Hirohito: The Trial of the Emperor is a book of information and training, a reference book that should be read as an educational tool on Japan's war in South East Asia and the Pacific. The book opens the debate on Hirohito's responsibility during World War II with a posthumous trial against the Japanese emperor before the Permanent Peoples' Court for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

Hirohito: Guilty or Innocent: The Trial of the Emperor is a book of information and training, a reference book that should be read as an educational tool on Japan’s war in South East Asia and the Pacific. The book opens the debate on Hirohito’s responsibility during World War II with a posthumous trial against the Japanese emperor before the Permanent Peoples’ Court for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

This book assesses the historical significance of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE)--commonly called the Tokyo trial--established as the eastern counterpart of the Nuremberg trial in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Through extensive research in Japanese, American, Australian, and Indian archives, Yuma Totani taps into a large body of previously underexamined sources to explore some of the central misunderstandings and historiographical distortions that have persisted to the present day. Foregrounding these voluminous records, Totani disputes the notion that the trial was an exercise in "victors' justice" in which the legal process was egregiously compromised for political and ideological reasons; rather, the author details the achievements of the Allied prosecution teams in documenting war crimes and establishing the responsibility of the accused parties to show how the IMTFE represented a sound application of the legal principles established at Nuremberg. This study deepens our knowledge of the historical intricacies surrounding the Tokyo trial and advances our understanding of the Japanese conduct of war and occupation during World War II, the range of postwar debates on war guilt, and the relevance of the IMTFE to the continuing development of international humanitarian law.

Hirohito: Guilty or Innocent: The Trial of the Emperor is a book of information and training, a reference book that should be read as an educational tool on Japan's war in South East Asia and the Pacific. The book opens the debate on Hirohito's responsibility during World War II with a posthumous trial against the Japanese emperor before the Permanent Peoples' Court for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

Hirohito: The Trial of the Emperor is a book of information and training, a reference book that should be read as an educational tool on Japan's war in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The book opens the debate on Hirohito's responsibility during World War II with a posthumous trial against the Japanese emperor before the Permanent Peoples' Court for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Career judge, teacher, writer, Jean Sénat Fleury was born in Haiti and currently lives in Boston. A former intern at the National School of Magistrates (Paris and Bordeaux), he has held various positions within the Haitian judiciary. He was in turn a trainer at the National Police Academy (1995-1996) and director of studies at the School of Magistrates of Pétion-Ville (2000-2004). Author of the book on The Stamp Trial, he wrote several other historical works such as: Jean-Jacques Dessalines: Words from Beyond the Grave, Toussaint Louverture: The Trial of the Slave Trafficking, Adolf Hitler: Trial in Absentia in Nuremberg, and The Trial of Osama Bin Laden. Mr. Fleury had immigrated to the United States in 2007. He earned a master's degree in public administration and a second in political science from Suffolk University. In 2014, Mr. Fleury became director of the Caribbean Arts Gallery, and founded a charity organization called Art-For-Change. His recent book, Hirohito: Guilty or Innocent: The Trial of the Emperor, is a historical account, written in a novelistic style. The book provides an understanding of the atrocities of the Imperial Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II, particularly the crimes of Unit 731.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize In this groundbreaking biography of the Japanese emperor Hirohito, Herbert P. Bix offers the first complete, unvarnished look at the enigmatic leader whose sixty-three-year reign ushered Japan into the modern world. Never before has the full life of this controversial figure been revealed with such clarity and vividness. Bix shows what it was like to be trained from birth for a lone position at the apex of the nation's political hierarchy and as a revered symbol of divine status. Influenced by an unusual combination of the Japanese imperial tradition and a modern scientific worldview, the young emperor gradually evolves into his preeminent role, aligning himself with the growing ultranationalist movement, perpetuating a cult of religious emperor worship, resisting attempts to curb his power, and all the while burnishing his image as a reluctant, passive monarch. Here we see Hirohito as he truly was: a man of strong will and real authority. Supported by a vast array of previously untapped primary documents, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan is perhaps most illuminating in lifting the veil on the mythology surrounding the emperor's impact on the world stage. Focusing closely on Hirohito's interactions with his advisers and successive Japanese governments, Bix sheds new light on the causes of the China War in 1937 and the start of the Asia-Pacific War in 1941. And while conventional wisdom has had it that the nation's increasing foreign aggression was driven and maintained not by the emperor but by an elite group of Japanese militarists, the reality, as witnessed here, is quite different. Bix documents in detail the strong, decisive role Hirohito played in wartime operations, from the takeover of Manchuria in 1931 through the attack on Pearl Harbor and ultimately the fateful decision in 1945 to accede to an unconditional surrender. In fact, the emperor stubbornly prolonged the war effort and then used the horrifying bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, together with the Soviet entrance into the war, as his exit strategy from a no-win situation. From the moment of capitulation, we see how American and Japanese leaders moved to justify the retention of Hirohito as emperor by whitewashing his wartime role and reshaping the historical consciousness of the Japanese people. The key to this strategy was Hirohito's alliance with General MacArthur, who helped him maintain his stature and shed his militaristic image, while MacArthur used the emperor as a figurehead to assist him in converting Japan into a peaceful nation. Their partnership ensured that the emperor's image would loom large over the postwar years and later decades, as Japan began to make its way in the modern age and struggled -- as it still does -- to come to terms with its past. Until the very end of a career that embodied the conflicting aims of Japan's development as a nation, Hirohito remained preoccupied with politics and with his place in history. Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan provides the definitive account of his rich life and legacy. Meticulously researched and utterly engaging, this book is proof that the history of twentieth-century Japan cannot be understood apart from the life of its most remarkable and enduring leader.

This reexamination of the controversial role Emperor Hirohito played during the Pacific War gives particular attention to the question: If the emperor could not stop Japan from going to war with the Allied Powers in 1941, why was he able to play a crucial role in ending the war in 1945? Drawing on previously unavailable primary sources, Noriko Kawamura traces Hirohito’s actions from the late 1920s to the end of the war, analyzing the role Hirohito played in Japan’s expansion. Emperor Hirohito emerges as a conflicted man who struggled throughout the war to deal with the undefined powers bestowed upon him as a monarch, often juggling the contradictory positions and irreconcilable differences advocated by his subordinates. Kawamura shows that he was by no means a pacifist, but neither did he favor the reckless wars advocated by Japan’s military leaders.

Emperor Hirohito reigned for more than sixty years, yet we know little about him or the part he really played in the turbulent history of Showa Japan. Stephen Large draws on a wide range of Japanese and Western sources in his study of Emperor Hirohito's political role in Showa Japan (1926-89). This analysis focuses on key events in his career such as the extent to which he bore responsibility for Japanese aggression in the Pacific in 1941, and explains why Hirohito remains such a contested symbol in Japanese post war politics.

When the Emperor Hirohito died in 1989, Japanese newspapers had to use a special, exalted word to refer to his death, and had to depict his life uncritically, as one beginning in turbulence but ending in magnificent accomplishment. To do otherwise would have exposed them to terrorism from the vigilant right wing. Yet this insightful book by a Japanese-American scholar who grew up in both cultures reveals the hidden fault lines in the realm of the dying emperor by telling the stories of three unlikely dissenters: a supermarket owner who burned the national flag; an aging widow who challenged the state's "deification" of fallen soldiers; and the mayor of Nagasaki, who risked his career and his life by suggesting that Hirohito bore some responsibility for World War II.

An explosive reinterpretation of the history of 20th century Japanese expansionism, Hirohito goes beyond the myth of the remote figurehead and shows that Emperor Hirohito was actively involved in the direction of Japan's conduct in World War II.