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Article Review Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse H-Diplo Web and Production Editor: George Fujii @HDiplo Article Review No. 797 27 September 2018

Peter Mauch. “Hirohito and General Douglas MacArthur: The First Meeting as Documented by Shōwa tennō jitsuroku.” Diplomacy & Statecraft 28:4 (December 2017): 585-600. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09592296.2017.1386446.

URL: http://tiny.cc/AR797

Review by Noriko Kawamura, Washington State University

mperor Hirohito of Japan, posthumously known as Emperor Showa, was both sovereign of the state and commander in chief of the military when Japan waged the fifteen year Asia-Pacific War (1931- 1945). The entire nation fought the war to the bitter end to preserve its national polity for which the Emyth of the divine absolute monarch served as core. Japan eventually accepted the Potsdam Declaration and surrendered with the understanding that the authority of Emperor Hirohito and the Japanese government to rule the state should be subject to Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) General Douglas MacArthur. The fate of the Emperor was to be determined “by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people,”1 in the words of U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes at the time of Japan’s surrender. During the U.S.-led Allied occupation of Japan (1945-1952), SCAP chose to exclude Hirohito from the Tokyo war crimes trial and transformed him into a humanized symbolic monarch with no political power under the new constitution of Japan written by SCAP’s staff. Hirohito became one of the most useful allies of SCAP’s reform efforts to demilitarize and democratize Japan.

Against the backdrop of this extraordinary transformation of Hirohito, historians continue to debate numerous questions surrounding the postwar status of the Emperor. Many critics of Hirohito questioned why he was not tried as a war criminal, or why he failed to take responsibility for the war and abdicate. Peter Mauch’s narrowly focused article on the first meeting between Hirohito and MacArthur on 27 September 1945, some six weeks after Japan’s surrender, addresses one such controversial question: whether or not the emperor offered to take responsibility for the war during his first meeting with MacArthur. Mauch suggests that, “English-language scholarship has not kept pace with its Japanese-language counterpart” (586). Two Pulitzer Prize-winning historians, John Dower and Herbert Bix are both dismissive about the possibility of

1 Robert J.C. Butow, Japan’s Decision to Surrender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1954), 245.

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Hirohito’s willingness to take war responsibility.2 The author offers an up-to-date and lucid overview of ongoing debate among Japanese historians, many of whom regard it as highly likely that Hirohito offered to take responsibility for the war. However, the recent publication of Shōwa tennō jitsuroku (The Annals of Emperor Showa), edited by the Imperial Household Agency,3 refueled the debate over the Emperor’s war responsibility because the agency’s supposedly official account of the September 27 meeting did not include Hirohito’s offer to take responsibility for the war. For the benefit of non-Japanese speaking readers, Mauch introduces an English translation of Shōwa tennō jitsuroku’s account of the September 27 meeting in the appendix of his article.

Did Hirohito really offer to take responsible for the war during his meeting with MacArthur on 27 September 1945? Mauch argues that in all probability “the emperor indeed offered to take full responsibility for the war fought in his name” (592). There were only three witnesses to this closed-door meeting: Hirohito, MacArthur, and Okumura Katsuzo, Japanese interpreter from the Japanese Foreign Ministry. They agreed to keep the contents of the meeting confidential, and the Emperor never revealed to anyone what he had actually said. Therefore, the author’s key sources mainly originate from MacArthur and Okumura. According to MacArthur’s 1964 memoir, Reminiscences, Hirohito offered to take “sole responsibility for every political and military decision made . . . in the conduct of war” (585-586). Although Mauch shares many historians’ apprehension about the accuracy of the General’s recollection, he points out that MacArthur mentioned Hirohito’s willingness to take war responsibility in his communications with SCAP Political Advisor George Atcheson in October 1945 and the inter-Allied Far Eastern Commission in late January 1946. The author argues that MacArthur’s contemporaneous remarks reflected the gist of what the emperor said.

In Japan, Okumura’s records and recollections of the September 27 meeting have created a complicated and unresolved controversy among historians. Mauch argues that the controversy happened because Okumura presumably left two versions of what Hirohito told MacArthur. According to Grand Chamberlain Fujita Hisanori’s memoir published in 1961, the emperor told MacArthur, “Responsibility is all mine. . . . Whatever happens to me is of no concern. . . . I should like to ask for the Allied nations’ assistance so that the Japanese people do not live in want” (587). Fujita’s recollection was based on Okumura’s first draft of the meeting sent from the Foreign Ministry to the Emperor. Fujita noted that contrary to the usual practice, the Emperor retained the document after reading it. Mauch speculates that since Hirohito did not return the Okumura draft, Okumura rewrote the document and submitted it for the Foreign Ministry’s record. It turned out that Okumura’s official record retained by the Foreign Ministry’s archives did not include Hirohito’s statement offering to take war responsibility. This document, which is in possession of the Foreign Ministry, was scooped by the popular magazine, Bungen shunju, in 1975, and the Foreign Ministry formally declassified the document in 2002. The Japanese historians who were appointed to edit Shōwa tennō jitsuroku chose to adopt this document with no reference to the Emperor’s war responsibility as the Imperial Household Agency’s

2 John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999); Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: Harper Collins, 2000).

3 The original 61 volume unpublished Shōwa tennō jitsuroku became available to researchers between September and November 2014, and by 2018 the entire volumes have been published except the index volume which will be published in March 2019.

H-Diplo Article Review presumably official account. This raised doubts about the accuracy and objectivity of Shōwa tennō jitsuroku among some historians, and Mauch confronts this problem in this article.

Did Okumura delete Hirohito’s offer to take responsibility for the war from the meeting record? Mauch offers a number of scenarios. The papers of Matsui Akira, who served as Hirohito’s interpreter with SCAP from 1949 to 1952, allegedly contain the information to the effect that Okumura deleted the Emperor’s statement offering to assume all war responsibility because of the “significance” of that statement (591).4 In a 1987 publication Okumura himself quoted the mperor as having stated, “Responsibility for this war is entirely mine” (590). Since “it is inconceivable that Okumura would have decided on his own authority to remove all trace of the emperor’s—presumed—admission of responsibility from the official record,” Mauch speculates that Foreign Minister Yoshida Shigeru, or soon-to-be Prime Minister Shidehara Kijuro, or even MacArthur directed or pressured Okumura to remove Hirohito’s admission of war responsibility. They all had reasons to keep the emperor away from the subject of war responsibility. It is hard for readers to follow the author’s speculative discussion without clear explanation of the respective position of Yoshida, Shidehara, and MacArthur concerning the intertwined issues of the emperor’s war responsibility and abdication, but that may be a near impossible task in a fifteen-page exegesis.

This reviewer inclines to share the author’s claim that Hirohito most likely offered to take full responsibility for the war during his meeting with MacArthur. However, in order to strengthen this line of argument, perhaps the author could have offered deeper analysis of the Emperor’s thoughts and actions concerning his war responsibility. If he indeed offered to take full responsibility for the war, what motivated him to do so? Mauch’s treatment of this fundamental question is limited and speculative. The author offers an important observation that, instead of being merely “a passive on-looker,” the Emperor was “an active agent who, behind the scenes, used his limited scope for manoeuvre to influence events in ways he believed would advantage his nation” (593). However, it seems a stretch to suggest that as early as September 1945 (before the promulgation of Japan’s new constitution and the conclusion of the war crimes trial), the Emperor “gambled on MacArthur” by offering to take war responsibility and contribute to Japanese reconstruction, with the hope that “he might convince MacArthur to use and even manipulate the throne—and, of course, his own person. (593)” Mauch could have utilized more Japanese sources to examine the Emperor’s dilemma between war responsibility and abdication at the time of Japan’s surrender and the subsequent days of uncertainty. They indicate that Hirohito’s ultimate goal was the preservation of the imperial court and Japan’s sovereignty, which to him was one and the same.5 To achieve that goal he was prepared to take full responsibility for Japan’s past conduct, but his question was how assuming war responsibility would help preserve the imperial house and Japan’s sovereignty. Throughout the U.S. occupation of Japan, Hirohito

4 Peter Mauch’s partial translation of the alleged excerpt from Matsui Akira’s paper needs further clarification. According to Toyoshita Narahiko, who claimed to have seen Matsui’s paper, Matsui writes as follows, “According to Mr. Okumura who served as interpreter, he deleted the emperor’s statement to the effect that he would take all responsibility for the war because the magnitude of the statement was too great. The emperor made this statement immediately after General MacArthur made a lengthy philosophical statement on the war.” Toyoshita Narahiko, Shōwa tennō-makkāsā kaiken (Emperor Showa-MacArthur meetings) (Tokyo: Iwanamishoten, 2008), 90.

5 Terasaki Hidenari and Mariko Terasaki Miller, Showa tenno dokuhakuroku: Terasaki Hidenari, goyo-gakari nikki (The Showa emperor monologue: And the diary of the liaison officer of the imperial household, Terasaki Hidenari) (Tokyo: Bungeishunju, 1991); Kinoshita michio, Sokkin nisshi (A chamberlain’s diary) (Tokyo: Bungeishunju, 1990). H-Diplo Article Review wrestled with the issue of his abdication, wondering whether it would save his country or backfire and endanger the throne itself.

As Mauch admits, “The evidence relating to the September 1945 emperor-MacArthur meeting is far from conclusive” (593). The way Shōwa tennō jitsuroku presents the meeting is a disappointing reminder that historians do not have full access to the archival material held by the Imperial Household Agency. Although Shōwa tennō jitsuroku cites a number of previously unavailable diaries of the court chamberlains, unfortunately it does not cite Matsui Akira’s reference regarding Okumura’s comments on the meeting on 27 September 1945. Moreover, Hirohito met MacArthur ten further times after the first meeting, and with MacArthur’s successor, General Matthew Ridgeway seven times. Matsui served as interpreter from summer 1949 until the end of the U.S. occupation. Nevertheless, Shōwa tennō jitsuroku does not provide any details discussed between Hirohito and SCAP during these meetings, and it never cites Matsui’s records. Matsui Akira’s papers remains classified today. Although Mauch’s article narrowly focuses on the first meeting, it has successfully illuminated the limitations and bias of Shōwa tennō jitsuroku. Moreover, the article speaks for many historians’ frustration with the reality of limited access to sources surrounding Emperor Hirohito that are in possession of the Imperial Household Agency seventy-some years after the end of World War II.

Noriko Kawamura is associate professor of history at Washington State University, where she teaches U.S. diplomatic and military history. Kawamura is author of Emperor Hirohito and the Pacific War (University of Washington Press, 2015), and Turbulence in the Pacific: Japanese–U.S. Relations during World War I (Praeger, 2000). She coedited Building New Pathways to Peace (University of Washington Press, 2011) and Toward a Peaceable Future: Redefining Peace, Security and Kyosei from a Multidisciplinary Perspective (The Thomas S. Foley Institute of Public Policy and Public Service, Washington State University Press, 2005). She is currently writing a book on Emperor Hirohito’s Cold War to be published by the University of Washington Press.