JAPAN'S EMPERORS: 1930S and 1940s TO THE PRESENT
This research paper examines the controversial role of the Emperor Hirohito (r. 1926-1989) in Japan during the period leading up to and during the Second World War, as compared his role and that of his successor Akihito thereafter.
For more than a millennium and long before American Commodore Matthew Perry's black warships entered Tokyo Bay in 1853-1854, the Imperial Throne served as an important symbol of religious, cultural and political unity as a distinctive Japanese sense of identity emerged. However, Japanese emperors reigned more than they ruled, as others exercised power in their name. Hirohito was a grandson of the Emperor Meiji (r. 1868-1912) through whom the founders of the Meiji Restoration responded to the challenge of the West by modernizing rapidly Japan's economy and institutions. Hirohito inherited from his inept father, the Emperor Taisho (r. 1912-1926), a considerably weakened throne, a failing economy and a crumbling political center. Under his stewardship, the monarchy survived the tumultuous events of the 1930s and 1940s but was considerably tarnished by its association with domestic repression, militarism, ultranationalism and Japan's ultimately disastrous foreign wars and defeat. Hirohito was either powerless or unwilling to prevent Japan's drift toward catastrophe; and he narrowly escaped being forced to abdicate or being tried as a war criminal. He nevertheless played a key role in helping Japan to avoid an even worse fate and in easing the transition to postwar democratic politics during the course of which the role of the emperor become more sharply truncated.
To most non-Japanese, one of the most puzzling aspects of modern Japan is its juxtaposition of the ultramodern and the traditional in all spheres of life, such as its high-speed economic growth which has raised Japan, a country with few natural resources, to the status of a global economic super...