First, the couple purified themselves in Shinto rites. Then the general took a dagger, dispatched his wife, and eviscerated himself in an act of sacrificial seppuku (ritual suicide) asa last service to the Emperor he had adored.

Gentle Family Man. The most remarkable thing about the unremarkable-looking little man who is Emperor Hirohito, the Magnanimous-Exalted, the Sublime Majesty, the Imperial Son of Heaven of Dai Nippon, is that none of his rigorous childhood lessons really stuck. When he was 14, he threw his history teacher into a flap by stating that he thought most of the details of his supposedly divine descent were pure moonshine. They had to be, he pointed out politely, because they were biologically unsound and physically impossible.

He proved to be a disappointment in other respects. Unlike his father, Emperor Taisho, a dandy who liked to emulate Kaiser Wilhelm by waxing and curling his mustache and galloping around on a horse, Hirohito neither looked nor acted warlike. From a gentle, somewhat toothy, thin-chested little boy, he grew into a gentle, somewhat toothy, thin-chested little man, who loved nothing better than to go splashing around for specimens for his marine-biology collection. Unlike his bold and high-living grandfather, Emperor Meiji, who used to select his bed partner by dropping a silk handkerchief in front of a court concubine, Hirohito became a happy family man and refused to take a concubine, even after his Empress gave him four daughters in a row (the fifth child was a boy).

Cut Down to Size. Such biographical details, competently researched, make good reading. But Leonard Mosley, a columnist for the London Daily Express, pads his story needlessly. He speculates on whether Hirohito could have prevented Pearl Harbor. Mosley says yes--but that the Emperor's advisers cleverly avoided giving him complete information until it was too late. Chances are, however, that Hirohito could not have prevented the war, since for all practical purposes he was a prisoner of his own warlords. .

Similarly, Mosley misses the point when he accuses Douglas MacArthur's occupation forces of indulging in unseemly harassment when they ordered the palace staff cut and demanded that the Emperor renounce his "divinity." Far from aiming to "cut the Emperor down to size," as Mosley suggests, MacArthur was implementing a plan that had been drawn up long before Japan toppled. The U.S. needed the Emperor to save the Japanese nation from disintegration. But only by destroying the myths of royal invincibility and divinity could the victors set the stage for political democracy in Japan. The plan succeeded admirably--and it is the reason Hirohito is the happy and admired monarch he is today.

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