A Royal Denunciation of Horrors : Hirohito’s brother--an eyewitness--assails Japan’s wartime brutality

Fifty years later, the horror of the wartime atrocities a Japanese staff officer witnessed in China still haunt him. The graphic recollections are all the more remarkable because they come from Prince Mikasa, the youngest brother of the late Emperor Hirohito. Now 78, the prince startled Japan the other day when he went public with his condemnation--first voiced in 1944--of the military’s “policy of aggression” toward the Chinese.

He is the first member of the imperial family to openly criticize the military. In a remarkable interview with the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, the prince detailed the extent of military atrocities against the Chinese that he saw while assigned to an expeditionary force in the city of Nanking, now known as Nanjing. He also confirmed that he had condemned the aggression in a 1944 speech to some Japanese soldiers in China. What may be the only surviving copy of that speech was recently found in the library of Parliament.

His disclosures again raise the provocative questions of whether Emperor Hirohito knew more about his nation’s wartime atrocities than he had indicated. The prince said he never told his brother of his report, only “bits and pieces.” Historians will study the comments as possible evidence of the imperial family’s concerns about the military even during the war.

And for Japan as a nation, the prince’s half-century-old condemnation presents Japanese authorities with the continuing challenge of coming to terms with the wartime past, of candidly acknowledging the facts about Japan’s brutal occupation and war against other Asian nations in the 1930s and 1940s.

Textbooks, teachers and even some politicians perpetuate the pervasive view that Japan was not aggressive. One recent Cabinet member, who has since resigned, even denied that the Rape of Nanking had occurred.

Such nonsense mocks attempts in recent years by prime ministers and Hirohito’s son, Emperor Akihito, to publicly acknowledge, however elliptically, Tokyo’s true war past.

The prince’s forthright disclosures about the war atrocities are both important and long overdue.