So emperor Hirohito died and lived to his 80s or 90s, why wasn’t he instantly killed or sent to jail after the war ended. Did he get punished at all?
In: 1701
Originally the plan was to turn Japan into a republic and hang Hirohito with the rest of the top military leasers. However the day General Douglas MacArthur landed on the island, he unilaterally decided the Japanese needed to keep the emperor based on his racist ideology. He used two severely outdated studies to justify it — one was a 1937 one where showing how deeply the Japanese revered the Emperor as a god even though in totalitarian states people just say what you want them to stay in a survey. He made no effort to conduct a study on what the Japanese thought of the Emperor in 1945.
As the Cold War begin the US wanted to co-opt the political elite against communism. So instead of being hanged Hirohito renounced his divinity and became a pillar of the US-Japanese Alliance. This avoided a German-style reckoning for its conduct in the war.
It’s a damn miscarriage of justice since Hirohito was probably the most powerful Emperor in the history of Japan. Postwar accounts in English and Japanese downplay his influence during the war to justify the decision to keep him alive. Some sources insist there would’ve been a guerilla war but Japan was utterly exhausted at war’s end. The Soviets did deal with some partisans in Eastern Europe into the 50s, but without external support Japanese fascist guerillas couldn’t do much.
The decision to not hang Hirohito is a big mistake which had bad ramifications in Japanese politics. Today Japan’s governing elite is disproportionately represented by the grandchildren of war criminals who are much more nationalist than the average Japanese.
TL;DR US General MacArthur was a racist who didn’t believe the Japanese people could function as a republic because they were naturally servile. Mac’s racist idiocy saved Hirohito’s life basically.
Latest Answers