Noriko Kawamura. Emperor Hirohito and the Pacific War

A considerable amount of ink has been spilled over the question of why, if Emperor Hirohito had the power to stop the Pacific War on August 15, 1945, he had permitted it to start. Noriko Kawamura turns this question around to ask: “if, as we will see, the emperor could not stop Japan from going to war in the first place, how and why was he able to play a critical role in ending the war through his seidan [sacred intervention]?” (13) At the center of Kawamura’s inquiry lies the way in which the Emperor reconciled his own informed opinions of the war with the constitutional position he occupied as mediator between—or rather as pawn of—the ambivalent loyalties within and between leaders of government, the military, and the court. The result is a chronicle of Hirohito’s anguished participation in a twenty-year shipwreck from 1926 to 1946, a personal tragedy brought about by circumstances in which his preferences for peace were sidelined until they became the only way out in mid-August 1945

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