Word: emperor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...every political and military decision made and action taken by my people in the conduct of war." On that basis he was subject to the death penalty. In his Reminiscences MacArthur confessed that he was "moved to the very marrow of my bones." Wrote the general: "He was an Emperor by inherent birth, but in that instant I knew I faced the First Gentleman of Japan in his own right...
...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...
...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...
...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...