BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : OCTOBER 16, 2000 ISSUE
BOOKS Shattering the Myth of Hirohito HIROHITO AND THE MAKING OF MODERN JAPAN By Herbert P. Bix HarperCollins -- 800pp -- $35 Watching the world react to Emperor Hirohito's death in January, 1989, was an altogether peculiar experience. Many Third World nations, evidently eager to secure Japanese loans, were reverent to a fault: India and Cuba even declared national days of mourning. At the opposite extreme were the Commonwealth countries that fought the Pacific war--Britain, Australia, New Zealand. Among them, one found diplomatic politesse at best--and often a lot less. (''LET THE BASTARD ROT IN HELL!'' one London tabloid shrieked.) Then there were the Americans--solemn, by all appearances, authentically sad. More or less alone, the U.S. marked Hirohito's passing with neither calculation nor buried bitterness nor complexity of any kind: An honored friend was gone. In retrospect, that is more than a little disturbing. It suggests the extent to which Americans now face a period of historical revision that will eventually have to embrace the entire cold war era. And as a measure of the task's magnitude, nothing published since the Berlin Wall's fall quite comes up to Herbert P. Bix's new book, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. It's a startling work--awesomely ambitious, faultlessly researched, daring in its thesis, and profound in its implications. Bix is in part a vandal--of just the sort both Americans and Japanese need. In effect, he has taken a razor to Japan's official portrait of its wartime monarch. His redone image, rendered in arrestingly realistic lines, gives us not only the man as he was--it also concludes a 50-year argument over the Emperor's true role in history. The book challenges Americans to look again at just what they were up to in Japan after the war--and then ask whether the U.S. role was admirable--or something less. For half a century, the American public has known Hirohito as a man of peace, a bespectacled dodderer in a sloppy suit whose passion was neither politics nor military strategy but marine biology. Hirohito, one can still read in any standard U.S. account, opposed the war but was powerless against those who waged it. Although controversial, that orthodoxy served various interests well. Washington found a benignly detached Hirohito useful as it shaped Japan into a cold war ally. For Tokyo's conservative elite, only a monarch recast as an out-of-the-loop innocent could survive the infamy of Japan's tragic campaign to establish an empire in the East. Bix, a Harvard University-trained scholar now teaching in Tokyo, cuts through all the mythology at last, aided by documents available only since the Emperor's death. Hirohito, to state the case bluntly, was an engaged, tough-minded strategist. ''A major concern of this book,'' Bix writes, ''is Hirohito's failure to publicly acknowledge his own moral, political, and legal accountability for the long war fought in his name and under his active direction.'' Here, then, is Hirohito approving the imperial army's 1940 advance into Southeast Asia. Here he is committing Japan to war with the U.S. and helping to plan the attack on Pearl Harbor. In all of this, Bix points out, Hirohito displayed an insatiable appetite for intelligence. It's a long way, indeed, from tadpoles and the biology lab. But Bix is careful to explain Hirohito's progress, if that is the word, from young heir-apparent to supreme commander and extraconstitutional monarch. Hirohito, born in 1901, was schooled by militarists from the age of 7. When he acceded to the throne in 1926, Japan was afire with democratic aspiration. It was in this context that Hirohito sanctioned the disemboweling of civilian political institutions and a fateful shift in power to the military and the palace. The Americans moved to protect this odious autocrat after the war with unseemly haste. Mainstream historians still advance this as the only option for General Douglas MacArthur as he launched the occupation in the autumn of 1945: Do away with the Emperor, and Japan would have come unstuck. Bix suggests otherwise. For MacArthur, who then harbored Presidential ambitions, a quick, orderly fix in Japan was politically expedient. For Washington's emerging cold warriors, a monarch who could help check liberal and left aspirations--rampant again after the defeat--was just what the circumstances required. In this context, Hirohito is best seen as a cold war template: the first of many unsavory figures the U.S. befriended in the name of democratic freedoms. Although he was stripped of power, Hirohito's presence weighed heavily on the Japanese until his death. They still suffer a kind of neurosis of history that prevents them from seeing either the past or the future clearly. But as Bix makes plain, Americans have no moral ground upon which to criticize them. All this is treacherous territory, which is why Bix's treatment is exhaustive. Hirohito is scholarship at its best: compelling, measured, psychologically subtle. Never shrill, Bix delivers a rounded, even sympathetic portrait. ''The emperor who emerges from this work was a fallible human being,'' he writes, ''susceptible to the same desires, drives, instincts, and faults common to all human beings, but with a prolonged educational experience such as probably no one in the world, except himself, was given.'' He was a war criminal, responsible for the deaths of many millions. Now, after 50 years, we know this. One hopes this book will help the Japanese find their way beyond Hirohito's legacy. By PATRICK SMITH Smith, the author of Japan: A Reinterpretation, covered Japan during Hirohito's final years for the International Herald Tribune and The New Yorker. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP					RELATED ITEMS Shattering the Myth of Hirohito PHOTO: Cover, ``Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan'' INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online

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