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World conditions, it is hoped, also will be peaceful.
Sometimes on his white stallion, Shira-yuki, or in his crimson Rolls-Royce, he passed in public parade across the moat around his castle. Almost always his subjects hailed him with traditional banzais and reverential bows. But in 1932 an unidentified assailant threw a bomb at the Emperor's carriage, slightly wounding two horses of the imperial stables. Hirohito sent eight pounds of carrots to console the animals. No doubt, he pondered the words of his Grandfather Meiji, who had once escaped an anarchist conspiracy:
"Who would take the life of a god? If there is some plot against my person, it must be that I have not perfectly practiced the divine virtues. Unless something was lacking within me, none would have dared it."
Two Viewpoints. Now, not only the life but the divinity of the Son of Heaven was being weighed in a balance of destiny beyond the control of Shinto. Discussion among the Allies, as they consider what to do with their inevitable victory over Japan, centers on Hirohito. In the process of liquidating Japanese militarism, must Hirohito, too, be liquidated? If so, how will the resultant political vacuum in Japan be filled? These are portentous questions, for the fate of 70,000,000 Japanese, like the fate of 70,000,000 Germans, might well be the key to the future of all the world.
There is still no Allied unanimity on what to do with the Emperor. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Government has made no bones about its wishes. It wants to dispose of Hirohito as Asia's War Criminal No.1. Acting Premier T. V. Soong has publicly hoped for the Emperor's destruction by U.S. bombers—"that would make one less embarrassing question to deal with later." Last week the Chungking press called for Hirohito's trial, execution and the public display of his body "on Sun Yat-sen Road near Nanking."
Washington has been less forthright. The last Tokyo Cabinet shake-up brought into office a group of conservatives influenced by such old friends of the Emperor as Prince Konoye and Baron Hiranuma. Is a split developing between the businessmen and nobles, on the one hand, and the Armyj chiefs, on the other? If so, the split is bound to weaken Japan's war effort. Washington does not want to heal the breach by an overt propaganda attack on the Emperor.
But once Japan is defeated militarily, what then? There are two points of view. One, to which Washington lends an attentive ear, has been best expressed by Under Secretary of State Joseph Clark Grew, who for ten years was U.S. Ambassador to Tokyo. He compares Japanese society to a hive, the Emperor to the queen bee. There comes a time when the queen is thrust out. The hive follows her to its new home. "It was not the queen which made the decision; yet, if one were to remove the queen from the swarm, the hive would disintegrate."
The implications of this analogy are clear. The Emperor institution (in the form of Hirohito or, if he is too discredited, Crown Prince Akihito) must be retained to save the Japanese nation from disintegration. The Emperor institution must be used to prepare the way for a nonaggressive, nontotalitarian state.