BOOK REVIEW : A Peek Into Emperor Hirohito’s Closet

Hirohito: Behind the Myth by Edward Behr (Villard Books: $22.50, 438 pages)

When Hirohito died last January, few of his eulogists bothered to recall how close the Japanese emperor came to standing in the dock as a defendant in a war crimes trial after World War II.

In “Hirohito: Behind the Myth,” Edward Behr seeks to remind us that Hirohito and the Japanese imperial traditions that he embodied are implicated in disturbing ways in the worst excesses of Japanese war-making and war crimes in World War II.

Behr is the author of “The Last Emperor,” and the story of Hirohito’s childhood and adolescence are strongly reminiscent of the lonely, mysterious and menacing splendor in which Pu-Yi, the last emperor of China, was raised. (Indeed, the pathetic figure of Henry Pu-Yi appears at several crucial moments in “Hirohito.”) But Hirohito, unlike Pu-Yi, was the powerful monarch of a powerful nation, and his place in history is undisputed if also poorly understood.

That’s the subtext of Behr’s book--he points out that history has been kind, perhaps too kind, to the Japanese emperor, and he suggests that Hirohito must bear some blame for Japanese militarism and expansionism in the 1930s and ‘40s, including wartime atrocities, the war against China, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

Behr explains that he was “struck by the extraordinarily skilled campaign designed to insulate Hirohito from responsibility for all the traumatic events that took place during the first 20 years of his reign.” The conventional wisdom of the postwar era, encouraged by Gen. Douglas MacArthur himself, holds that Hirohito was “the passive, withdrawn, monarch-scientist . . . who was . . . unable to control the military.” But Behr suggests that Hirohito was actually “a shrewd and skilled manipulator” filled with “guile, ruse and a passion for secrecy” and “capable of decisive and ruthless action.”

Behr’s harsh verdict is that Hirohito is culpable for the actions of Japan in the ‘30s and World War II, ranging from the grand plan for the conquest of Asia to the establishment of secret chemical and bacteriological warfare laboratories where prisoners of war were the subject of gruesome medical experiments. “On the evidence of what actually happened,” Behr argues, “it is clear to me that for all his occasional verbal disapproval of the militarist expansionists, their aims and goals--if not always their methods--had his wholehearted approval.”

Behr is a richly experienced veteran of the corporate news magazines, where he acquired a knack for rooting out the colorful anecdote or telling detail, and he also proves himself to be an accomplished popular historian with a gift for telling a tale. He unravels the politics of the Japanese imperial court with ease and clarity, and he threads his way through countless coups, mutinies and other remarkable intrigues with all the drama of a Saturday matinee serial.

We learn, for example, that one of the rival clans in the Japanese aristocracy conspired to prevent Hirohito’s marriage to his chosen fiancee by charging that she would introduce the genetic flaw of color blindness into the imperial bloodline; the plot was foiled with the assistance of a Japanese underworld figure who wielded much influence at court and in the streets.

We see the tragicomic denouement of one of the bloodiest coups of the prewar years--the mutineers assassinated a man they believed to be the prime minister, and their intended victim showed up at what was supposed to be his own funeral. And Behr reveals the desperate efforts of a cabal of die-hard Japanese officers who proposed to kidnap a child of royal blood and raise him in hiding in case the Allies sought to dethrone the emperor.

Although Behr tells a good yarn, he has not managed to penetrate very deeply into the heart and mind of Hirohito. It’s a failing for which he can hardly be blamed--Hirohito spent his life inside a box of ritual and protocol--and Behr still manages to show us something of the fears and passions that must have been at work behind the imperial facade. But Behr’s pronouncements on Hirohito’s war guilt are all the more troubling because of the lack of hard facts.

Behr is to be complimented for his care and caution in building a case on what must be circumstantial evidence only--he owns up to the fact that, in many instances, he can only surmise what Hirohito knew and when he knew it. For example, here is how Behr describes Hirohito’s culpability for the so-called “Rape of Nanking,” a ghastly crime of war in which 100,000 Chinese prisoners-of-war and civilians, including men, women, children and infants, were brutally assaulted and slaughtered by Japanese troops in 1937.

“It is difficult to believe that this--one of the most appalling events of the China war--came and went without Emperor Hirohito becoming aware of it,” Behr writes. “It is inconceivable that he should have (not) read any of the reports on the Nanking atrocity.” And Behr points out the emperor played golf with a close relative who was recalled to Japan after the troops under his command were implicated in the Nanking slaughter: “What did they talk about, one wonders--the weather?”

Of course, this is sheer speculation, not history, and it is impossible for the lay reader to weigh the evidence and judge the for himself. But, even if Behr’s arguments and conclusions must be regarded with caution, I came away from “Hirohito” with the sense that a curtain had been drawn aside, and an inner chamber of history had been revealed to our gaze.