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Is Japan's Emperor Akihito Trying To Stop Abe?

This article is more than 8 years old.

It is a puzzle, with an intriguing, possibly explosive, solution.

Why now, after 70 years, did Japan’s Imperial Household Agency on August 1 agree to release the original phonograph record of Emperor Hirohito's surrender speech first broadcast to the nation and the world on August 15, 1945?

The most probable answer is that Hirohito’s son, reigning Emperor Akihito, now 81, ordered the release. So speculates one of Japan’s most insightful pundits and critic of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's foreign and security policies, former  diplomat, Amaki Naoto.

Why would Akihito do this? It is because he is deeply concerned about the foreign and, particularly, security policies of the Abe government, most immediately Abe’s patently unconstitutional new security legislation.

This legislation, which fundamentally alters the pacifist, self-limiting, strictly self-defensive security doctrine of the past 70 years, was passed last month by the Diet Lower House and is now before the Diet Upper House. Some 60 percent of Japanese respondents have told pollsters that they oppose Abe’s new security direction.

Akihito is, believes Amaki, sending a message to the Japanese people, especially young people, and to the Abe government that they should remember and deeply reflect upon the suffering, death, and destruction that Japan brought upon itself (and of course to other countries and peoples) by its launch and prosecution of war. Rather than altering Article 9 of Japan’s Peace Constitution, they should rededicate themselves to its letter and spirit.

This is the time of year, every year, that the Japanese people think again about the war, about the fire-bombings of Japan’s major cities, about the battle of Okinawa (82 days from early April to mid-June 1945), and, especially the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9).

August 15 is the day Japan commemorates the war’s end. The emperor and empress attend a memorial ceremony at Tokyo’s Budokan. Akihoto will deliver a short speech, about which he is likely now thinking.

Akihito has surely been deeply conflicted and frustrated by the discourse and direction he is seeing coming from the Abe government. Constrained by custom in what he can publicly say, he has—we may believe--chosen the highly symbolic gesture of releasing the original phonograph disk of his father’s surrender speech to express his alarm. By doing so, he is lending enormous moral support for an increasingly organized, vocal, and effective anti-Abe security legislation, pro-Article 9 popular movement.

Emperor Akihito has for many years distinguished himself by his earnest expressions of deep regret and sympathy for the victims of Japan’s wartime aggressions, articulated during visits to places like Palau in the South Pacific. On June 3, welcoming Philippines’ president Benigno Aquino, at a palace banquet, Akihito, according to the official Imperial Household Agency translation, said

“During World War II, however, fierce battles between Japan and the United States took place on Philippine soil, resulting in the loss of many Filipino lives. This is something we Japanese must long remember with a profound sense of remorse. In particular, in this year of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, I offer my deepest condolences to all those who lost their lives then."

Considering the strict limits imposed on Japan’s emperor, constitutionally only a symbol of the Japanese nation with no political role and not a head of state, Akihito’s words and deeds, however subtle and indirect, are seen by many as purposely contrasting with Prime Minister Abe’s “let’s stop dwelling on history” and “let Japan again be a ‘normal country’” agenda.

What more forceful and emotive contrast with Abe’s agenda could be imagined that to recall the words of Akihoto’s father, officially the “Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War”? They are, in part:

“To Our Good and Loyal Subjects:

“After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in Our Empire today, We have decided to effect a settlement…

“We have ordered Our Government to communicate to the Governments of the United States, Great Britain, China and the Soviet Union that Our Empire accepts the provisions of the Joint [Potsdam] Declaration….

“…the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone…the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage…

“Moreover, the enemy has enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb…. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization…

“The thought of …officers and men as well as others who have fallen in the fields of battle, those who died at their posts of duty, or those who met with untimely death and all their bereaved families, pains Our heart night and day.

“The welfare of the wounded and the war sufferers, and of those who have lost their homes and livelihood, are the objects of Our profound solicitude.

“The hardships and sufferings to which Our nation is to be subjected hereafter will be certainly great. We are keenly aware of the inmost feeling of all of you, Our subjects. However, it is according to the dictates of time and fate that We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what its unsufferable (sic).

…”Let the entire national continue as one family from generation to generation, ever firm in its faith in the imperishability of its sacred land, and mindful of its heavy burden of responsibility, and of the long road before it….”

What are Japan’s citizens thinking and feeling as they once again listen to these words, re-broadcast thanks to Emperor Akihoto’s magnificent gambit? My guess is that most of them are growing more deeply dismayed if not also fearful and distraught by the direction in which the Abe government is leading them.