Self-delusion is a remarkable and underrepresented aspect of human nature. For it has the capacity to convince us that we are right when we are wrong, righteous when we are sinning, strong when we are weak. In an effort to ease the pain of the cognitive dissonance we experience every time we compare our actions to our morals, self-delusion sands down the rough edges until our two worldviews, the internal and the external, are once again in harmony. But of course, this way lies disaster. For eventually, after the internal has had its way with the external, our conception of the world is so far out of step with how things actually are that calamitous mistakes are inevitable. We have lost all perspective. And with that goes any hope of relating to anyone of consequence, much less anyone we care about. For the powerless, this is simply pitiable, but for the powerful, for those in whom society invests authority, the consequences can be disastrous. Mr. Bix demonstrates in this lengthy, scholarly biography.
The child of centuries old Japanese nobility, emperor Hirohito stood at a vital crossroads in 20th century history. Born in 1902, he was trained from the cradle to not only be the imperial ruler of an emerging world power, but to be a man of the military, to be disciplined, to be regimented, to be efficient. But more than a leader, more than a man invested by his people and their government with an authority second only to fascist dictators like Hitler and Mussolini, Hirohito was thought by many to be divine, to be a force through whom the will and the superiority of imperial Japan could be made manifest on the world stage. A warrior became the focus of a war machine that had but few rivals in the century's early decades.
With no checks in place to mitigate this unimaginable power, Hirohito used it. He shaped his government to suit his desires; He authorized territorial conquests in Manchuria and China, looking the other way when his soldiers committed abominable war crimes; he even bid that war be declared on world powers like the United States, heedless of his military's own assessments that Japan would be overmatched in such a conflict. He did all this while endorsing the very culture that kept him in power, believing in the conceit that he understood both his place in history and his family's position in his country's destiny. Such hubris drove his empire into ruin, causing the deaths of millions of soldiers in war and hundreds of thousands of citizens in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It destroyed the Japanese economy, ended imperial rule and directly lead to the American occupation of Japan. It lead to the end of the world that his family had so carefully imagined and that his supporters had so imprudently endorsed. It created a new Japan.
However, as Mr. Bix argues in this, his exhaustive biography of the last true emperor of japan, Hirohito himself escaped the consequences of his actions with only a few moderate wounds. He had to surrender his power and take up a largely ceremonial role in Japanese culture. He had to sit by and watch his country be transformed into a democracy. And he had to swallow the humiliating concessions made to japan's reformer, the United States. There would be no war crimes trial for Hirohito. For he was useful to japan's masters in Washington, Americans who, ignorant of Japanese culture, would invariably blunder in the country's westernization. He could glue the nation together while it was reborn into a new form, a new state.
This usefulness, contends Mr. Bix, lead to the suppression of Hirohito's role in WWII and the events that preceded it. Instead of the mastermind, Hirohito had been the victim of a militarized state. He was held captive by the influence of bellicose forces within Japan's government which foolishly sought out a war with the west. He was helpless to prevent the inevitable and destructive outcome. Perhaps, as the decades accumulated, he even believed this notion. But Mr. Bix does not. Arguing against the tide of popular opinion, he calls upon government records and the accounts of Hirohito's contemporaries to paint a different portrait of the man, one consistent with what we know of human nature, that power is corrupting, that to use it is destructive, and that to relinquish it is impossible. The idea that a man invested with ultimate authority refused to deploy that authority goes against everything we know about man and of Hirohito.
This is fascinating work. There can be no doubt that Mr. Bix has strongly held views on the role Hirohito played during WWII. But his scholarship and his willingness to declare his position on the matter, openly and honestly, lends his work here credibility. There's perhaps too much attention paid to the machinations of Japanese politics in the 1920s and 30s which must have been bewildering even then. But he nonetheless leaves us with a captivating portrait of a fascinating man who deserves both our pity, for the extent to which he was born into a life he could never change, and our scorn, for not rising above the world around him to be a visionary for his country. An intriguing study of a powerful man in a turbulent time... (3/5 Stars)
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