Ghost of Hirohito still haunts as Japan fails to confront past

The completion by Japan's Imperial Household Agency of the 61-volume record of the life of Emperor Hirohito (1901-1989) has drawn much attention in Japan. The formidable work was recently opened to limited public viewing, with a plan to publish it over the next five years. But it is already clear that the new record inadvertently reflects Japan's continuing inability to address some fundamental questions about its past.

Having taken a quarter century to compile, the project relied on some 40 new sources, most notably the diary and notes of Saburo Hyakutake, an admiral who served as court chamberlain from 1936 to 1944. But, while acknowledging the enormous scale of the undertaking, specialists seem to agree that the new account offers no earth-shattering findings or innovative interpretations concerning Hirohito's many and changing roles in the most tumultuous period of Japan's modern history.

Perhaps this is not surprising, coming from a conservative imperial institution's official team of editors. The record takes to new lengths the idea that the historian's task, as Leopold von Ranke put it in the 19th century, is to show "what actually happened". It is said to be an excellent chronicle of the court's day-to-day goings-on, revealing, for example, that the emperor celebrated Christmas as a boy and had nose surgery in his youth, and how often he met with whom.

To be fair, such tidbits can be interesting and useful. But the new account fails to explain or analyze crucial events of Hirohito's reign. Readers will be disappointed if they want to learn more about Japan's entry into the Pacific War, its defeat, the Allied occupation (especially Hirohito's relationship with US General Douglas MacArthur), and Hirohito's later reluctance to visit Yasukuni Shrine, where Imperial Japan's war dead, including 14 Class-A war criminals, are honored.

What is already known about Hirohito is sketchy. That he was a tragically conflicted man is not news. As a young sovereign (imperial regent at age 20; emperor at 25), he had to assume contradictory roles: divine pater familias of the Japanese state and supreme commander of the imperial armed forces that were colonizing Japan's Asian neighbors. He could not have been the bravest or most decisive man, given that he was unable to resist rising militarism. But to say that he was powerless (and thus blameless) or did nothing to oppose it would also be wrong.