WikipediaExtracts:Hirohito
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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 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 the rise of Japanese militarism, Japan's invasion of mainland Asia, the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Second World War, and the nation's postwar economic miracle.
Hirohito was born during the reign of his paternal grandfather, Emperor Meiji, as the first child of Crown Prince Yoshihito and Crown Princess Sadako (later Emperor Taishō and Empress Teimei). When Emperor Meiji died in 1912, Hirohito's father ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne, and Hirohito was proclaimed Crown Prince of Japan in 1916, making him the heir apparent. In 1921, he made an official visit to the United Kingdom and Western Europe, marking the first time a Japanese crown prince had traveled abroad. Due to his father's ill health, Hirohito became Sesshō of Japan (regent) that same year. In 1924, he married Princess Nagako Kuni, with whom he later had seven children: Shigeko, Sachiko, Kazuko, Atsuko, Akihito, Masahito and Takako. He became emperor upon his father's death in 1926.
As Japan's head of state, Emperor Hirohito oversaw the rise of militarism in Japanese politics. In 1931, he raised no objection when Japan's Kwantung Army staged the Mukden incident as a pretext for the invasion of Manchuria. Following the onset of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, tensions steadily grew between Japan and the United States. After Hirohito formally sanctioned his government's decision to go to war against the United States and its allies on 1 December 1941, the Pacific War began one week later with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, as well as attacks on other U.S. and British colonies in the region. After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, Hirohito called upon the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces to surrender in a radio broadcast on 15 August 1945. The extent of his involvement in military decision-making and his wartime culpability remains a subject of historical debate.
Following Japan's surrender, Emperor Hirohito was never prosecuted for war crimes at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), even though the war had been waged in his name. The head of the Allied occupation, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, believed that a cooperative emperor would facilitate a peaceful occupation and support U.S. postwar objectives. MacArthur therefore excluded any evidence from the tribunal that could have incriminated Hirohito or other members of the Imperial House of Japan. In 1946, Hirohito was pressured by the Allies to renounce his divinity. Under Japan's new constitution, drafted by U.S. officials and enacted in 1947, his role as emperor was redefined 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, beginning the Heisei era.
