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
Whereas Germany’s surrender was conditional, Japan’s had one condition- that Hirohito remain Emperor. This matter was a point of discussion between the British and Americans in the lead up to Japan’s surrender. The U.S. thought that Hirohito should be removed from the throne and the monarchy disbanded, while the British were themselves monarchists and therefore seeing the benefits of continuity of figurehead. Keep in mind Hirohito would not really have had that much say in the matters of war, that’s not how monarchies work these days. He did, however, have to admit to the Japanese public that he was not a god.
In the simplest terms?
They didn’t want a repeat of the end of the first world war which only gave them a 20 year respite.
When they stripped the Kaiser through the intervening years they ended up with hitler so they thought to themselves well might not be the best idea to do that again. Macarthur played a huge roll and said “Destroy him and the nation will disintegrate” in a series of documents from the US state department documents released in 1977.
He went on to say “His connection with affairs of state up to the time of the end of the war was largely ministerial and automatically responsible to the advice of his counselors,” and “I believe all hope of introducing modern democratic methods would disappear and that when military control finally ceased some form of intense regimentation probably along Communistic lines would arise from the mutilated masses.” so the emperor had a powerful advocate in the US military. They believed they needed him so he was to be kept.
That the emperor surrendered and issued the statement himself instead of forcing an invasion of Japan was a huge factor in his favor. As they surrendered the Americans didn’t have to deal with the anger of their population on the heavy death toll for the invasion. Interesting tidbit all purple hearts issued since ww2 are surplus from the aborted invasion of Japan they were expecting mass casualties and injuries.
The fact that there was a coup attempt to stop the surrender and it failed gave the emperor some breathing room as this reinforced the idea that he was simply rubber stamping the will of the military.
It was rapidly becoming apparent to the allies that they would have to deal with the Soviet Union.
Japanese during that time actually believed he (the Emperor) was a deity descended from Heaven. He was infallible; God incarnate. Yes, they believed it with their entire being!
MacArthur feared that killing Hirohito would cause the Japanese people to rescind their surrender and keep fighting to the last. It was therfore incumbent upon MacArthur to stage a scenario where the Japanese people could hear from their own emperor’s mouth that Japan surrenders. There is a powerful picture of a Japanese family bowing low to a radio as the Emperor’s transmission was just heard over all of the country.
There is also a picture of MacArthur standing next to Hirohito towering above him. All of those images & soundbites were necessary to convince Japan that their Emperor was human and not divine.
Not only was the war lost, but Japan’s belief system was shook to the core. Some say Japan’s “back” was broken twice at the end of the war: losing the war and losing its beliefs.
(Source: Eastern Civilizations college course).
The emperor was a divine figure in Japanese culture. America knew Japan would not surrender without a guarantee of the the emperor’s surviving, which was correct, and so one of Truman’s Advisors (I can’t recall whom off the top of my head) suggested that America place the condition on Japan that their surrender would involve the Emperor instructing the people to cease fighting and cooperate. That way Japan got to keep the Emperor, America got to use his divine word to cease hostilities, and neither side would have to fight a bloody invasion. I’d actually highly recommend a YT video called “Dropping the Bomb” by Shaun if you have a spare two and a half hours and a heavy interest in the subject, as it has a great timeline of the final weeks of the war and shows, as best we can, what all the major players were thinking at the time.
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.)
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.
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