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Showa History, Rising Nationalism, and the Abe Government
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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On September 9, 2014, the Imperial Household Agency released to the public its carefully vetted Authentic Account of the Showa Emperor's Life and Reign (Showa Tenno Jitsuroku). This was the long-awaited official version of nearly every aspect of Emperor Hirohito's long life and reign. Compilers, researchers, and outside scholars of the Agency's Archives and Mausoleum Department—including a few specialists in modern Japanese history–started on the project in 1990. It took nearly a quarter century to finish. Through negotiations they secured the cooperation of imperial family members, chamberlains, and others who had worked closely with the emperor and were prone to self-censorship in revealing what they knew about him. They collected a huge trove of 3,152 primary materials, including some unpublished, even unknown diaries of military and civil officials, all of which were arranged chronologically in 61 volumes.
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.- Copyright
- Copyright © The Authors 2015
References
Notes
I thank Mark Selden, John Dower, and Gavan McCormack for helpful comments.
1 Henshubu, “Kunaicho OB ga akashita hensan no uchimaku,” Bungei Shinjjuu, October 2014, pp. 124-130.
2 For over half a century historians and political scientists wrote important critical works on Hirohito and his performance as emperor. To name just a very few: Inoue Kiyoshi, Awaya Kentaro, Fujiwara Akira, Yoshida Yutaka, Yamada Akira, Watanabe Osamu, and Nakamura Masanori.
3 Herbert P. Bix, “Hirohito: String Puller, Not Puppet,” New York Times, Sept. 29, 2014.
4 Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (HarperCollins Publisher, Perennial, pb, 2000), p. 676. The brave journalist who dared to ask these questions was Nakamura Koji. See Norihiro Kato, “The Journalist and the Emperor: Daring to Ask Hirohito About His Role in WW II,” New York Times Op-Ed, Oct. 14, 2014.
5 Yuka Hayashi, “Piketty on Japan: Wealth Gap Likely to Rise,” The Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2014.
6 Watanabe Osamu, “Abe seiken to wa nani ka,” in Watanabe Osamu, Okada Tomohiro, Goto Michio, Ninomiya Atsumi, ‘Taikoku’ e no shitsunen—Abe seiken to Nihon no kiki (Otsuki Shoten, 2014), p. 147ff. and private e-mail communications with Professor Watanabe.
7 Adam Lebowitz and David McNeill, “Hammering Down the Educational Nail: Abe Revises the Fundamental Law of Education, Japan Focus, July 9, 2007.
8 Gavan McCormack, “The End of the Postwar? The Abe Government, Okinawa, and Yonaguni Island,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Vol. 12, Issue 48, No. 3 (Dec. 8, 2014).
9 Committee of the Historical Science Society of Japan (Rekishigaku kenkyukai) Public Statement, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, English translation of Dec. 5, 2014.
10 Martin Fackler, “Rewriting the War, Japanese Right Attacks a Newspaper,” New York Times Dec. 2, 2014.
11 “Reexamining the ‘Comfort Women’ Issue: An Interview with Yoshimi Yoshiaki,” transl. by Yuki Miyamoto, introduced by Satoko Norimatsu, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 1, No. 1, Jan. 5, 2014.
12 “Dai kyukai Nihonjin no ishiki chosa” (2013).
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