Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (172 page)

5.
“Eigoban, ‘Sh
wa tenn
dokuhakuroku' genbun,” in Higashino Shin, p. 212. The original is untitled and undated. Internal evidence, analyzed by Higashino, suggests that it was drafted by Terasaki Hidenari about a week after the completion of the Japanese version of the “Monologue” and presented to Gen. Bonner F. Fellers, MacArthur's secretary, on or around April 23, 1946, the day Hirohito was scheduled to have (but at the last minute was forced to cancel) his second meeting with MacArthur.

6.
No one knows the true dimensions of the human losses from World War II in Asia and the Pacific because accurate figures on war deaths were never really collected. It can be said with some certainty that China sustained the most casualties at the hand of Japan, including more than 10 million killed. The Philippines (according to official Filipino sources) suffered 1.1 million wartime deaths. Approximately 1.5 to 2 million Vietnamese died from war-related starvation. Official casualty estimates for Indonesia seem to have been buried (probably deliberately) within the figure of 4 million “forced laborers” put forward by Indonesian officials during reparations talks with Japan; famine was the main cause of their deaths. An estimated 150,000 Burmese, more than 100,000 Malaysians and residents of Singapore, 200,000 Koreans, and more than 30,000 residents of Taiwan died during or immediately after the war, including many from noncombat situations. There appear to be no official casualty figures for Pacific islanders, especially those who suffered in the jungle fighting in the Solomons and New Guinea. Australia suffered nearly 18,000 dead. More than 60,000 Allied soldiers, civilians, and prisoners of war were killed by the Japanese. Japan, the aggressor in Asia and the Pacific, suffered 3.1 million deaths, of which nearly one-third were noncombatant fatalities. Like Nazi Germany, Japan incurred gross
human losses smaller than those it inflicted on some of the nations that were the objects of its aggression. Finally, huge as these Asian losses were, the European losses from the war were greater, especially in the Soviet Union, which did most of the fighting against Nazi Germany. See Otabe Yuji, Hayashi Hiroshi, and Yamada Akira,
Kiiwaado Nihon no sens
hanzai
(Yuzankaku Shuppan, 1997), p. 54; for Soviet casualties, see John Erickson, “Soviet War Losses: Calculations and Controversies,” in John Erickson and David Dilks, eds.,
Barbarossa, the Axis and the Allies
(Edinburgh University Press, 1994), pp. 255–77.

7.
Tadokoro Izumi,
Sh
wa tenn
no waka
(S
jusha, 1997), p. 11.

8.
On the tenth anniversary of Hirohito's death, the
Yomiuri shinbun
reported that the Imperial Household Agency had already spent over 97 million yen on the Sh
wa annals project and “a further 12.74 million yen was budgeted for fiscal 1999.”
Daily Yomiuri
(Jan. 8, 1999), p. 3.

9.
Higashino Shin, p. 142. He identifies this as Record Group 331, Box 763.

10.
Yasuda Hiroshi,
Tenn
no seijishi: Mutsuhito, Yoshihito, Hirohito no jidai
(Aoki Shoten, 1998), p. 277.

11.
An imperial household law, promulgated at the same time, blurred the distinction between the ancient customs and institutional practices of the imperial house and the many newly constructed ones of the Meiji era. Together with imperial ordinances, it formed a legal tradition entirely separate from parliamentary law based on the constitution. Yokota K
ichi, “‘K
shitsu tempan' shich
” in Yokota K
ichi et al., ed.
Sh
ch
tenn
sei no k
z
: kenp
gakusha ni yoru kaidoku
(Nihon Hy
ronsha, 1990), pp. 105–106.