(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-11-01 11:37

TOKYO - A top US scholar of wartime Japan said Wednesday that the Bush administration's "war on terror" bore close parallels to Japan's past militarism through a defiance of international law.

This handout file picture taken in 1987 by the Imperial Household Agency (IHA) shows the late Japanese Emperor Hirohito at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. [Agencies]

Herbert Bix, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his landmark biography of wartime emperor Hirohito, said he believed US aerial bombings and alleged use of torture in Afghanistan and Iraq constituted war crimes.

"The current American rampage in Iraq and elsewhere, not to mention the Bush administration's threats of war against Iran, so clearly replicates Imperial Japan during the period when its leaders willfully disregarded international law and pursued the diplomacy of force," Bix said during a visit to Tokyo.

Bix compared Japan's action to current US efforts to scuttle the Treaty of Rome establishing the International Criminal Court, which President George W. Bush argues could unfairly target Americans.

He also said that senior US leaders - not just rank-and-file soldiers - should have been held to account for the killings of 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha.

"US war criminality is justice institutionalised, as Japan's once was," Bix said.

"In today's America, torture is not only standard battlefield practice in the so-called war on terror. Torture is celebrated in American popular culture as evidenced by the popularity of '24,' a TV programme in which the hero confronts a ticking bomb scenario... designed to justify torture."

But Bix, a professor at Binghamton University in New York state, said he remained optimistic for change as most Americans were opposed to "the Washington consensus."

Bix is best known for writing "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan," in which he described the emperor as a shrewd architect of the war.

The book remains highly controversial in Japan, where most historians have portrayed Hirohito, who was never prosecuted and stayed on the throne until his death in 1989, as a figurehead detached from war planning.