---
title: "Hirohito"
chunk: 10/16
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirohito"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:06:28.660739+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Yasukuni Shrine ===
Hirohito maintained an official boycott of the Yasukuni Shrine after it was revealed to him that Class-A war criminals had secretly been enshrined after its post-war rededication. This boycott lasted from 1978 until his death and has been continued by his successors, Akihito and Naruhito.
On 20 July 2006, Nihon Keizai Shimbun published a front-page article about the discovery of a memorandum detailing the reason that Hirohito stopped visiting Yasukuni. The memorandum, kept by former chief of Imperial Household Agency Tomohiko Tomita, confirms for the first time that the enshrinement of 14 Class-A war criminals in Yasukuni was the reason for the boycott. Tomita recorded in detail the contents of his conversations with Hirohito in his diaries and notebooks. According to the memorandum, in 1988, Hirohito expressed his strong displeasure at the decision made by Yasukuni Shrine to include Class-A war criminals in the list of war dead honored there by saying, "At some point, Class-A criminals became enshrined, including Matsuoka and Shiratori. I heard Tsukuba acted cautiously." Tsukuba is believed to refer to Fujimaro Tsukuba, the former chief Yasukuni priest at the time, who decided not to enshrine the war criminals despite having received in 1966 the list of war dead compiled by the government. "What's on the mind of Matsudaira's son, who is the current head priest?" "Matsudaira had a strong wish for peace, but the child didn't know the parent's heart. That's why I have not visited the shrine since. This is my heart." Matsudaira is believed to refer to Yoshitami Matsudaira, who was the grand steward of the Imperial Household immediately after the end of World War II. His son, Nagayoshi, succeeded Fujimaro Tsukuba as the chief priest of Yasukuni and decided to enshrine the war criminals in 1978.

== Death and state funeral ==

On 22 September 1987, Hirohito underwent surgery on his pancreas after having digestive problems for several months. The doctors discovered that he had duodenal cancer. Hirohito appeared to be making a full recovery for several months after the surgery. About a year later, however, on 19 September 1988, he collapsed in his palace, and his health worsened over the next several months as he suffered from continuous internal bleeding.
The Emperor died at 6:33 am on 7 January 1989 at the age of 87. The announcement from the grand steward of Japan's Imperial Household Agency, Shoichi Fujimori, revealed details about his cancer for the first time. Hirohito was survived by his wife, his five surviving children, ten grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.
At the time of his death, he was both the oldest and longest-reigning historical Japanese emperor, as well as the longest-reigning living monarch in the world at that time, a distinction which passed to the Prince of Liechtenstein, Franz Joseph II, until his own death in November of the same year.
The Emperor was succeeded by his eldest son, Akihito (r. 1989–2019), whose enthronement ceremony was held on 12 November 1990 at the Tokyo Imperial Palace.
Hirohito's death ended the Shōwa era. On the next day, 8 January 1989, a new era began: the Heisei era, effective at midnight the following day. From 7 January until 31 January, Hirohito's formal appellation was "Departed Emperor" (大行天皇, Taikō-tennō). His definitive posthumous name, Emperor Shōwa (昭和天皇, Shōwa-tennō), was determined on 13 January and formally released on 31 January by Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita.
On 24 February, Hirohito's state funeral was held at the Shinjuku Gyo-en, and unlike that of his predecessor, it was formal but not conducted in a strictly Shinto manner. A large number of world leaders attended the funeral. Hirohito was buried in the Musashi Imperial Graveyard in Hachiōji, Tokyo alongside his late parents. Following his wife's death in 2000, she was buried near him.

== Accountability for Japanese war crimes ==

The issue of Emperor Hirohito's war responsibility remains contested. During the war, the Allies frequently depicted Hirohito to equate with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as the three Axis dictators. According to Bix, U.S. authorities thought that the retention of the emperor would help establish a peaceful allied occupation regime in Japan and they therefore depicted Hirohito as a "powerless figurehead" without any implication in wartime policies. Starting with the publication of specific archival records in the 1960s and continuing after Hirohito's death in 1989, a growing body of evidence and historical studies started to dispute the theory that he was a powerless figurehead. In recent years, the debate over the Emperor's role in the war has focused on the exact extent of his involvement in political and military affairs (as it is now widely accepted that he had at least some degree of involvement).

Historian Peter Wetzler said that: "The debate, however, about Hirohito's participation in political and military affairs during the Second World War -whether or not (at first) and to what extent (later)- still continues. It will animate authors for years to come. Now most historians acknowledge that the Emperor was deeply involved, like all nation-state leaders at that time."
Jennifer Lind, associate professor of government at Dartmouth College and a specialist in Japanese war memory, states that: "Over the years, these different pieces of evidence have trickled out and historians have amassed this picture of culpability and how he was reflecting on that. This is another piece of the puzzle that very much confirms that the picture that was taking place before, which is that he was extremely culpable, and after the war he was devastated about this." As new evidence surfaced over the years, historians concluded that he bore at least some amount of culpability for the war's outbreak and the crimes perpetrated by Japan's military during that period.

=== Evidence for wartime culpability ===

==== Historians' assessments ====