A message from the Showa Emperor

Abstract

The American occupation of Japan following World War II lasted from 1945 to 1952 and produced a mixed legacy. Initially, the Americans promoted a progressive and even revolutionary agenda of 'demilitarization and democratization.' As the cold war intensified, however, a 'reverse course' policy assumed center stage, in which U.S. policy-makers threw their support behind the reconstruction of Japan as a conservative cold war bastion against the rise of communism in Asia. In his recent book Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, John W. Dower assesses these developments, paying particular attention to how the Japanese people themselves responded to defeat and the multiple challenges of creating a new society. The essay that follows below expands on one of the themes in Embracing Defeat: 'oxymoronic democracy.' One aspect of this was the 'bureaucratic democracy' that the U.S. occupation authorities promoted through their own authoritarian, top-down modus operandi. Another manifestation of 'oxymoronic democracy'-that focused on in this article-was the peculiar 'emperor-system democracy' that General Douglas MacArthur and his top aides ensured by not only retaining the Japanese imperial institution, but also insisting that Emperor Hirohito, whose reign defined the 'Showa era' (1926-1989), be exonerated from war responsibility and retained on the throne. This article introduces (and reproduces in full) a formerly top-secret 'message' from Emperor Hirohito to the Americans that Professor Dower came upon after completing Embracing Defeat. Embracing Defeat won the 1999 National Book Award in nonfiction, and was awarded the 1999 John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association (for best historical study dealing with Asia since 1800). This present article was originally published in the September 1999 issue of the Japanese journal Sekai (and later cited as one of the 'best articles of 1999' in the newspaper Asahi Shimbun). A slightly abridged version in English, titled 'The Showa Emperor and Japan's Postwar Imperial Democracy,' was published by the Japan Policy Research Institute (Cardiff, Calif.) as IPRI Working Paper no. 61 (October 1999). BCAS is grateful to Chalmers Johnson of the JPRI for permission to reproduce this original version of the text.