Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (150 page)

T
g
implied that the government was forced to opt for war after it had carefully studied the “Hull note.” In fact there was (and is) no record of such an examination. What T
g
sought to obscure in addition to the professional incompetence of his Washington diplomats, was that Hull had never challenged Japan's continued control of Manchukuo; and that he, T
g
, might have, but did not, insist on postponing war with the United States at that time by making Hull's document a focus for negotiations.

When General T
j
took the stand on December 27, 1947, both GHQ's and the Japanese government's lobbying campaign to protect Hirohito shifted into high gear. The
Asahi shinbun
gave most of its front page to T
j
's testimony. Its headline that day read, “The Emperor Bears No Responsibility. [T
j
] Insists Adamantly That It Was a War of Self Defense.”
⁴⁷
Three days later, on December 30, after his American lawyer had read into the record excerpts from his earlier depositions, T
j
defended not only the emperor but the entire Japanese political process leading to the decision for war in December 1941. Japanese politics had not undergone any reactionary transformation, he insisted, but had remained government-as-usual-under-the-Meiji-Constitution. All Japanese war atrocities were accidental; neither ideological indoctrination nor the ethos that informed the armed forces had anything to do with them. Addressing the Japanese public at large, rather than the courtroom audience, T
j
depicted himself as an aggrieved victim.
He denied that aggressive war was a crime and declared: