TOKYO — Early last month, a quarter century after Emperor Hirohito’s death in 1989, Japan's Imperial Household Agency released the official record of his life. The 61 volumes contain a great wealth of previously unavailable material and some fascinating trivia: Who knew that the imperial family has been exchanging Christmas presents since at least 1907? The Japanese media have been digging in. I haven’t waded through the books, but scholars are already noting that they studiously avoid addressing Hirohito’s part in Japan’s actions leading up to and during World War II.
A couple of weeks ago, the historian Herbert Bix wrote in an op-ed for this paper that he had received an email from “an employee at one of Japan’s largest newspapers” asking him to comment on an embargoed excerpt from the record of Hirohito’s life. “But there was a condition,” Bix explained. “I could not discuss Hirohito’s ‘role and responsibility’ in World War II.” And so Bix refused, he said. Some 70 years after the end of the war, the subject is considered taboo in Japan’s mainstream media. Which only makes it that much more remarkable that almost four decades ago, a Japanese journalist named Koji Nakamura asked Hirohito the question no one dared to ask. On Oct. 31, 1975, a few weeks after a visit to the United States, Hirohito and his wife held a public press conference at the palace. Nakamura, who participated as a representative of the London Times, was one of the very few reporters called upon to ask an unscripted question. “At the White House, your majesty referred to ‘that most unfortunate war, which I deeply deplore,"’ he began. “May we interpret this to mean that you yourself feel responsible for the war itself, including the fact that Japan waged it in the first place? In addition, may I ask you to share your thoughts about so-called war responsibility?” In a sense, the question was pointless. Hirohito did not answer anything meaningful: “Since I have not delved much into literary matters, these little tricks of language are beyond me, and I am unable to answer such a question.” Yet this was a moment in postwar Japanese history without parallel. Although Hirohito lived for another 14 years, to my knowledge, he held no other press conferences; if the journalist had remained silent, the emperor would have died without once being publicly asked by a citizen of Japan to take responsibility for his catastrophic failures. Nakamura’s question may have gone unanswered, but he deserves a place in history simply for asking it. Instead, he has been all but forgotten. The one reporter to have touched on Nakamura’s challenge to Hirohito is David Tharp, the only non-Japanese participant at that 1975 press conference. In an article published the next morning in the English-language Mainichi Daily News, he said Nakamura had “swept aside” the “ultimate taboo in Japanese newspaper circles.” He described the reaction of their Japanese colleagues: “It was the one question that seemed to freeze the reporters with collective interest. Pens poised over notebooks as if for lack of knowing how to move for a brief instant.” He added, “Then there was what appeared to be a mutual relaxation because the question which everyone secretly was tensed to hear had finally been asked.” I spent the past month trying to track down information about Nakamura. I have been unable to contact David Tharp, and an email I sent to the chief of this paper’s Tokyo bureau went unanswered. I did succeed in meeting a few former colleagues and acquaintances, though, and gleaning a few facts about the first half of this unusual journalist’s life. Nakamura was born in 1918. When he was 13 he got a job as a gofer at the Mainichi newspaper offices in Kobe. In his free time, he took English classes at the YMCA’s foreign language school and the Palmore Institute. In 1942, Mainichi sent him to Manila to work at a new local newspaper. He stayed after the defeat of Japan in World War II, as an interpreter for soldiers accused of war crimes; many could not speak English. He wrote about this experience after he returned to Japan in 1949. From those writings it appears that in addition to interpreting at trials, he also translated the letters that soldiers wrote “in a special prison with a gallows” immediately before they were hanged. It was his task to take dictation of their final wishes. He was well aware of the brutality of the Manila massacre of February 1945, in which Japanese soldiers slaughtered some 100,000 civilians. The fundamental horror of that event, he wrote, stemmed from the fact that Japan’s militarism, pegged to a cult of the emperor as a living god, was devoid of any respect for “the value or the sanctity of human life.” I’ve pieced together a timeline of the assignments Nakamura took as a special correspondent until he died of stomach cancer in 1982, at the age of 63. I’ve gathered enough of his writings to see that the question he put to Hirohito at that press conference in 1975 stemmed from his awareness, based on his own experience, of just how much wrong this other man had done. I know I can never assemble a proper record of Nakamura’s life — certainly nothing as hefty as the official life of Hirohito. And yet for me, the fact that Nakamura asked that one question is as great a contribution to history as those 61 volumes, which seem so determined, like Hirohito himself, to avoid answering it. Norihiro Kato is a literary critic and a professor emeritus of Waseda University. This article was translated by Michael Emmerich from the Japanese.
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