Lecture 2003-11-03
"Herbert Bix and his Hirohito: On the Use and Misuse of Sources"
Professor George Akita

A cold wind did not keep people away from the November meeting, as members turned out in good numbers for what promised to be, and was in fact, a stimulating occasion. Our speaker was Professor Emeritus George Akita of the University of Hawaii, and his subject was "Bix and his Hirohito; On the Use and Misuse of Sources."

Prof. Akita prefaced his talk by saying that he had once been attacked by Bix for an article he had written in 1977 on E.H. Norman's Japan's Emergence as a Modern State. In the footnotes Norman had cited an impressive number of Japanese language sources, as if he himself had translated them, but Prof. Akita had discovered that Norman had in fact merely edited the Japanese author's translation in nearly every case, and had been sharply criticized by Bix for pointing this out. (The accuracy of Prof. Akita's observations has been borne out by Roger Bowen, who was granted access to Norman's papers; one of his findings was that Norman was "functionally illiterate in Japanese".) Bix himself, in a speech made at the Foreign Correspondents' Club in 2002, expressed pride in the fact that his Hirohito had been based entirely on written materials, and challenged readers to check his footnotes for themselves. This Prof. Akita proceeded to do, with results that he now proposed to present to us.

Herbert P. Bix's massive Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York, Harper Collins, 2000) was received with wild acclaim by journalists and scholars as a monumental study based on assiduous and superb research  of documents. It received the 2000 National Book Critics Award for Biography and Autobiography and the 2001 Pulitzer prize for General Non-fiction.  Special mention was made by reviewers of the 1,530 footnotes, 80-90% of which referred to Japanese sources. Bix's conclusion was that there was no doubt that the Meiji and Showa emperors had possessed real powers and had acted decisively in the exercise of those powers.

Prof. Akita, while stressing that he had no personal animus against Bix, said that he now proposed to show that Bix had failed to maintain the standards of rigorous scholarship, and his approach had been more that of a novelist. Bix had admitted at the start that personal writings by the Showa emperor were virtually non-existent. So how had Bix set about surmounting this obstacle? He had firstly made a virtue out of the emperor's veil of silence; secondly he had imagined what the emperor could have thought, said or meant; and thirdly he had asked the reader to accept his explanation of what could have happened. As an example of the first case, Bix had captioned a photo with the words that the emperor had supported a stronger military policy against China by his silence. In the second case, Bix constantly used phrases like "Hirohito may also come to feel...",  "in Hirohito's imaginings,...", "while continuing to imagine...", and "this...mindset...was probably shared by Hirohito".

A reviewer of a novel had once said "Good journalists don't claim to know what their subjects are thinking; good novelists do so for a living." Here the word "historians" could be substituted for "journalists", Prof. Akita said. Ironically, Bix had revealed at the Foreign Correspondents' Club that he was aware of the distinction when he said of David Bergamini's Japan's Imperial Conspiracy that many passages in the book seemed to have been "imaginatively constructed"

Prof. Akita took up Bix's invitation to examine his footnotes, and those that he had examined for the purpose of this lecture had led him to the conclusion that Bix's scholarship did not stand up to the claims made for it (that it was "meticulous", "exhaustive" and "assiduous").  In particular, he took up the major component of Bix's case against the emperor, which was that he was a military leader. True, the Meiji Constitution specified that the emperor was the supreme commander of the army and the navy, and presumably it was on the basis of this that Bix asserted that the Meiji emperor personally took direct command during military manoeuvres. The indispensable source on the Meiji emperor (notably used by Donald Keene for his book on the emperor) is the Meiji Tennôki, which Bix does not seem to have used.  Of the emperor's role in the manoeuvres, it uses words meaning "observe", "review", "witness", but no words to indicate that he took personal command. Moreover, the size of his entourage, including the empress and several princesses, would rather suggest an occasion such as a cherry-blossom viewing. In the aftermath of one set of manoeuvres, the emperor was required to attend the customary banquet, and suddenly decided not to attend. He was eventually persuaded to go, but limited himself to merely greeting the guests, and then left immediately. Another occasion, when he refused to receive the supreme commander, Yamagata Aritomo, pleading illness, suggests even more strongly how low the manoeuvres were in the emperor's sense of priorities. All these entries in the Meiji Tennôki indicate that the emperor's role was basically ceremonial, and that he did not consider his presence essential for the success of the manoeuvres.  The fact that Bix failed to consult the Meiji Tennôki  on such matters is a serious indictment of the claims that he was assiduous and exhaustive in his research.

When we come to the Showa emperor, we have good materials on his period as crown prince in the diary kept by Nara Takeji, who accompanied him on his European tour. As regards his role in the military manoeuvres of November 1921, following his return from Europe, Nara does admittedly use the word tôkan  ("overall command", the word used earlier to describe Yamagata's role), which seems to substantiate Bix's statement that the crown prince directly commanded the manoeuvres. However, in the case of the landing operation phase of the naval manoeuvres, the crown prince was said to tairan, a word for inspection by the imperial family. Furthermore, the landing operation had to be cancelled because of bad weather, so the crown prince heard a lecture instead, hardly a legitimate substitute for "overall command". There are further accounts of his attendance at manoeuvres after he became emperor, which all speak of his "personally reviewing" them (shin'etsu); it is significant that two of these occasions take place in 1939 and 1940, at the height of the Japanese operations in China, when, if Bix is correct, the emperor would have been expected to take command.

A further criticism of Bix is that, so far from following the accepted view that the crown prince evolved into a constitutional monarch thanks to his European tour, Bix employs the "guilt by association" tactic to taint him with fascism. In Italy, the crown prince spent time with King Victor Emmanuel III, who would "soon" become "a keen admirer of Mussolini" (who came to power all of fifteen months later). He also gratuitously, and anachronistically, associates the prince once more with Mussolini in writing of his being invited to a sporting event sponsored by the Italian military, which was "already" influenced by "Mussolini's Fascist Movement". Moreover, it is not at all clear that the king was ever a "keen admirer" of Mussolini, but it appears rather that he accepted the Fascists under compulsion.  Nara writes positively of King Victor Emmanuel that he was sensitive to the mood of public opinion, and made an effort to encourage simplicity and frugality in his daily life and in state receptions, a practice which is also typical of Japan's imperial family. He also states that the military did not "sponsor" the sporting event,  but merely participated in it.

Another account of the crown prince's 1921 European tour is given by Irokawa Daikichi in his The Age of Hirohito: In Search of Modern Japan (1995), in which he speaks of two events that deeply impressed the crown prince. The first was the British royal family's relatively open and close relationship with the people, which the crown prince decided to emulate. The second was the shock of seeing the utter devastation at Verdun, which convinced him that modern war was no longer an option for humanity.

Prof. Akita closed his critique by referring to an article on Bix by Hasegawa Hiroshi which appeared in AERA in December 2002. While he was writing the article,  Hasegawa told Prof. Akita that he had a tentative title "Naive Fiction" in mind for his article; but in the end he settled for "Showa Tenno Kenkyû no Giman" (A Deceptive -- or even Fraudulent --Study of the Showa Emperor).

In summing up his conclusions, Prof. Akita said that firstly Bix had filled up the gaps in his sources by creative imagination, a method more suited to novelists. Second, he had ignored all sources that might invalidate his assertions. Third, he was less than thorough in using even the sources he quoted. Fourth, he had failed to bear in mind the fact that primary sources themselves may not be trustworthy, an observation that applied particularly to two sources he had relied on heavily, the diaries of Makino Shinken and Kido Kôichi. Diaries intended for publication were often written for a purpose, and in doing so evaded the truth (an observation that was made recently by a reviewer of Hillary Clinton's best-seller). Finally,  Prof.  Akita said that he might have been too impassioned in his presentation;  after all, there was much to admire in Bix's narrative ability!

Prof Akita left ample time for questions, which came thick and fast, particularly from people who had recently read Bix's book and had a copy of it in their hands.

Asked if there were there any occasions when an emperor did in fact command manoeuvres, Prof. Akita said that the Meiji emperor actually tried to get out of going to Kumamoto, despite his strong sense of duty!

To another question, as to whether the emperor was, in  fact, absolved from responsibility for the war, he gave as his personal view a somewhat complex answer: (1) many Japanese consider the man at the top to bear the moral responsibility, as had recently been  demonstrated once again in a recent business scandal, when the superiors of the actual perpetrator accepted blame; (2) it is possible to take the  Constitution literally, as Bix does, and assert that the emperor is in command of the armed forces; (3) but if you look at what the emperor really could and couldn't do,  you find that when his subordinates had made a decision, he was not able to say "no";  (4) the emperor's true role is that of a shaman, one who mediates between the people and the kami; the administration is carried out by those below him, and in Prof. Akita's view, it was they who were responsible.

Asked: (a) Did Bix feel the emperor was too well-protected by his subordinates? and (b) was the emperor a perfect hostage during the occupation? Akita pointed out that the emperor did offer to abdicate, three times. He also mentioned an account written by a man who had accompanied the then crown prince right across the United States; he never said anything in public without prior consultation; indeed, the only occasion when he showed any animation and spontaneity was when shown the fish in which he was interested.

Somebody else inverted the argument and asked: who gets the credit for the decision to surrender if the emperor was not responsible? Akita opined that this was done by the intuition of his advisers;  if the decision had been made too early, the emperor might have been assassinated.

On the question of Bix's ideological affiliations, Prof. Akita said that Bix was a disciple of E.H. Norman, and was a member of the Committee of Concerned Scholars who praised Mao's revolution and supported revolution in Asia.   Another comment was that there will always be gaps in the public record, and memoirs and diaries are written for publication; there are some matters that we cannot ever know for certain. But possibly the emperor's overwhelming concern was the survival of his blood line, which had a religious element. Akita summed up by saying that we can only give the best answer possible at any given time -- but we still don't know!

The meeting closed with a vote of thanks proposed by Prof. Charles De Wolf, who said he had bought the book, read it, and come to the same conclusions as Prof. Akita had given in his fine presentation. He personally had more dealings with linguists, who "do not care about the truth, but only models that work!"