JAPAN: Since Hirohito's death the taboo on criticising him has weakened, writes David McNeill , in Tokyo
After 17 years since the death of Emperor Hirohito, Japanese people still don't know what to think of their controversial wartime leader. A new film, released this week, will only deepen the mystery.
Was the emperor, as his supporters claim, a largely ceremonial figurehead manipulated by militarists as Japan slid into the last century's most destructive war, or did he have his hands firmly on the helm, guiding the state and his generals?
The former theory is the preferred legacy in official Japan, carefully cultivated by monarchists and the Americans who wanted the emperor left in place after the second World War as a conservative, unifying figure.
Most Japanese born since 1945 have grown up with an image of the befuddled, bespectacled marine biologist, rather than the imperious military leader on horseback who appears in critical biographies.
For years, questioning this image was dangerous. Japanese reporters never asked Hirohito about his wartime role, and when mayor of Nagasaki Hitoshi Motojima suggested in 1989 that the dying emperor bore some responsibility for the war, he was shot by ultra right-wingers.
However, since Hirohito's death that year the taboo on criticising him has weakened. By 2002, it was safe enough for scholar Herbert Bix to publish a book in Japanese arguing that the emperor was heavily involved in planning and executing the war.
Bix believes that allowing Hirohito to remain on the Chrysanthemum Throne after the war was one of the great scandals of the 20th century. So the arrival of a new film on the man the Japanese call the Showa Emperor, by Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov, has created a stir.
Sokurov is mainly known for his pair of recent acclaimed films on Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin and there was an expectation that he was going to stick the cinematic boot into this most revered and reviled Japanese figure. The choice of comedian Issey Ogata to play the title role added to the expectations.
In the event, however, the film is as dull as dishwater. We see the emperor, who Issey plays with an awkward reticence, dawdling over breakfast, composing poetry and fiddling with a laboratory shellfish in Tokyo's imperial palace as the city around him turns to ash under US firebombing. Much of the real drama, such as the political meetings that decided the fate of millions of lives, or the emperor's surrender address, when he famously announced on national radio thatthe war situation has developed not necessarily to our advantage, are left out.
In its place is a film of small details: the retainers unable to look the man they serve in the eye because they believe he is a deity; Hirohito's nervousness as he prepares for his momentous meeting with effectively Japan's new emperor, US general Douglas MacArthur.
The overall impression is of a weak, well-meaning man who much preferred tinkering in his cluttered lab than leading one of history's greatest confrontations.
As one reviewer said, Hirohito comes across more like Chance the gardener (Peter Sellers, Being There) than Stalin the dictator.
The emperor taboos have not completely faded: Issey had to keep his role secret in Japan to avoid the attentions of right-wingers. The film has just opened in a single screen in central Tokyo and a couple of regional cinemas are nervously watching the reaction.
Moreover, even in death the emperor's cold, bony touch occasionally sends a shiver down the spine of contemporary Japan, as shown recently when a memo suggested his unhappiness at political visits to the Yasukuni Shrine war memorial.
Those words, uttered over three decades ago, have come back to haunt the candidates in September's election to replace prime minister Junichiro Koizumi; yet another example that Japan's past keeps bubbling to the surface like untreated sewage.