What is Reddit's opinion of Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

It's combination of both what you're saying and what yordles_win is saying. Read Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. Hirohito had a much bigger role in the events of WWII than most American historians like to admit ... BUT he also was frequently circumvented towards the end of the war and at the very end, it was the army that negotiated with America, and not the emperor.

>Are you trying to say that the US is more centralized and top-down oriented than fascist dictatorships/Imperial Japan was?

This is what happens when you edit out the end of the sentence. It was a dictatorship with a MENTAL DEFECTIVE at the helm. Thus there was a total break down in chain of command. Read Bix's book Hirohito for more.

Learn to read for comprehension, not snip out bits that catch your eye.

Have you read Herbert Bix's Hirohito biography? It makes a very strong case for how underhanded the Imperial government was (especially Emperor Hirohito, who has historically been regarded as "just a figurehead" in the WWII Japanese military system) and how uninformed the Japanese people were.

Edit: Just looked at the username... Crafty, but either way, Bix's Hirohito bio is an informative, if incredibly dense, read.

Just look for recent biographies, like this: https://www.amazon.com/Hirohito-Making-Modern-Japan-Herbert/dp/0060931302

This book is a very thorough treatment. If you're not that interested, here is a page with the text of a pretty decent lecture about it by a respected scholar (even if the web page's formatting/font is horrifyingly bad).

If you weren't really even that interested, TLDR is we really can't know. We have to kind of guess based on his public actions. They are inconclusive due to how he actually wielded his Imperial Power (very indirectly), but still leaning toward "didn't want war but it was taken out of his hands." He probably could have tried more to oppose the junta, but we don't know what threats passed behind closed doors. The big problem is that the combined Japanese/US occupation government had every reason to cover up incriminating evidence and so avoid the domestic unrest that would come from indicting a man that many thought of as a god. Any evidence that might have survived is under the tightest wraps you can think of by the Imperial Household Bureau of the current Japanese govt.