The late Emperor Showa was anything but the military-manipulated pacifist he has been portrayed as in the United States since the end of World War II.
What's more, the decision by the U.S. to keep him on the throne ultimately has led to Japan's failure to acknowledge wartime atrocities and helped set a precedent of impunity for heads of state, an American historian and Hitotsubashi University professor says.
The accepted image of Emperor Showa as "passive, noncommittal, remote" is nothing more than a myth propounded by the U.S. and the Emperor himself for a mutually agreeable goal, Herbert Bix told the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Tokyo this week after the recent publication of his book "Hirohito and the making of modern Japan."