Ghost of Hirohito still haunts as Japan fails to confront past

The completion by Japan's Imperial Household Agency of the 61-volume record of the life of Emperor Hirohito (1901-1989) has drawn much attention in Japan. The formidable work was recently opened to limited public viewing, with a plan to publish it over the next five years. But it is already clear that the new record inadvertently reflects Japan's continuing inability to address some fundamental questions about its past.

Having taken a quarter century to compile, the project relied on some 40 new sources, most notably the diary and notes of Saburo Hyakutake, an admiral who served as court chamberlain from 1936 to 1944. But, while acknowledging the enormous scale of the undertaking, specialists seem to agree that the new account offers no earth-shattering findings or innovative interpretations concerning Hirohito's many and changing roles in the most tumultuous period of Japan's modern history.

Perhaps this is not surprising, coming from a conservative imperial institution's official team of editors. The record takes to new lengths the idea that the historian's task, as Leopold von Ranke put it in the 19th century, is to show "what actually happened". It is said to be an excellent chronicle of the court's day-to-day goings-on, revealing, for example, that the emperor celebrated Christmas as a boy and had nose surgery in his youth, and how often he met with whom.