Found in Translation : History: A Japanese diplomat’s writings about Emperor Hirohito fill in some blanks in World War II records.

For Mariko Terasaki Miller, leafing through her father’s diaries and looking at the pages of Japanese characters was a longtime ritual.

Miller and her mother, Gwen Harold Terasaki, could not read the writing, but they were content to study the simple ink sketches of mountain ranges and family photographs and to point out the only Japanese words they knew--their names.

Translation was out of the question.

Hidenari Terasaki, Miller’s father, had been a Japanese diplomat and head of Western intelligence stationed in Washington when the United States entered World War II. The family was interned and sent to Japan six months later. The diaries were Hidenari Terasaki’s personal account of the war years, and the women feared that translation might reveal sensitive political information or that his recollections might be too personal for even his family to read.

But in 1987, Gwen Terasaki fell ill and Miller, encouraged by her son Cole, started to contemplate translation. Three years later, Miller was finally able to read her father’s journals, and she discovered that her family treasure was a missing link in 20th-Century history.

Among Hidenari Terasaki’s poems, sketches and musings about his family is the only known record of Emperor Hirohito’s opinions on what started the war. And the documents have added to the historical debate over whether the emperor could have intervened to prevent the fighting. (In interviews before his death in 1989, Hirohito said he was powerless to stop the conflict.)

“This diary is interesting to anyone curious about Japanese history and the 1,500-year-old Imperial system,” said Gordon Berger, an Asian history professor at USC.

“It is in a very informal style, and one has the feeling of hearing the emperor, who was considered a supreme being, talk in his living room as he remembers the war.”

Hidenari Terasaki spent the 10 years before that war immersing himself in American culture. He was a graduate student at Brown University. He met Gwen Harold in Washington in 1930 and married her the next year. Miller said her father loved the United States and was devastated by the outbreak of war and his family’s subsequent exile. Miller, an only child, was 9 when the family arrived in Japan in 1942.

Soon after their arrival, Miller was taken out of grade school and hidden so she would not be conscripted to manufacture weapons. Gwen Terasaki’s fingernails stopped growing because she was malnourished, making her fingertips bleed. Family pets were killed to save food. Miller and her parents suffered frostbite on their hands and feet. Hidenari Terasaki had several strokes, but he continued to write.

After the war, Hidenari Terasaki was Hirohito’s interpreter and liaison for the Imperial Court, the Japanese government and Allied Occupation headquarters. He recorded the emperor’s words before the war crime trials started at the end of 1946.

In 1949, Miller and her mother returned to Gwen Terasaki’s birthplace in Johnson City, Tenn., to enroll Mariko in college. Gwen Terasaki’s attempts to return to her ailing husband were thwarted by the outbreak of the Korean War, and he died in 1951.

It wasn’t until 1958, when Gwen Terasaki was on a book tour in Tokyo for “Bridge to the Sun,” an account of her family’s war experience, that she collected her husband’s diaries from her brother-in-law, Taira Terasaki.

For years, Gwen Terasaki kept the diaries in an engraved Chinese trunk in her Tennessee home. They were wrapped in two furoshikis, the cloth she placed around her husband’s shoulders on chilly afternoons in Japan.

“We talked about (getting translations) all the time, my mother and I,” said Miller, 58, from her home in Casper, Wyo., where she lives alone.

“I was just so busy being a mother to my four boys. But mother felt (the journals) were a part of my father and they belonged with her. Every time I would say let’s do this or that, she would say, ‘No, let’s just keep them here.’

“My mother was the wife of a diplomat, and she was careful of not commenting on anything. (My father) could have written down something official that we would not have wanted to come out, and we assumed they (the diaries) were very private. . . . She belonged to another age where caution was her training. . . . The caution of my mother was just something I respected.”

In the summer of 1986, Gwen Terasaki suffered a series of small strokes and moved into Miller’s Wyoming house. Miller carried her father’s diaries on the flight to Casper.

Two years later, Miller’s son Cole, who lives in Los Angeles, provided the impetus to get the diaries translated.

“When I went home that Christmas,” said Cole Miller, “I said, ‘I want to find out what’s in these.’ Otherwise I’d never get to know (my grandfather). So my mother entrusted them to me. . . . I took them to ( one) I thought was the best in East Asian history.”

That person was Gordon Berger, and he did the initial translations.

“The diaries will be of particular interest to the Japanese people, who never knew the emperor’s position on the causes and events of the war,” he said.

In fact, the only time the Japanese people heard Hirohito’s voice, Berger added, was on Aug. 15, 1945--the day of surrender.

“The first time they ever heard his voice was on a recording announcing the surrender,” Berger said. “And it was very hard to understand it because the radio transmission was terrible at that time and the language he used was court language. The average Japanese could not understand it. It would be sort of like if President Bush were to start speaking in Shakespearean English.”

Berger urged Cole Miller to send the materials to Takashi Ito at Tokyo University, whom he called “one of the world’s leading experts on Japanese history in the ‘30s and ‘40s.” Ito confirmed that Hirohito’s monologues were contained in the diaries.

Last November, Bungei Shunju, a Japanese monthly magazine, published the first account of the diaries. Anticipating overwhelming enthusiasm from the Japanese people, the publishing house printed 1 million copies, more than three times the number normally printed. It sold out in two days. Eight days later, Bungei Shunju printed 300,000 more, Cole Miller said. The January issue of Bungei Shunju was dedicated entirely to the publication of excerpts from the diaries.

(Bungei Shunju issued the diaries and the monologues as a book on March 7. Berger will do an English-language edition, including the historical annotations. No publisher or date has been set.)

Speaking from Tokyo, Masuhiko Hirobuchi, an executive for the Asahi television network, said the diaries have dominated the news since their publication and “have caused incredible enthusiasm and excitement among the Japanese people. There were so many astonishing facts included in the monologues that the Japanese people never knew about, behind-the-scenes history.”

Said Miller, “We knew that my father kept journals and diaries during the war, but we had no idea what was in them. These notes were on his personal stationery with his monogram on it. You can imagine our profound astonishment. It is such an extraordinary discovery because much of Japanese history was ruined in the war.”

“The wonderful thing for me now is that part of the puzzle which was missing is now there,” Cole Miller said of his grandfather’s memoirs. “I know what my grandfather said. . . . I’ve gotten to know him in a way that I would have never been able to know him otherwise. I wish I would have gotten to know him personally because it’s clear from his diaries that he was extremely funny.”

Last December, Miller, who makes her living giving talks on Japanese-American relations, and Cole toured Japan to publicize the diaries. Gwen Terasaki, 84, died of pneumonia before they could return.

“I tried to get back in time, and Japan Air Lines even held the flight, but we got stuck in a two-hour traffic jam. It was too late, “ Miller said.

“It has been my great misfortune in life that I was in America when my father died in Japan and I was in Japan when my mother died in America,” she added.

But after reading the translated diaries from beginning to end, Miller said, she felt a tremendous sense of solace.

“If you can imagine, one of the great tragedies of life is losing a parent when you’re very young,” she said. “I’ve always felt that my father was one of the first victims of the war. I have been haunted all my life by the things I wanted to say to him and by the fact that he never got to see his country emerge from the funeral pyre.

“The diaries have comforted me a great deal. . . . That he was able to work after the war must have given him a great deal of personal satisfaction,” she said.

“His work was so critical in helping his own country become a parliamentary democracy and join the democratic nations of the world and pursue the foreign friendship of America--which were his goals for Japan. I am so relieved to know he had a sense of contributing to his country before he died.”