BY a coincidence worthy of some Kabuki melodrama, Emperor Hirohito's first visit to American soil occurred just a week before the official publication of a startling new book that proclaims him a major war criminal. Japan's Imperial Conspiracy (Morrow; $14.95) charges that Hirohito, far from being a mild and unworldly figurehead, personally supported and even encouraged the attack on Pearl Harbor. The main reason he escaped hanging was that General MacArthur needed his symbolic authority to maintain order during the Allied occupation of Japan.
The book's author is David Bergamini, 43, a Rhodes scholar and former LIFE correspondent who was born in Japan of American parents and spent his early boyhood there. He also spent much of World War II in a Japanese prison camp. In 1965 Bergamini returned to Tokyo and began a six-year labor of poring over thousands of Japanese documents and interviewing hundreds of former officials. His 1,239-page thesis, subtitled "How Emperor Hirohito Led Japan into War Against the West," goes roughly like this:
More than a century ago, when Commodore Perry's warships steamed into Tokyo Bay to "open" Japan to American commerce, Emperor Komei passionately resisted the invasion, but in vain. So it was that Hirohito eventually "inherited from his great-grandfather a mission, which was to rid Asia of white men." As early as 1921, when Hirohito became regent for his ailing father, he organized a cabal of young officers notably including Major Hideki Tojo, to undertake any mission the throne desired. Bergamini insists that two years before the fighting broke out, Hirohito personally "directed his General Staff to plan the war."
Under Compulsion. In January 1941 a brilliant naval strategist named Yamamoto communicated to Hirohito a plan for a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Because strict secrecy was imposed, even War Minister Tojo knew nothing about the plan until after he became Prime Minister, two months before the attack. "Hirohito alone stood at the top of the mountain," Bergamini writes. "He alone had full access to army planning, navy planning." When it finally came time to decide, Hirohito called in his Lord Privy Seal and said: "Instruct Prime Minister Tojo to proceed according to plan."
"Hirohito was a formidable war leader," according to Bergamini, "tireless, dedicated, meticulous, clever and patient." But when the war came to an end at Hiroshima, the Emperor and his vassals began plotting to "convince outside observers, especially Americans, that the sacred Emperor had been a victim rather than villain of Japanese militarism." This suited the Allies admirably; without at least some semblance of the imperial system, General MacArthur estimated, he would need 20,000 American administrators to govern Japan and a million troops to police it. "There is no specific or tangible evidence," said MacArthur, "to connect the Emperor with responsibility for any decision of the government during the past ten years." Instead, the Allies prosecuted 28 of Hirohito's top officials and hanged seven of them.