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Protecting the Emperor

On 29 August 1945, MacArthur was ordered to exercise authority through the Japanese government machinery, including the Emperor Hirohito. MacArthur's headquarters was located in the Dai Ichi Life Insurance Building in Tokyo. Unlike in Germany, where the Allies had in May 1945 abolished the German state, the Americans chose to allow the Japanese state to continue to exist, albeit under their ultimate control. Unlike Germany, there was a certain partnership between the occupiers and occupied as MacArthur decided to rule Japan via the Emperor and most of the rest of the Japanese elite. The Emperor was a living god to the Japanese people, and MacArthur found that ruling via the Emperor made his job in running Japan much easier than it otherwise would have been.

After the Japanese surrender in August 1945, there was a large amount of pressure that came from both Allied countries and Japanese leftists that demanded the emperor step down and be indicted as a war criminal. MacArthur disagreed, as he thought that an ostensibly cooperating emperor would help establish a peaceful allied occupation regime in Japan. Since retaining the emperor was crucial to ensuring control over the population, the allied forces shielded him from war responsibility and avoided undermining his authority. Evidence that would incriminate the emperor and his family was excluded from the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.

Code-named Operation Blacklist, MacArthur created a plan that separated the emperor from the militarists, retained the emperor as a constitutional monarch but only as a figurehead, and used the emperor to retain control over Japan and help the U.S. achieve their objectives. The American historian Herbert P. Bix described the relationship between the general and the Emperor as: "the Allied commander would use the Emperor, and the Emperor would cooperate in being used. Their relationship became one of expediency and mutual protection, of more political benefit to Hirohito than to MacArthur because Hirohito had more to lose—the entire panoply of symbolic, legitimizing properties of the imperial throne".

At the same time, MacArthur undermined the imperial mystique when his staff released a picture of his first meeting with the Emperor, the impact of which on the Japanese public was electric as the Japanese people for the first time saw the Emperor as a mere man overshadowed by the much taller MacArthur instead of the living god he had always been portrayed as. Up to 1945, the Emperor had been a remote, mysterious figure to his people, rarely seen in public and always silent, whose photographs were always taken from a certain angle to make him look taller and more impressive than he really was. No Japanese photographer would have taken such a photo of the Emperor being overshadowed by MacArthur. The Japanese government immediately banned the photo of the Emperor with MacArthur on the grounds that it damaged the imperial mystique, but MacArthur rescinded the ban and ordered all of the Japanese newspapers to print it. The photo was intended as a message to the Emperor about who was going to be the senior partner in their relationship.

As he needed the Emperor, MacArthur protected him from any effort to hold him accountable for his actions and allowed him to issue statements that incorrectly portrayed the emerging democratic post-war era as a continuation of the Meiji era reforms. MacArthur did not allow any investigations of the Emperor, and instead in October 1945 ordered his staff "in the interests of peaceful occupation and rehabilitation of Japan, prevention of revolution and communism, all facts surrounding the execution of the declaration of war and subsequent position of the Emperor which tend to show fraud, menace or duress be marshalled". In January 1946, MacArthur reported to Washington that the Emperor could not be indicted for war crimes on the grounds:

His indictment will unquestionably cause a tremendous convulsion among the Japanese people, the repercussions of which cannot be overestimated. He is a symbol which unites all Japanese. Destroy him and the nation will disintegrate...It is quite possible that a million troops would be required which would have to be maintained for an indefinite number of years.

To protect the Emperor from being indicted, MacArthur had one of his staff, Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, tell the genrō Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai on 6 March 1946:

To counter this situation, it would be most convenient if the Japanese side could prove to us that the Emperor is completely blameless. I think the forthcoming trials offer the best opportunity to do that. Tojo, in particular should be made to bear all responsibility at his trial. I want you to have Tojo say as follows: "At the imperial conference prior to the start of the war, I already decided to push for war even if his majesty the emperor was against going to war with the United States."

From the viewpoint of both sides, having one especially evil figure in the form of General Hideki Tojo, on whom everything that went wrong could be blamed, was most politically convenient. At a second meeting on 22 March 1946, Fellers told Yonai:

The most influential advocate of un-American thought in the United States is Cohen (a Jew and a Communist), the top adviser to Secretary of State Byrnes. As I told Yonai... it is extremely disadvantageous to MacArthur's standing in the United States to put on trial the very Emperor who is cooperating with him and facilitating the smooth administration of the occupation. This is the reason for my request... "I wonder whether what I said to Admiral Yonai the other day has already been conveyed to Tojo?"

MacArthur's attempts to shield the Emperor from indictment and to have all the blame taken by Tojo were successful, which as Bix commented, "had a lasting and profoundly distorting impact on the Japanese understanding of the lost war".