Volume 48, Number 5 · March 29, 2001
The Emperor's Secrets
By Ian Buruma
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
by Herbert P. Bix
HarperCollins, 800 pp., $35.00
So was Bergamini right after all? Perhaps I should explain. David Bergamini, an American journalist who was born in China and spent part of h is childhood in Japanese POW camps, published in 1971 a book of 1,239 pages, entitled Japan's Imperial Conspiracy. For five years Bergamini had poured over '30,000 pages' of Japanese documents and US intelligence reports, '140,000 pages of collater al reading,' '272 reference books,' '50,000 pages of testimony' from the Tokyo war crimes trial, '5,613 pages of diaries' kept by high Japanese officials, and a whole lot more besides, and then had a revelation: 'Countless 'incidents' which had once seeme d unfathomably Oriental began to make hard rational sense. Everything fell into place and reinforced my simple perception of the obvious: that Hirohito had, indeed, been Emperor.'[1]
Review, 4620 words
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