Emperor Hirohito's last speech

Once the fish disappeared from the sea, and the storm winds rose, and sailor ships vanished at sea.

On a remote fishing island off Japan:?An elder tells that in the old days, a virgin had to be sacrificed – she would be shipped out on a raft into the sea.??Then the god would be appeased.?And life would return?to the sea.?The fish harvest would be bountiful again.

The elder laments, as the village watches an indigenous Shinto festival of masked dancers, “These dances are all that is left of that ancient exorcism ritual”.

No one knows why the dragon destroys, or why a virgin would appease.?The link between these two must be very ancient, and supernatural.?The dragon coalesces where the sea blends with dreamtime. And dreamtime exacts the most demanding, if metaphorical, innocence.

The first sighting of the dragon is heralded one night by storm winds like a typhoon, and the waves crashing.?Then, like thunderous drums, gigantic steps shake the island in the night…

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The Japanese word kamikaze means “divine wind”, a reference to the two typhoons that twice protected the island from invasion by Mongol ships, in 1281.??This is also the same word used for the pilots who would fly their planes into American naval ships to protect the Japanese mainland in the last stages of the Pacific war.

On December 8th, 1941, Japan commenced its bold Strike South – simultaneously dispatching military forces to attack Pearl Harbor, and invading Malaya via Thailand. Like a divine wind, they expanded their aegis across Southeast Asia all the way to Indonesia and the Philippines by the next year.?They called this the Greater East Asia Prosperity Sphere, a naked euphemism to the Americans if there ever was one.?

The military caste – and probably also their divine emperor Hirohito – did not see any moral dilemma in grabbing so much territory.?It was a matter of sharing in the Great Game that the Allies and Axis powers had long been doing for centuries, culminating in America’s expansion to the pacific islands of Hawaii, and for a brief promontory, the Philippines, until an indigenous insurrection drove out the newly established American regime.

By striking out so boldly, the Japanese leaders though that they would be able to negotiate from a position of strength, and keep much of their gains.?Few could foresee the implacable and relentless war of attrition during the next four years, that would bring the American naval and air power, across?the stepping stones of the Pacific Islands, to the very doorstep of Tokyo, devastating their people with hunger, and levelling their cities with fire.?

The bushido code of Japanese chivalry permitted no surrender.?As the grip of the Allied war machine closed in, the media campaigned for relentless sacrifice. In the last desperate months that the “hundred million” might have to die in suicidal sacrifice for national honor, rather than suffer total defeat.?Thousands of Japanese pilots in World War II enlisted as “kamikazes” to protect Japan again, by flying their planes with divine fury into enemy ships.

The apocalyptic nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki broke the back of the war effort.???In a steely confrontation with the military council, under full courtly courtesies, Emperor Hirohito asked the council to accept the Allied proposal of surrender under the Potsdam Declaration, and to stop the war effort before his people were annihilated.

On August 15, 1945, the emperor made his first ever radio broadcast to the Japanese people.?He spoke in an ancient and courtly dialect that few commoners could understand, but the text was translated colloquially by the press immediately thereafter. And it proved the Emperor a master of national courtesies and euphemisms.

… We declared war on American and Britain out of our sincere desire to ensure Japan’s self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from our thoughts either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark on territorial aggrandizement.?But now the war has lasted for nearly four years?Despite the best that has been done by everyone – the gallant fighters of military and naval forces and the devoted service of our one hundred million people – the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.?Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many lives.?Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization…

What the emperor called self-preservation was the right to aggressively expand her sphere of influence, and defend this greater empire from strangulation by the Allies. Further, the cruelty of the Japanese occupation, particularly the atrocities in the occupation of Nanking, and rough justice in the colonial lands of Malaya, the death camps, are all named as “emancipation”, and glossed over with “apology for the cooperative efforts of these nations”.

But of course, much of the Japanese civilian population did not learn of these horrors until the soldiers started returning home in shameful defeat, with tales of guilt and ghastly crimes unfitting of Japanese chivalry. The bushido code demanded seppuku, or ritual suicide for dishonor and defeat.?But the Emperor made special care never to use the word “defeat”.?Instead, the emperor encouraged his subjects to “endure the unendurable and suffer the unsufferable”.?

Let the entire nation continue as one family from generation to generation, ever firm in its faith of the imperishableness of its divine land, and mindful of its heavy burden of responsibilities, and the long road before it.

The Emperor had spoken.?In a master stroke, he appealed to the chivalric spirit of nobility and benevolence, to endure apocalyptic defeat, instigated by forces of a Pacific war that Japan had done much to conjure herself.?To be patient, kind – and undefeated

There may have been an initial euphoria regarding the cessation of war, and especially, widespread relief that the Emperor had not enjoined the “final sacrifice” of the “hundred million”?But then began the years of the American occupation, the aftermath of shock, despair, poverty, inferiority, and war guilt, on the long road to national resurrection.??Few knew what life was worth, or meant, any more.

(My paraphrase of a history told by John W. Dover in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II.)

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The dragon first arose from the maritime depths, on an village of Odo island. Far from cities, the indigenous peasants of the superstitious village could best understand this force.??To them, he was a personification of storm, wind and heaven, which they named Gojira. (Godzilla, in the American version of the film)

Enter the Tokyo scientists.

It is of course, as a premier scientist says, a dinosaur, slumbering in the crevices of the earth under the sea, since awakened by nuclear testing, and absorbing the powers of nuclear radiation.?

Looking back upon this film now, it’s easy to laugh.?It’s “just” a dinosaur.?Even – a little silly – really a man in a monster suit shot in slow-motion.?It’s a children’s movie after all.?And perhaps, to the contemporary audience back then, in shock and trauma, wasn’t a laugh a first sign of returning health? “Hah! There it is, the beast, and a bit ridiculous, but we’ll go along with the fabrication for sake of entertaining the children”.

Most assuredly, the later scenes of Tokyo devastated in a holocaust of fire, a total leveling of buildings to the ground would have been far from innocent images.?They would have deeply resonated with a Japanese audience, evoking not just the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also the whole conflagration of Allied bombings in the inescapable American advance to Tokyo.

But just as important are the contrapuntal moments of quiet, largely edited out of the Americanized version. A homeless widow and her children await the dragon’s full tumult, promising to her children that they will be seeing their father soon.?This would have evoked the common scenes of destitute widows and orphans that lived off the streets in the poverty of the aftermath.?

Amid the wreckage and thunder, we are presented a cage of small birds, whose quiet twittering interrupts the tumult of destruction.?Was this another sign of the heavenly lineage of the dragon??Was this another way of poignantly “making light” of the apocalyptic disaster, through a caesura of sheer haiku? As if to laugh in a sadder way: even all of this destruction – is maya.

At one point, the aged scientist mourns the decision to destroy the dragon.?Here was a lost opportunity to study and learn about this apocalyptic phenomenon “which is uniquely Japan’s”.?What could this mean??In what sense was the dragon – this apocalypse – not an external incursion, but the exorcism of the Japanese psyche? Where did the dragon come from, and why??

Was it just national karma, returning home??

Or did Japan’s imperial karma more presciently mirror that of America’s empire, and a new British-American way of war whose centerpiece would be massive and spectacular bombing of civilian targets (and later, critical economic targets that would lead to civilian poverty and humanitarian disaster), today???