Is Hirohito the War's Real Villain?

BY a coincidence worthy of some Kabuki melodrama, Emperor Hirohito's first visit to American soil occurred just a week before the official publication of a startling new book that proclaims him a major war criminal. Japan's Imperial Conspiracy (Morrow; $14.95) charges that Hirohito, far from being a mild and unworldly figurehead, personally supported and even encouraged the attack on Pearl Harbor. The main reason he escaped hanging was that General MacArthur needed his symbolic authority to maintain order during the Allied occupation of Japan.

The book's author is David Bergamini, 43, a Rhodes scholar and former LIFE correspondent who was born in Japan of American parents and spent his early boyhood there. He also spent much of World War II in a Japanese prison camp. In 1965 Bergamini returned to Tokyo and began a six-year labor of poring over thousands of Japanese documents and interviewing hundreds of former officials. His 1,239-page thesis, subtitled "How Emperor Hirohito Led Japan into War Against the West," goes roughly like this:

More than a century ago, when Commodore Perry's warships steamed into Tokyo Bay to "open" Japan to American commerce, Emperor Komei passionately resisted the invasion, but in vain. So it was that Hirohito eventually "inherited from his great-grandfather a mission, which was to rid Asia of white men." As early as 1921, when Hirohito became regent for his ailing father, he organized a cabal of young officers notably including Major Hideki Tojo, to undertake any mission the throne desired. Bergamini insists that two years before the fighting broke out, Hirohito personally "directed his General Staff to plan the war."

Under Compulsion. In January 1941 a brilliant naval strategist named Yamamoto communicated to Hirohito a plan for a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Because strict secrecy was imposed, even War Minister Tojo knew nothing about the plan until after he became Prime Minister, two months before the attack. "Hirohito alone stood at the top of the mountain," Bergamini writes. "He alone had full access to army planning, navy planning." When it finally came time to decide, Hirohito called in his Lord Privy Seal and said: "Instruct Prime Minister Tojo to proceed according to plan."

"Hirohito was a formidable war leader," according to Bergamini, "tireless, dedicated, meticulous, clever and patient." But when the war came to an end at Hiroshima, the Emperor and his vassals began plotting to "convince outside observers, especially Americans, that the sacred Emperor had been a victim rather than villain of Japanese militarism." This suited the Allies admirably; without at least some semblance of the imperial system, General MacArthur estimated, he would need 20,000 American administrators to govern Japan and a million troops to police it. "There is no specific or tangible evidence," said MacArthur, "to connect the Emperor with responsibility for any decision of the government during the past ten years." Instead, the Allies prosecuted 28 of Hirohito's top officials and hanged seven of them.

The MacArthur thesis has, of course, prevailed. Hirohito was known to have stamped all the major military orders, and he even decorated his uncle, Prince Asaka, for leading the Japanese troops who slaughtered more than 150,000 unarmed Chinese in the rape of Nanking. Yet it was widely said that he was really a man of peace who had acted under compulsion.

Gruesome Realism. Is Bergamini right in rejecting the general view? Did this rather vague, retiring, almost comically awkward man really launch the Pacific war? And do his seemingly peaceful people really believe, as Bergamini insists, that "Japan must some day, somehow avenge herself by besting the U.S."? From other experts on Japan there have already come expressions of distrust or outright disbelief. Former Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer, now a professor of Asian history at Harvard, has denounced Bergamini's thesis as "absolutely preposterous" and added that he was "appalled" by its publication at a time of Japanese-American strain. Faubion Bowers, a freelance writer who once served as an official interpreter for MacArthur, attacked the book in the Washington Post as a work of "paranoia."

Bergamini uses his research about as impartially as a prosecuting attorney. He applies the term Hirohito cabal, for example, without any clear evidence that the Emperor actually organized it or directed it. There is also a considerable amount of what Reischauer calls "just hunches or guesses." Everyone agrees, for instance, that a band of officers temporarily seized the palace in 1945 and demanded that there be no surrender, but Bergamini alone argues that the coup must have been a fake designed to obscure the Emperor's real role in waging the war. If so, why did the insurgents kill a number of high-ranking officers? The fake coup, Bergamini explains, "was to be so gruesomely realistic that it could not have been staged without imperial sanction."

Murky Language. Such gossamer arguments lead to a suspicion that Bergamini's indictment is vastly exaggerated. But is it also possible that the complete exoneration of the Emperor has been somewhat exaggerated as well? The key question is not whether he took part in making war--he did, if only by acquiescence--but whether he could and should have done otherwise. Hirohito has said: "The idea of gainsaying my advisers in those days never even occurred to me. Besides, I would have been put in an insane asylum or even assassinated." Yet at one point during the war-crimes trials, Tojo declared unequivocally: "There is no Japanese subject who could go against the will of His Majesty."

The problem is that His Majesty rarely expressed his will clearly--or at all. When he attended a meeting, the proceedings were enveloped in ritual, ceremony and murky language. Sometimes he expressed his views by writing enigmatic poems about trees ("Courageous the pine that does not change its color/ Under winter snow . . ."). Most often he said nothing, which might have meant agreement or disagreement or neither. He is, after all, an accomplished writer of waka, and one of the themes that constantly recurs in this traditional 31-syllable poetic form is that one must learn to emulate the river reed by bending with the current.

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