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
Taiwanese expat here–I only mention that because, in 1945, Taiwan ceased to be a Japanese colonial possession (as it had been in fifty years, since the Treaty of Shimonoseki signed by the Qing Dynasty shortly before its collapse). I was born in 1986, in the last decade of the rightist dictatorship; for my grandparent’s generation (my grandfather worked on behalf of the Taiwanese colonial government, seeding rivers for fisheries), the “retrocession” to the Chinese Republic as it came to be called was a case of something seeming like a possibly good thing, but then turning out to be a very bad thing for the next few decades, which had a pronounced affect on that particular generation; when your half-century of rule makes the citizenry consistently nostalgic for *Japanese colonial rule*, despite the whole of Taipei being bombed into rubble by B-24 bombers and you making it illegal for anyone to even talk about Japan outside of an interrogation, your civil leadership has really dropped by the ball.
I think most of the obvious reasons have been covered (even in the Meiji Constitution, the Japanese Emperors were *de facto* heads of state, not head of government, and there was an increasing shift of power powers from the hereditary supreme leader with relatively little military experience in his early thirties to a permanent military dictatorship clique throughout Showa’s reign, etc.). Those members of the clique, most obviously represented in Tojo Hideki (who was simultaneously prime minister and minister of war through most all of the American fighting in the Pacific War), were often executed; that being said, the Tokyo Trials (the “far east” counterpart to the International Military Tribunal held by the USA, USSR UK and France earlier that year, the “Nuremberg Trials”) were often seen as being ultimately a farce for procedural reasons and deal making in the interests of using occupied Japan as a bulwark against the Soviet Union (it’s often forgotten that in August 1945, the USSR invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria, defeating a million-man reserve army; so even if the USSR was hardly in a position to invade Japan, considering the state of its navy, it was a regional presence). As I understand it, if Showa had been tried, it would’ve been there (Tojo was, as were members of his cabinet). And even this isn’t *that* exceptional–consider that, even though Hitler succeeded in killing himself (unlike Tojo), in postwar Germany large numbers of Nazis–as in “actual wartime NSDAP membership” and not some more vague category–didn’t just remain at liberty, but were incorporated into positions of leadership in new governments (this was a problem in East Germany, but *particularly* the larger West Germany, e.g. in 1957, 77% of senior officials in the West German Ministry of Justice were Nazi Party members, a higher percentage than *during the actual Third Reich*, and by 1970, almost half were still former NSDAP members, despite a number of them surely dying of old age). And the Nuremberg process was held up as an example of “doing it right”, compared to Tokyo. It was the creation of a political environment–the first postwar decade, with direct American (and British) military rule over all of Japan, and large parts of Japan’s overseas colonial empire (with exceptions–take North Korea, or Taiwan, under Chinese military rule as I noted)–where people we would consider demonstratably responsible for Japanese war of aggression in the Pacific–could either escape prosecution or even be promoted back into the leadership. As I understand it, the situation was even worse in what was the American-zone of the Korean Peninsula (later the Republic of Korea), where Japanese but particularly Korean collaborators were protected in order to ensure that the quasi-feudal system of land tenancy, where the vast majority of Koreans were peasants and a very small minority owned almost all arable land, remained intact in order to prevent what was seen as a communist groundswell from the North (where land-owning collaborators of the Japanese were purged or exiled, often violently).
With that in mind, Showa–in Japan, still a very prestigious public figurehead who, in the fashion of earlier 19th century European monarchies whom he was styled, represented the incarnation of the unified Japanese Empire–being spared prosecution was very easy (ironically, the possible deposing or even execution of Showa, perhaps in the style of Nicholas Romanov, Autocrat of all Russians before he was toppled by the Bolsheviks, was a reason why part of the Japanese military tried in vain to resist an unconditional surrender). He also served a clear role to the foreign military occupation: legitimizing the rule of the man who took his place of formal military dictator of Japan, Douglas MacArthur (the son of the governor general of the Philippines, effectively American’s colonial governor, and himself field marshal of the Philippines). If he was dead, that wouldn’t have been possible.
(After I finished typing this, I realized I completely failed in the task of “explain this like I’m five years old”–sorry, I’m still pretty unpracticed when it comes to Reddit norms.)
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