Emperor Hirohito Quotes

One of our favorite examples of the value of Nothing is an incident in the life of the Japanese emperor Hirohito. Now, being emperor in one of the most frantically Confucianist countries in the world is not necessarily all that relaxing. From early morning until late at night, practically every minute of the emperor's time is filled in with meetings, audiences, tours, inspections, and who-knows-what. And through a day so tightly scheduled that it would make a stone wall seem open by comparison, the emperor must glide, like a great ship sailing in a steady breeze. In the middle of a particularly busy day, the emperor was driven to a meeting hall for an appointment of some kind. But when he arrived, there was no one there. The emperor walked into the middle of the great hall, stood silently for a moment, then bowed to the empty space. He turned to his assistants, a large smile on his face. "We must schedule more appointments like this," he told them. "I haven't enjoyed myself so much in a long time.

(In 1990 a gunman shot Motoshima Hitoshi, mayor of Nagasaki, in the chest for saying that Emperor Hirohito bore some responsibility for World War II.)

To help cement the friendship between Japan and Disney, Emperor Hirohito personally presented to Roy O. Disney, for the dedication of the Magic Kingdom, a stone Japanese lantern known as a Toro to light the way to success and happiness.

Back in 1943, Prince Mikasa Takahito, the youngest brother of Emperor Hirohito, spent a year as a staff officer at the Nanking headquarters of the Japanese Imperial Army’s expeditionary force in China, where he heard a young officer speak of using Chinese prisoners for live bayonet practice in order to train new recruits. “It helps them acquire guts,” the officer told the prince.

On the afternoon of August 9, hearing the news that Nagasaki had been bombed, Emperor Hirohito called an imperial conference at which his ministers debated the wisdom of surrender. After hours of talk, at 2 a.m. Hirohito stated that he felt Japan should accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, terms of surrender proposed in late July by Truman (who had only become president on Roosevelt’s death in April). But Potsdam called for the emperor to step down; and his ministers insisted that their acceptance depended on Hirohito being allowed to remain as sovereign—an astute demand that would ensure a sense of national exoneration. James F. Byrnes, the U.S. secretary of state, did not deal directly with this, and on August 14 Japan surrendered at Hirohito’s command. The next day, the entire country heard with astonishment the first radio broadcast from a supreme ruler, now telling them squeakily, in the antiquated argot of the imperial court, that he was surrendering to save all mankind “from total extinction.” Until then, Japan’s goal had been full, all-out war, as a country wholly committed; any Japanese famously preferred to die for the emperor rather than to surrender. (One hundred million die together! was the slogan.) Today the goal was surrender: all-out peace. It was the emperor’s new will. Later that day a member of his cabinet, over the radio, formally denounced the United States for ignoring international law by dropping the atomic bombs. In 1988, on the forty-seventh anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when the mayor of Nagasaki accused Hirohito of responsibility for the war and its numerous atrocities, he inadvertently stirred up petitions for his own impeachment, and nationwide protests and riots calling for his assassination. A month afterward, in January 1989, Hirohito died at age eighty-seven, still emperor of Japan. Eleven days later the mayor, whom the Nagasaki police were no longer protecting, was shot in the back. He barely survived.

Why don’t people talk about Japan’s wartime emperor Hirohito in the same breath as people do about Germany’s Hitler? After all, both had an almost similar role in instigating World War II. In the West, whether it is good or bad, people take full responsibility for their actions, and they have total freedom to express their true feelings. On the contrary, here in the East, it is always the small people who take the blame and are made scapegoats. That is, for you and me, the difference between the West and the East, my friend.

In the years following World War II, the Kaizen methodology continued to evolve thanks to the work of both Japanese and American managers—three of which are listed here: The Iowa-born statistician Dr. William Edwards Deming made many consulting trips to Japan during reconstruction efforts and was so influential in turning around Japanese industry that he was awarded the Second Order Medal of the Sacred Treasure by Emperor Hirohito in 1960. (We’ll be referring to Deming’s work many times throughout this book.) The business consultant Masaaki Imai published a management guidebook entitled “Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success.” He also founded the Kaizen Institute Consulting Group (KICG) with the aim of introducing Kaizen techniques to Western companies. Dr. Jeffrey Liker (Professor Emeritus of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan) would bring Kaizen into the mainstream when he published his book of “manufacturing ideals” called “The Toyota Way.” The book showcased many Kaizen-related principles and described the philosophy and values that dictate the modus operandi of the Toyota Motor Corporation.

Showa Era Hirohito succeeded Emperor Taisho in 1926, taking the title Emperor Showa.

Millions more were planted nationwide after Japan’s military victory against Russia in 1905, and to celebrate Emperor Taishō’s accession to the throne in 1912 and Emperor Shōwa’s (Hirohito) in 1926. Other cherries were neglected or simply disappeared. Few people cared, and fewer still did anything about it.

Acheson and MacLeish questioned the desirability of exempting the emperor from punishment and permitting the Japanese to preserve an institution that was so easily exploited by the militarists.57 That was a view held by Owen Lattimore, a China scholar and advisor in the Pacific section of the Office of War Information. Lattimore published his thoughts on reconstructing Japan in February 1945 in a slim volume titled Solution in Asia. Lattimore argued that democratization was possible in Japan, but first the Allies had to “puncture the myth of the divinity of the Mikado.” The best way to do that, he advised, was to exile Hirohito and all males eligible for the throne to China under United Nations supervision.58

et al. (2000), Bonifaci et al. (2012), Tero et al. (2010), and Oettmeier et al. (2017). In Advances in Physarum Machines (Adamatzky [2016]), researchers detail many surprising properties of slime molds. Some use slime molds to make decision gates and oscillators, some simulate historical human migrations and model possible future patterns of human migrations on the moon. Mathematical models inspired by slime molds include a non-quantum implementation of Shor’s factorization, calculation of shortest paths, and the design of supply-chain networks. Oettmeier et al. (2017) note that Hirohito, the emperor of Japan between 1926 and 1989, was fascinated by slime molds and in 1935 published a book on the subject. Slime molds have been a high-prestige subject of research in Japan ever since.

In answer to seemingly ad hoc objections, they repeatedly struck all references to the emperor or his dynasty from American and Allied public statements. That did not change until the second week of August 1945, following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but before the final Japanese surrender, when the Americans implicitly promised to leave Hirohito alone. In the end, as Grew put it ruefully, the United States “demanded unconditional surrender, then dropped the bomb and accepted conditional surrender.