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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hirohito | 13/16 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirohito | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T04:06:28.660739+00:00 | kb-cron |
In Hirohito's monologue: It doesn't matter much if an incident occurs in Manchuria, as it is rural; however, if something were to happen in the Tientsin-Peking area, Anglo-American intervention would likely worsen and could lead to a clash. While he could justify the aggression of his military in China's northeastern provinces, he lacked confidence in Japan's capacity to win a war against the United States and Britain. He was also more aware than his military commanders of Japan's vulnerability to an economic blockade by Western powers. Japan signed the Tripartite Pact in 1940 and another agreement in December 1941 that forbade Japan from signing a separate peace treaty with the United States. In the Dokuhaku roku, Hirohito said:
(In 1941,) we thought we could achieve a draw with the US, or at best win by a six to four margin; but total victory was nearly impossible ... When the war actually began, however, we gained a miraculous victory at Pearl Harbor and our invasions of Malaya and Burma succeeded far quicker than expected. So, if not for this (agreement), we might have achieved peace when we were in an advantageous position. The passage in the Dokuhaku roku refutes the theory that Hirohito wanted an early conclusion to the war owing to his value for peace. Instead, it provides evidence that he desired its end because of Japan's early military victories in Pearl Harbor and Southeast Asia. In September 1944, Prime Minister Kuniaki Koiso proposed that a settlement and concessions, such as the return of Hong Kong, should be given to Chiang Kai-shek, so that Japanese troops in China could be diverted to the Pacific War. Hirohito rejected the proposal and did not want to give concessions to China because he feared it would signal Japanese weakness, create defeatism at home, and trigger independence movements in occupied countries. As the war shifted unfavorably for Japan, his sentiments were recorded in the Dokuhaku roku as follows:
I hoped to give the enemy one good bashing somewhere, and then seize a chance for peace. Yet I didn't want to ask for peace before Germany did because then we would lose trust in the international community for having violated that corollary agreement. As the war front progressed northward, Hirohito persistently hoped for the Japanese military to deliver a "good bashing" at some point during the war, which meant securing a decisive victory and then leveraging that success to negotiate the most favorable terms possible for Japan. In the autumn of 1944, he hoped for a victory at Battle of Leyte Gulf, but Japan suffered defeat. On 14 February 1945, Fumimaro Konoe wrote a proposal to Hirohito, urging him to quell extremist elements within the military and end the war. Konoe argued that although surrendering to America might preserve imperial rule, it would not survive a communist revolution he believed was imminent. Hirohito was troubled by the ambiguity surrounding America's commitment to upholding imperial rule. He considered the advice of Army Chief of Staff Yoshijirō Umezu, who advocated for continuing the fight to the bitter end, believing that the Americans could be lured into a trap on Taiwan, where they could be defeated. However, the Americans avoided Taiwan. Despite the defeat at the Battle of Okinawa and acknowledging Japan's imminent unconditional surrender following this defeat, Hirohito persisted in seeking another battlefield where a "good bashing" could be achieved, considering locations such as Yunnan or Burma. In August 1945, Hirohito agreed to the Potsdam Declaration because he thought that the American occupation of Japan would uphold imperial rule in Japan.
===== Shinobu Kobayashi's diary ===== Shinobu Kobayashi was the Emperor's chamberlain from April 1974 until June 2000. Kobayashi kept a diary with near-daily remarks of Hirohito for 26 years. It was made public on Wednesday 22 August 2018. According to Takahisa Furukawa, a professor of modern Japanese history at Nihon University, the diary reveals that the emperor "gravely took responsibility for the war for a long time, and as he got older, that feeling became stronger." Jennifer Lind, associate professor of government at Dartmouth College and a specialist in Japanese war memory said:
"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." An entry dated 27 May 1980 said the Emperor wanted to express his regret about the Sino-Japanese war to former Chinese Premier Hua Guofeng who visited at the time, but was stopped by senior members of the Imperial Household Agency owing to fear of backlash from far right groups. An entry dated 7 April 1987 said the Emperor was haunted by discussions of his wartime responsibility and, as a result, was losing his will to live.
===== Michiji Tajima's notes ===== According to notebooks by Michiji Tajima, a top Imperial Household Agency official who took office after the war, Emperor Hirohito privately expressed regret about the atrocities that were committed by Japanese troops during the Nanjing Massacre. In addition to feeling remorseful about his own role in the war, he "fell short by allowing radical elements of the military to drive the conduct of the war."
===== Saburō Hyakutake's diary ===== In September 2021, 25 diaries, pocket notebooks and memos by Saburō Hyakutake (Emperor Hirohito's Grand Chamberlain from 1936 to 1944) deposited by his relatives to the library of the University of Tokyo's graduate schools for law and politics became available to the public. Hyakutake's diary quotes some of Hirohito's ministers and advisers as being worried that the Emperor was getting ahead of them in terms of battle preparations. Thus, Hyakutake quotes Tsuneo Matsudaira, the Imperial Household Minister, saying: