Hirohito Unmasked: Revisiting Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy

One summer’s day in 2011, as I browsed through the cluttered shelves of Blossoms’ Bookstore in Bangalore, I stumbled upon a doorstopper of a book. The tome was David Bergamini’s Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, a 1,400-page exposé that sought to do for the Pacific theatre what William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich did for Nazi Germany. As an obsessive World War II completist, I was astonished that I had never heard of this book.

As I later discovered, the academic establishment’s effort to ‘suppress’ Bergamini’s book by denying it the critical recognition it deserved, made for a conspiracy in itself.

In 1971, Bergamini, a popular science writer, had published his bombshell of a book which forcefully threw the mask off Showa Emperor Hirohito by alleging he was no ceremonial relic or dupe of Japanese military but an active warmonger. Bergamini, born in Japan (but schooled in Hankow, China), had trawled through more than 30,000 pages of Japanese documents and US intel. reports, done 140,000 pages of collateral reading, 272 reference books, 50,000 pages of testimony from the Tokyo war crimes trial and 5,613 pages of diaries kept by high Japanese officials in his quest to understand what had made the intelligent, artistic Japanese people turn to war.

His formidable research revealed Emperor Hirohito and his courtiers had been plotting a war against the West since the 1920s. According to Bergamini, Hirohito had inherited from his great-grandfather, the Meiji Emperor a mission, which was to rid Asia of white men. Among his many formidable revelations, he stressed on the ‘Sugiyama Memoranda,’ published by a Tokyo firm, Hara Shobo, in 1967.

The memo, jotted by Japanese Chief of Staff Sugiyama Hajime contained verbatim accounts of conversations with Hirohito, which revealed that the Emperor participated in the Pearl Harbour planning a full six months before his official military advisors had wind of it.

The memo, Bergamini claimed, directly refuted statements of Gen. MacArthur claiming that Hirohito had professed ignorance of military and economic matters in 1941 to him. His book comprehensively demolished MacArthur’s postwar whitewashing of Hirohito.

Bergamini's ‘heresy’ - portraying Hirohito as a war criminal and 1930s Japan as a hotbed of manufactured conflicts, conspiracies, assassinations, shadowy cliques - saw the American academic establishment crash down on him like a ton of bricks.

Leading the charge against him in the New York Times was Yale historian James B. Crowley, who lambasted the writer’s cavalier handling of sources. Crowley alleged Bergamini’s brief against the Emperor of Japan was “completely unsubstantiated by any reliable source, primary or secondary” and that Bergamini’s book was believable "only by violating every canon of acceptable documentation

British historian Geoffrey Barraclough had a more measured view. In a review in the New Yorker, Barraclough, while criticizing Bergamini's “idiosyncratic” approach, nonetheless admitted that he had succeeded, where experts had failed, in opening the general public’s eyes to the role of Japan in the 1930s.

Barraclough, however, objected that Bergamini had stressed the conspiracy theory and “magnified it to monster dimensions” while “refusing to believe that Japan, unlike Germany, lacked a mastermind pulling the strings and executing a preconceived design, and has in effect, invented one.” According to Barraclough, Bergamini had made Hirohito the “archvillain, the Japanese Hitler.”

The one enthusiastic endorsement came from Sir William Webb, the Australian judge on the Tokyo Military Tribunal, who hailed Bergamini’s book as “a tremendous achievement” which supplemented and complemented the findings of the Tribunal of which he was president.

Sadly, the intense critical hostility devastated Bergamini, and is believed to have driven him to an early grave in 1983.

Irony of ironies, 29 years later, academic Herbert B. Bix came out with ‘Hirohito and the making of Modern Japan’ (2000), which pretty much repeated Bergamini’s central thesis - of Hirohito's involvement in the war-making process - and was awarded a Pulitzer!

Today, Bergamini’s book falls under the ‘hard-to-get’ category. Over the years, I was fortunate enough to acquire a second used copy in Mumbai’s Flora Fountain area. In terms of readability, it is on par with Shirer’s Third Reich classic and Alexander Werth’s ‘Russia at War:1941-45’ (1964). It is an absolute smasher, reading like a relentless thriller in spots, and a must for anyone seriously studying the Pacific War.