Emperor Hirohito
Japan's emperor from 1926 to 1989, the divine sovereign in whose name the Pacific War was fought and whom the US kept on the throne.
Emperor Hirohito reigned for 62 years, longer than any monarch in Japan's recorded history, and across that span he was two entirely different figures. Until 1945 he was a living god, the 124th sovereign of an unbroken imperial line and the supreme commander in whose name Japan waged war across Asia and the Pacific. After 1945 he was a shy, bespectacled constitutional monarch who studied marine biology and shook hands with commoners. How one man moved between those roles, and how responsible he was for the first, is still argued over.
The god in whose name they fought
Under the prewar constitution, sovereignty rested with the emperor. He was head of state, commander of the armed forces, and, in official doctrine, a divine descendant of the sun goddess. Every soldier fought in his name, and every major decision of state was issued under his seal. Yet how much Hirohito actually directed policy remains one of the most contested questions in modern history. One school, argued most forcefully by the historian Herbert Bix, holds that he was an engaged monarch who shaped and endorsed the militarists' course. Another holds that he was a cautious constitutional sovereign, hemmed in by the military and by the convention that he not overrule his ministers. Historians have not settled it, and the surviving record leaves room for both readings.
The voice on the radio
Whatever his role in starting the war, his role in ending it was decisive. With Japan facing invasion after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Soviet declaration of war, a deadlocked cabinet turned to the emperor, and Hirohito broke the tie by choosing surrender. It was a rare and constitutionally irregular intervention, later called his 'sacred decision.' On 15 August 1945 his subjects heard his voice for the first time, a recorded broadcast telling them to 'endure the unendurable' and lay down their arms. Many wept; a group of officers tried to seize the recording and stop it from airing.
Kept on the throne
The United States could have put him on trial. Instead General Douglas MacArthur, calculating that a cooperative emperor would make occupying Japan far easier, kept him on the throne and shielded him from prosecution. On 1 January 1946 Hirohito publicly renounced his divinity, and the 1947 constitution recast him as a 'symbol of the state,' stripped of political power. He reigned for another four decades as a constitutional figurehead, a mild-mannered naturalist presiding over Japan's astonishing postwar recovery. He toured factories and coastlines, published papers on hydrozoans, and became, to most Japanese, a familiar and unthreatening presence. When he died in 1989, mourned by millions at home and indicted by critics abroad, the question his position had always raised followed him to the grave: what the sovereign had known, and what he had chosen, is argued over to this day.