WikipediaExtracts:Hirohito
Extracted from Wikipedia --
.jpg)
Hirohito (裕仁; 29 April 1901 – 7 January 1989), posthumously honored as Emperor Shōwa (昭和天皇, Shōwa Tennō), was the 124th emperor of Japan according to the traditional order of succession, reigning from 25 December 1926 until his death in 1989. He remains the longest-reigning emperor in Japanese history and one of the longest-reigning monarchs in the world. As emperor during the Shōwa era, Hirohito presided over Japan's rise in militarism, its imperial expansion in Asia, the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War, as well as the nation's postwar economic miracle.
Hirohito was born during the reign of his paternal grandfather, Emperor Meiji, as the first child of the Crown Prince Yoshihito and Crown Princess Sadako (later Emperor Taishō and Empress Teimei). When Emperor Meiji died in 1912, Hirohito's father ascended the throne, and Hirohito was proclaimed crown prince and heir apparent in 1916. In 1921, he made an official visit to the United Kingdom and western Europe, marking the first time a Japanese crown prince traveled abroad. Owing to his father's ill health, Hirohito became his regent that year. In 1924, Hirohito married Princess Nagako Kuni, with whom he would go on to have seven children. He became emperor upon his father's death in 1926.
As Japan's head of state, Emperor Hirohito presided over the rise of militarism in Japanese politics. In 1931, he made no objection when Japan's Kwantung Army staged the Mukden incident as a pretext for its invasion of Manchuria. Following the onset of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, tensions steadily grew between Japan and the United States. Once Hirohito formally sanctioned his government's decision to go to war against the US and its allies on 1 December 1941, the Pacific War began one week later with a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as well as on other US and British colonies in the region. After atomic bombs were dropped on Japan and the Soviet Union invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria, Hirohito called upon his country's forces to surrender in a radio broadcast on 15 August 1945. The extent of his involvement in military decision-making and wartime culpability remain subjects of historical debate.
Following the surrender of Japan, Emperor Hirohito was never prosecuted for war crimes at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) even though the Japanese had waged war in his name. The head of the Allied occupation of the country, Douglas MacArthur, believed that a cooperative emperor would facilitate a peaceful occupation and other US postwar objectives. MacArthur therefore excluded any evidence from the tribunal which could have incriminated Hirohito or other members of the imperial family. In 1946, Hirohito was pressured by the Allies into renouncing his divinity. Under Japan's new constitution drafted by US officials, his role as emperor was redefined in 1947 as "the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people". Upon his death in January 1989, he was succeeded by his eldest son, Akihito.
