Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (397 page)

21.
Ashida nikki, dai nikan
, p. 27.

22.
“The Emperor's Visit to Hiroshima,” Dec. 9, 1947, Departmental Despatch No. 45/1947: From Australian Mission in Japan, Australian Archives, ACT CRS A 1838, Item 477/511.

23.
Suzuki Masao,
Sh
wa tenn
no gojunk
(Tentensha, 1992), pp. 210–11.

24.
“The Emperor's Tour of the Ch
goku Region,” Dec. 16, 1947, in National Diet Library, GHQ/SCAP Records Box No. 2195, Microfiche Sheet No. GS (B)–01787.

25.
“Memorandum for the Record,” Jan. 12, 1948, by Guy Swopes, Chief of GHQ's Political Affairs Division. After citing the huge amount of yen spent on Hirohito's four-day visit to Hiroshima prefecture, he noted that prefectural assemblies, local governments, and private corporations had also appropriated “staggering” amounts of money for large-scale street repair and road improvements in connection with Hirohito's travels. “The Japanese Emperor has been humanized,” but he still “occupies today essentially the same position he has held for decades.”

26.
John W. Treat, “Beheaded Emperors and the Absent Figure in Contemporary Japanese Literature,” in
PMLA
(Jan. 1994), p. 106.

27.
Matsuura S
z
,
Tenn
to masu komi
, p. 29; It
Satoru, “Nihon koku kenp
to tenn
,” in Fujiwara Akira, et al.,
Tenn
no Sh
wa shi
, pp. 129–30.

28.
Nippon Times
, Feb. 25, 1948.

29.
Ashida nikki, dai nikan
, March 10, 1947, pp. 72–73.

30.
According to this view of political history, Japanese development alternated between periods of radical (usually rightist) reform and periods of moderation.

31.
On the release of war crimes suspects, see Sebald to Sec. of State, Dec. 24, 1948, in
FRUS 1948,
vol. 6,
The Far East and Australasia
, pp. 936–37; and Far Eastern Commission policy decisions of Feb. 24 and March 31, 1949.

32.
In the San Francisco Peace Treaty, the U.S. abandoned reparations claims against Japan and obliged the Japanese government to acknowledge only minimal war responsibility in the form of accepting, in Article 11, the verdict of the Tokyo tribunal.