Emperor Hirohito, 124th Emperor of Japan

Hirohito was born in 1901, in Tokyo, Japan and became Emperor upon the death of his father in 1926. Although the Meiji Constitution of Imperial Japan vested the Emperor with significant rights, Hirohito used these seldom, most notably to squash a military coup in 1936. There is significant controversy amongst historians about the role Hirohito played in the Japanese imperialist conquests of World War II and the extent of his responsibility for the multitude of consequent war crimes. In the summer of 1945, Japan rejected the unconditional surrender requested in the Potsdam Declaration primarily to protect the Emperor from being forced to abdicate. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hirohito broke his traditional silence in the Saikō sensō shidō kaigi (Supreme Council for the Direction of the War). He overruled the militarists and ensured that his government would sue for peace, accepting the Potsdam Declaration. The Japanese public heard the voice of Hirohito for the first time ever on the 15th of August, when his surrender speech was broadcast on radio across the nation. Upon the end of the war, the American occupation ensured that the Emperor lost all political power, yet he was not officially accused of war crimes or subjected to a trial. The Americans had feared that without him, Japan would become ungovernable. Thus, Hirohito was allowed to remain the figurehead of the country. He died in 1989. (Josef Mlejnek)