Exposing The Emperor
Fifty-five years after the end of World War II, a new book about Japan's Emperor Hirohito counters the prevailing image of the bespectacled leader as a peaceful man who was drawn into a war he didn't want.
On Sept. 2, 1945, when Japan signed an unconditional surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri, a myth may have been engraved into American minds: the notion that the frail-looking Hirohito was really a pacifist who opposed the war, a leader relieved to see it finally end.
As CBS News Correspondent Barry Petersen reports, author Herbert Bix has found evidence that the man who led Japan during its years of conquest and defeat was not a reluctant follower, but rather the driving force behind Japan's war effort.
In writing Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, Bix spent a decade poring through public records and imperial family diaries for an exhaustive book.
He found not the myth, but a leader Bix says was like the spider at the center of the web as Japan built a military, prepared for war and finally attacked Pearl Harbor.
"The real emperor…insisted and got a voice in national policy decision making and in time became a controlling military leader whose decisions were final," Bix said.
That was true, Bix argues, until the final days of the war. The author writes that in 1945, if it hadn't been for Hirohito's stubborn rejection of several peace overtures, the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki may not have been necessary.
"He was at one with the so-called die-hard militarists until the very end and no option was left," Bix said.
But at the time, Americans believed the emperor was key to controlling and pacifying a defeated Japan.
War-time newsreels reinforced that impression, referring to him as Japan's "god emperor."
That's one reason allied leaders dropped their initial insistence that Hirohito be handed over to the them at the end of the war.
The mythology of Hirohito and the remnants of imperial Japan can still be found. To this day, Japan, unlike Germany, has still not apologized for the war or its atrocities because of the myth that the emperor was innocent.
"If the emperor, in whose name the war was fought, in whose name violence and brutality was justified—if he did no wrong, than those who fought and loyally served him also did no wrong," Bix says.
However, the legacy is a double-edged sword: many Japanese are acutely sensitive about their nation's past. Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori was roundly criticized earlier this year when he made reference to Japan being a "divine nation." And the issue of military spending is very delicate in Japan to this day.
Still, Bix's book may have stirred old feelings of loyalty to the Emperor. No Japanese publisher has offered to translate it.
Hirohito died in 1989 at the age of 88. He had ruled as emperor since 1926 and was succeeded by his son, now Emperor Akihito, who is still consdered Japan's chief of state.