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During the First World War, POWs in Japan were treated remarkably well. What happened in the intervening years that led the nation to commit such inhumane atrocities in World War II? This series probes the Japanese belief at the time of racial superiority and the mentality that drove Kamikaze fighters. Newly unearthed archive material reveals horrific stories involving cannibalism and crucifixion.
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00:00To be continued...
00:39In Japan, during the Second World War, the religion of state Shinto inextricably linked
00:45Japanese soldiers to their homeland.
01:00At the time, state Shinto taught them that the world was full of gods, dominated by the Sun Goddess, from
01:06whom the Emperor of Japan was said to be descended.
01:17And the Emperor was not only a god himself, he was also the supreme commander of the Japanese armed forces.
01:25Every order these soldiers received was given in the name of the Emperor.
01:30We were told that the Emperor was a living god.
01:33And if you go to war and die in action, then you become a god, and are enshrined at the
01:39Yasukuni Shrine, and the Emperor will kindly visit and pray for you.
01:53And one of the clearest instructions these soldiers received in the name of their Emperor
01:57was that under no circumstances were they to be captured alive.
02:04I never thought of surrender.
02:06Every soldier remembered the words from the military service code,
02:10don't bring shame on yourself by becoming a prisoner of war.
02:18This is the story of how, when the war turned against the Japanese, their willingness to die rather than surrender
02:25was to have terrible consequences, not just for Japan, but for every nation touched by the war in the East.
02:51When American Marines tried to retake Japanese-held islands, like here at Tarawa in the Pacific in 1943,
02:58the ferocious way in which the Japanese were prepared to fight to the death,
03:01did not make the Americans respect them more.
03:04It had quite the reverse effect.
03:09I thought they were very cruel, they were sadistic, and they wanted to die for their Emperor,
03:14and we had to go out there and help them die for the Emperor.
03:19I blew a lot of them out of the caves, and as they come out of the pillboxes,
03:23after we put the gasoline in the slips and let them with the flamethrower,
03:29we shot the hell out of them as they were going out.
03:31To many Americans, the Japanese refusal to surrender became like their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor
03:37and their mistreatment of prisoners of war, just another sign that they were a dishonourable foe.
03:42I'm gonna have to slap the dirty little jack,
03:47I'll pretend the guy who can do it.
03:51You'll spin the streak of yellow from this sneaky little fellow,
03:56and you'll think a cyclone hit him when he's through it.
04:00Their alibi for fighting is to save their face,
04:05for ancestors waiting in celestial space.
04:10We'll kick their precious face down to that other place.
04:14We've gotta slap the dirty little jack.
04:19We're gonna have to slap the dirty little jack.
04:22We had been taught that the Japanese were subhuman when we got into the attack,
04:27but of course we had no love for Hitler or the Nazis,
04:31but we also had many people in America who were of German descent,
04:37of descent from Italians.
04:42It was an entirely different view we had of the Italians, the Germans,
04:47than we had of the Japanese.
04:53This view that the Japanese were somehow different from the other enemies the Allies faced,
04:58extended to the way in which Japanese war-dead could be treated.
05:04They would turn these bodies over and hit them in the back of the head with the butt of a
05:08rifle.
05:08I saw Marines that had that much in a paper sack of gold teeth.
05:14It weighed probably 10 or 15 pounds.
05:17Now that was their off-duty activity.
05:23And it was for a game, I guess.
05:26Shoot them in the head with a .45, automatically a mouth opens up.
05:30Man, all them gold teeth staring me in the face.
05:34I didn't knock them out with a rifle, but I used the pliers.
05:38I guess I had so much hate and so forth while I was doing that.
05:42I had a whole canteen, a canteen of water here and a canteen of gold teeth here.
05:48And the mutilation of Japanese war-dead by some Americans
05:52was not just confined to stealing the gold teeth from their mouths.
05:55This photograph, published during the war in Life magazine,
05:59shows the girlfriend of an American sailor next to a souvenir
06:03which her boyfriend has sent home from the Pacific,
06:05the skull of a Japanese soldier signed by her boyfriend's comrades.
06:11A lot of atrocities in war that are on both sides.
06:19On both sides, not only one side, both sides.
06:23You can call it revenge, call it what you want.
06:31Japanese soldiers fighting the Australians in New Guinea
06:34were also to commit atrocities against enemy war-dead.
06:37In late 1943, forbidden to surrender and cut off from their supplies,
06:43Japanese troops began to starve.
06:46As a result, some resorted to cannibalism,
06:48eating both their own dead and the enemy dead as well.
06:57The findings of the Australian army on this most sensitive issue
07:01were kept secret until the 1990s,
07:04when a Japanese academic managed to get them declassified.
07:08The practice of cannibalism was a much more widely practiced than previously thought.
07:15I found through my research that the cannibalism was organized group practice,
07:24rather than individually practiced activity.
07:34That senior Japanese officers were aware of the problem of cannibalism amongst their men,
07:38is clear from this order from Major General Aotsu,
07:42which says that any Japanese soldier who has eaten human flesh is to be sentenced to death,
07:47but specifically excludes from that those who have eaten enemy flesh.
07:56The purpose of this group cannibalism was, of course, survival,
08:01because about 160,000 Japanese forces were sent to New Guinea in 1942,
08:07but 93% of the Japanese forces died.
08:12I feel angry towards the Japanese officers who made this decision,
08:18to send such a large number of Japanese soldiers to New Guinea without sufficient preparation.
08:25And when the situation changed, they simply decided to abandon those soldiers.
08:33And what these abandoned soldiers knew was that when they died,
08:36their divine emperor would go and worship them himself.
09:07The
09:21The first signs that large numbers of civilians, as well as soldiers, might be prepared to die for their emperor
09:27rather than surrender came in 1944, at a place 1,400 miles south of the home islands of Japan, the
09:36island of Saipan.
09:39Here, civilians were told that the Americans would rape and murder them if they were captured, and with the encouragement
09:45of the Japanese army, thousands took their own lives.
10:11They were throwing the women and children off the cliff and into the coral, and there's pictures of it, and
10:20as they were throwing the children, I used to shoot the children as they went down so they wouldn't suffer
10:25when they hit the coral.
10:31They'd jump and you could hear the screaming of the children on a coral.
10:35It's a great big cliff.
10:38They jumped down with the babies.
10:50A lot of times, I used to think about that in my dreams, that if it was right for me
10:56to do that, so they wouldn't have to suffer when they went down, because they were going to die anyway,
11:00you know, when they hit the coral down there.
11:06But a lot of moan died, they would still be alive and have a horrible death, so it's by shooting
11:12them.
11:12It's like shooting a horse that breaks his leg.
11:16This is a human being.
11:20How I ever went through Saipan, I don't know.
11:24I've been years in post-traumatic stress, stress from the war.
11:49Japanese propaganda about Saipan emphasized the nobility of dying in the struggle against the Allies, and the message was spread
11:57even among Japanese school children.
12:21With the capture of islands like Saipan and Tinian, heavy bombers were now in easier range of targets on the
12:27home islands of Japan.
12:29The Allies now launched the biggest aerial bombardment the world had ever seen.
12:40During the war, the Allies dropped more than 160,000 tons of bombs on Japan, in an effort to make
12:47the Japanese accept unconditional surrender.
12:57I was 21 years old, and I really was wanting to get the war over, and I wanted to get
13:02home.
13:02And if they told me to go bomb some cities, I went and bombed cities.
13:09They were bombed to nothing left except steps and chimneys.
13:16Complete 100% obliteration.
13:22It's not like going out and sticking a bayonet in somebody's belly, okay?
13:27You still kill them, but you kill them from a distance, and it doesn't have that demoralizing effect upon you.
13:34I felt everything except mercy for the people for some reason.
13:40I did not, I was not obsessed with any feeling of sympathy. I just wasn't.
13:58Tokyo was firebombed on the 10th of March, 1945.
14:03Over 300 American B-29 bombers dropped in centuries, which caused a firestorm in the Japanese capital.
14:10About 100,000 people died.
14:19First, a little flame would catch our clothes, so we told each other and tried to put it out.
14:29I heard a sharp scream on my back.
14:32It was my baby.
14:35The baby was crying on my back.
14:39I turned around.
14:42He was crying with his mouth open and the sparks of fire got into it.
14:49Red flame was burning right in his mouth.
14:53My mother shouted at me to hold him in my arms rather than carrying him on my back.
15:00My father and my mother were trying to protect the baby from the raging fire around us.
15:12My parents must have been caught in the fire and died.
15:16It's beyond any description.
15:19It's so very painful even to think about it.
15:26Despite the destruction in Tokyo, opinion was still divided in the Japanese government in the months that followed over what
15:33should be done.
15:35Accepting unconditional surrender might, some feared, mean the elimination of the institution of the emperor itself.
15:44Emperor Hirohito, together with his military leaders, believed that in order to negotiate a more advantageous peace, Japan needed to
15:52win one big victory.
15:56And these were the men who would help provide it.
15:59The kamikazes.
16:01Pilots who would fly their planes to crash deliberately into enemy targets.
16:12Pilots.
16:22Kamikaze strategy had been born in 1944 with sporadic suicide attacks on allied planes and ships.
16:29Now in the spring of 1945, kamikazes were to sortie en masse for the first time.
16:38There had always been a tradition amongst the Japanese warrior elite
16:41of suicide being an honourable way out of an insurmountable problem.
16:46Now this tradition was extended beyond the elite.
16:49In this close-knit society, one strongly based on respect through hierarchy,
16:55suicide was now seen as a way of showing that what mattered was not one's own life,
17:00but the life of the state, the life of the emperor.
17:04Through films like these showing the self-sacrifice of the kamikaze,
17:07the message was spread into the general population.
17:17I thought they were doing very well.
17:19I didn't think that they were wasting their lives.
17:22I believed that they were sacrificing their lives for the country.
17:26And us civilians, we should also be ready to sacrifice our lives for the country when the time came.
17:34The Japanese people belonged to the emperor.
17:39We were his children.
17:45But not all kamikazes volunteered as freely as the propaganda images suggest.
17:50The story of how Kenichiro Onuki came to be a kamikaze offers a less simplistic insight.
18:03All the fighter pilots, about 150 of us at the training base, were called in.
18:11A senior officer, the head of the troop, told us they were recruiting people for a special mission.
18:21And he said, if you go on this mission, you won't come back alive.
18:31Everybody thought this was ridiculous, and nobody really was willing to go.
18:35We wanted to give the answer, no, I don't want to go.
18:40But later on, we thought, wait, if we want to say no, can we really say it?
18:48Can we say no to this officer?
18:51We told each other that we should calm down and think about the consequences.
18:57If people rejected the offer, they might be shunned,
19:01and sent to the most severe battlefront in the south, and would meet certain death anyway.
19:06Then, when their family was informed of this, how would they feel?
19:11They would be ostracized from the community.
19:18So nobody wanted to volunteer, but everybody did write,
19:22yes, I volunteer for the special mission with all my heart.
19:27And that's what we need to do.
19:57I would like to invite our family to talk about the news and the news.
20:01All right.
20:02What?
20:32Everybody had the same expression in their eyes.
20:39Like a deep-sea fish looking up at the blue sky above.
20:46I've never seen sadder expressions in anyone's eyes since then.
21:30The biggest kamikaze attack of the war was on the British and American fleets during the battle
21:35for Okinawa in spring 1945.
21:52I think it was the worst moments of my life.
21:54I've been frightened many times in the war, but that was about the worst time.
22:00Sitting there knowing that one kamikaze coming up there could have swept the whole complement of aircraft and aircrew.
22:09They'd be killed a whole lot.
22:12It's not nice.
22:16We wouldn't expect to survive if the kamikaze had hit the deck.
22:21All of us would have gone up and smoked.
22:24A lot of roasting going on and all they do is brush the remains over the side.
22:28That's all we could go into.
22:42The guns were going.
22:44All the ship's guns were, the place was black with smoke up there where the bursts had been going on.
22:50And there were occasional splashes in the sea where some kamikaze had been hit.
22:57Or missed, you know, because some of them were pretty careless.
23:02One of them hit the fourth forward gun turret.
23:06And that killed about six people.
23:09And maybe injured another six.
23:12And the second one bounced off the flight deck aft.
23:16And that, I think, swept a few airplanes into the sea and killed about four people.
23:20Or maybe eight people.
23:25Because of the war, what we'd heard about what they did on the land fighting,
23:30we had no compassion for them at all.
23:34They're no good Japanese, they're only dead ones.
23:56The British warships, with their armoured decks, did not suffer as much under kamikaze attack as the Americans.
24:09Altogether, 24 American ships were sunk and around 200 damaged by kamikazes off Okinawa.
24:20Kenichiro Onuki was shot down by the Americans before he had a chance to crash his plane into one of
24:25their warships.
24:26The Japanese authorities said he was dishonourable, imprisoned him, and denied him the chance to fly another kamikaze mission.
24:35Many of my comrades died, thousands of them, whereas we simply survived.
24:40We survived, and we feel guilty about it.
24:50In March 1945, as the kamikazes flew around them, the Americans landed here, on the small island of Tokashiki.
25:03As on Saipan, the civilians were told by the Japanese army that the Americans would rape and murder them.
25:10The army encouraged the islanders to adopt kamikaze tactics.
25:14To some, they gave two hand grenades, and told them to throw one at the Americans, and then to blow
25:20themselves up with the other.
25:24On March the 27th, 1945, about 800 villagers gathered in this ravine at the southern end of the island.
25:31The Americans were less than half a mile away.
25:39The children were told that they would be killed if the enemy captured them.
25:45And also, that to be captured would bring great shame.
25:51So it was better to choose to die.
26:00There was an explosion. A small American bomb had dropped nearby.
26:06One of the village elders started to try and kill his family with the branch of a tree.
26:12At the sign that this senior member of the group would sacrifice those he loved, other villagers started to follow
26:18his example.
26:22The first person we killed was our own mother, who gave us life.
26:26Everything around me, including my mind, was all in absolute chaos, and I don't remember the details.
26:34But what I do remember is that we first tried to tie her neck with rope.
26:41Finally, we took a stone and bashed in her head.
26:48That's the brutal thing we did to our mother.
26:53I was only 16.
26:55I couldn't stop crying because of a sadness that I had never experienced before.
27:02I will never cry like that in my life again.
27:07That day in March, around 320 men, women and children died on Tokashiki.
27:13Shigeaki Kinjou survived only because as he tried to attack the Americans in a suicide charge, he was captured alive.
27:22I think we were dreadfully manipulated.
27:27As I got older, my soul started to suffer.
27:3155 years since the end of the war, and I still suffer today.
27:41By the time of the suicides on Tokashiki in March 1945, the Japanese Empire had been pushed apart.
27:50The British Army was advancing through Burma, and the Americans threatened to land on Okinawa,
27:55the largest piece of Japanese territory they'd yet reached, less than a thousand miles from Tokyo.
28:07The Imperial Japanese Army ordered a heroic stand to be made here on Okinawa.
28:13one that might then allow the Japanese to negotiate peace from strength.
28:22The Americans expected the Japanese to defend the beaches.
28:26After all, that was the only way a landing could ever be prevented.
28:38But on April the 1st, 1945, when 50,000 American troops came ashore, they found their arrival virtually unopposed.
28:47Everyone was very happy.
28:50They couldn't figure out what happened to the Japanese.
28:52We just thought we were lucky or in hell.
28:56And we were very surprised that there wasn't cannon fire, mortar fire, small arms fire meeting us.
29:08We were very pleased.
29:10But there were Japanese troops on the island, more than 80,000 of them,
29:16dug into the fabric of the island interior, some in concrete pillboxes underneath the trees.
29:23I saw Americans for the first time in my life.
29:29Their tanks came first and then the infantry companies followed.
29:33The soldiers were carrying guns and they were chewing gum.
29:39I didn't know what they were chewing at the time.
29:42They looked as though they were coming for a picnic.
29:50The Japanese leadership hoped that on Okinawa their army, together with the civilian population,
29:56would be so determined, so prepared to sacrifice themselves,
30:01that the Allies would realize that a compromise peace would be in everyone's best interests.
30:28We realized that we were losing a lot of people. A lot of people.
30:32They were very excellent trained troops and killed in a number of our company people.
30:41You get up there and you get under machine gun fire and mortar fire and you lose people.
30:47Thank you very much.
30:50Amen.
30:51Well literally all that was in the ceremony.
31:00They signed the совершенно
31:20The Japanese soldier's last word was usually mother.
31:24I saw several people die in the war,
31:27but I heard nobody call out Banzai for the emperor.
31:34Americans also muttered mother when they died.
31:37When we shot them, we heard them calling mom, or mother.
31:44We talked about it amongst ourselves,
31:47that when they were dying, they said the same thing as us.
31:56But not all American soldiers accepted that their enemy was as human as they were.
32:04They were inhuman.
32:10We were taught and did not ever take a Japanese prisoner.
32:15In the two years that I was overseas with the Raiders, the 4th Marines, 6th Marine Division,
32:24I saw no prisoner ever taken.
32:28One came with 30 or 40 of them with their hands up.
32:32They were killed on the spot because we didn't take prisoners.
32:39On Guadalcanal, a number of Japanese would come up purporting to surrender
32:44and would fall down with grenades under their arms and blow up people.
32:49Any number of tricks the Japanese had, we took no prisoners.
32:55The Americans would often order those Japanese soldiers who did try to surrender to take off their clothes to show
33:00they weren't armed.
33:02And many thousands of Japanese soldiers did survive to become prisoners of war.
33:07But there were cases where even after their surrender had been accepted,
33:10the lives of Japanese soldiers still remained at risk.
33:14Two fellows running a telephone line across the country came across a Japanese who surrendered to them.
33:22They took him to the company headquarters.
33:29And the captain just blew his top.
33:31You've ruined our record.
33:35He said, Sergeant, take this prisoner to battalion headquarters and I will see you at 1115.
33:44Well, it was 11 o'clock and the headquarters was five miles away.
33:49They took him out and killed him.
33:56After weeks of fighting, much of it hand to hand, and distraught with lack of sleep and food,
34:03Hajime Kondo decided his time had come.
34:11Almost all my colleagues had died.
34:14I thought it's time for us to join them.
34:19That's why we decided to attempt a Banzai attack.
34:25It was suicidal behaviour, but I believed that death would be a kind of relief for us at the time.
34:35I saw my comrade get shot and fall down on the ground.
34:38And when I was trying to save him, I stumbled over a stone and fell down.
34:43I was surrounded by American soldiers.
34:46They were pointing guns at me, and that's how I was captured.
34:52As the Americans pushed the Japanese army to the south of the island, there were many civilian suicides.
35:04Once more, the Japanese army played a crucial role in encouraging civilians to kill themselves.
35:10On the remote islands nearby, where there were no Japanese soldiers, there were no mass suicides.
35:19It was an awesome scale of sacrifice.
35:23Around 8,000 American troops, 60,000 Japanese soldiers, and 150,000 Japanese civilians died on Okinawa.
35:33And still the war continued.
35:47The reason why then Japan continued the war is that for the previous half century, through the First Sino-Japanese
35:54War,
35:55the Russo-Japanese War up to World War I, the Japanese had never lost a war.
36:01Japan had always won.
36:04Thus, both the government and the military people didn't know how to deal with losing a war.
36:10They didn't have any experience of defeat.
36:13And they didn't know how to end it, how to lose the war.
36:17In that situation, it was easier to continue the war, rather than make the courageous decision to lose it.
36:27While the fighting raged on Okinawa, here in Borneo, the Japanese refusal to surrender was to have a catastrophic effect
36:34on Allied prisoners of war.
36:42British and Australian prisoners of war had been sent to this camp at Sandakan in North Borneo,
36:47and forced to build an airfield for their Japanese captors.
36:53Many had been captured at the fall of Singapore, others when the Japanese overran the island of Java.
37:11The prisoners laboured here in temperatures often as high as 30 degrees Celsius.
37:16Malnourished, many sick with beriberi or malaria.
37:24Always under the constant threat of receiving a beating from their Japanese guards.
37:29There was one occasion on which somebody intervened when he was an officer,
37:38when one of their men was being beaten up by some Japanese guards,
37:42and he was horribly beaten up by quite a number of them.
37:48The Japanese treatment of prisoners of war was brutal, sadistic, and uncivilised.
37:56But in those conditions, there was no solution. You have to take it.
38:03In the old British phrase, you have to grin and bear it.
38:07Peter Lee was fortunate to survive.
38:10He was one of a group of officers transferred from the camp before the crisis developed.
38:18I do good in my right hand to have stayed.
38:21I lost some very good friends, not only amongst the 700 men who were left,
38:28but also the officers, the very fine men.
38:36Fearing an Allied invasion, the Japanese forced more than a thousand British and Australian prisoners of war
38:42to march 160 miles through the jungle towards Japanese bases on the other side of Borneo.
38:48The biggest of these forced marches, with nearly 550 prisoners of war,
38:54left Sandakan in May 1945.
39:01Well, maybe one in ten was sort of healthy.
39:04But the food situation was terribly bad, and a lot of them were sick.
39:09They had malaria and things like that, so they were weak.
39:16A couple of days later, we were told that if they fell over,
39:19if they fell over, we shouldn't leave them.
39:24We had to get rid of them.
39:29As the prisoners of war fell exhausted by the side of the jungle trail,
39:33they were shot.
39:35One of the Australian prisoners of war who collapsed was murdered by Toyoshige Karashima.
39:43I felt very sorry for him, but I had no choice but to kill him.
39:48I shot him.
39:52When people are about to die, they know that up to then,
39:55they have made their utmost effort to survive.
39:59But once they realize that there's no chance of survival,
40:02they just give up.
40:04For us, even if I wanted to help him,
40:07there was no way I could except to help him by killing him.
40:19Each day, as they marched on through appalling conditions,
40:22more prisoners of war died.
40:25And not just prisoners of war.
40:27A hundred of the 1,000 Japanese soldiers who went on the marches from Sandakan died.
40:33But in contrast, all of the prisoners of war who were left in Japanese care
40:38would lose their lives.
40:39The final survivors murdered by the Japanese in an attempt to conceal their crime
40:45after they'd reached their destination.
40:51Of the 1,800 Australian prisoners of war who'd been alive at Sandakan camp in 1944,
40:58only six who'd managed to escape into the jungle survived.
41:02The rest died either in the camp itself, on the marches,
41:06or once their trek was over.
41:11Every single one of the 700 British prisoners of war lost their lives.
41:18Absolute horror.
41:19Because nobody, I would say, at that time,
41:23had any idea that any such thing could possibly occur
41:30in what is called a civilised world.
41:35Toyoshige Karachima was subsequently convicted by an Australian war crimes tribunal
41:40of murdering more than a dozen prisoners of war.
41:46I don't feel guilty now about what I have done.
41:50Because in a war, people cannot be normal.
42:00We had already learnt what the Japanese were like
42:02when we were trained by the Japanese army at a training camp in Taiwan.
42:06And we saw many Japanese in colonised Taiwan.
42:14When we joined the Japanese army,
42:15we were told that we were the soldiers of the emperor
42:18and all we needed to do was to obey orders.
42:21To obey orders, which were the orders of the emperor.
42:26That's what I was told.
42:40And the fierce resistance of the emperor's army was costing the allies dear.
42:53I passed right by a graveyard.
42:58That's an indescribable number of crosses, of hit markers.
43:08I couldn't describe to you how I was affected by that.
43:21I had never seen 7,000 markers before.
43:24And when I came to realise that they were just kids like myself
43:30that wouldn't be going home.
43:35Sorry.
43:39I just couldn't make it anymore.
43:42It just took something out of me that I didn't know was there.
43:47I thought I was pretty tough.
43:49I wasn't tough.
43:53Anyway, yeah, it was a traumatic event.
44:03With Okinawa taken, the next battle these marines believed would be on the home islands of Japan.
44:10We went from Okinawa to Guam to be in training to attack Japan.
44:18And we fully expected heavy casualties.
44:25Whether without the use of the atomic bomb in August 1945, the Japanese might have subsequently given up before any
44:31invasion was necessary,
44:33is one of the great unanswered questions of history.
44:36For the last few weeks of the war, Japan had been seeking Moscow's help to mediate a peace,
44:41but one that still fell short of unconditional surrender.
44:46What is certain is that after the atomic bombs were dropped,
44:51throughout Asia and the Pacific, Japanese troops laid down their arms,
44:55finally allowed to stop fighting and survive.
45:00Around 5,000 soldiers and politicians would subsequently be tried for war crimes.
45:07British and Malay officials watched 10,000 faces getting lost
45:10as the Japs march past and salute the Union Jack.
45:22Prestige is precious in the Far East,
45:24and this is the way to make sure that from now on, Japan's name is mud.
45:31Spared humiliation was the Emperor himself.
45:34After the nuclear bombs had been dropped,
45:37the Japanese made peace overtures to the Allies,
45:39who then hinted that the institution of the Emperor could be kept in Japan.
45:44And so it proved.
45:47After the war, Hirohito remained in his palace in the central part of Tokyo.
45:51For the Allies, useful as a symbol of continuity between the old Japan and the new,
45:56and now a constitutional monarch at the head of a democratic government,
46:00no longer a living god.
46:03Even today, historians are divided as to how much Hirohito,
46:08with a hard-line government around him, was able to control the conduct of the war.
46:14But what there is no argument about is that after the war,
46:18the former Supreme Commander of the Imperial Armed Forces stayed on as Emperor,
46:24despite more than a million Japanese soldiers dying in his name.
46:31Why did the person at the top, the person who had supreme responsibility,
46:36not take responsibility for the war?
46:40I would have expected, if the Emperor had given any thought to those who died in misery on the front
46:45line,
46:45he would have taken some responsibility.
46:49Veterans don't really talk about war experiences openly,
46:53don't talk about bad things, they say, as it would shame Japan.
46:59Keep quiet.
47:11Emperor Hirohito remained on the throne until his death in January 1989.
47:17.
47:18.
47:30雨のちさきりりのびわざうけもちて
47:40家とおわぬかぴいこたよ
47:50仰げば通りこの黒
48:00仕上げが通りこの黒
48:05stamp向よおかしいねお菓子はお茶
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