“Emperor”: American Swagger, Hollywood Style

The new film “Emperor” tells the story of how America made the first key decision of its post-World War II occupation of Japan: the fate of Emperor Hirohito. Gen. Douglas MacArthur (Tommy Lee Jones) and his staff are landing in Tokyo as the film opens, ready to display some “good ol’ American swagger” and establish a stable occupation that leads to a stable reconstruction. One decision of great moral and strategic import — the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — has been made. Another remains: Should Japan’s imperial leader face execution as a war criminal? Gen. MacArthur tasks Gen. Bonner Fellers (Matthew Fox) with rounding up the defeated country’s senior political and military leaders, determining what role the emperor played in prosecuting it, and what price he should pay.

Fellers stands in for America’s Janus-faced view of defeated Japan. He is indignant in meetings with its high officials — haranguing them about the ultimate costs of the war they began. While sorting through Tokyo’s ruins for missing officials, however, he appears to weigh, wordlessly, the human costs of America’s use of force — bombing that culminated in the use of atomic weapons but involved much more conventional devastation.

Through MacArthur, the U.S. decided to preserve the emperor, in a more public role, to assist in disseminating to the Japanese people U.S. decisions regarding the occupation. It’s doubtful that the decision was as dramatic as the film suggests. MacArthur understood the emperor’s value as a mouthpiece for U.S. forces, and he believed (and the film addresses) that executing him would pose a direct threat to civil order in the early days of the occupation. The outcome probably did not hang in the balance long. Gen. Fellers’ investigation apparently did uncover that the Emperor had broken with tradition and attempted to deter Japan’s military leadership from the attack on Pearl Harbor and other aggressions. These actions were relevant to those weighing his status as a possible war criminal; but they were equally a signal that two elements of Japan’s cultural leadership — its military and its imperial court — were divided about the country’s march to war and its ultimate capitulation. The film conveys the decision from this perspective: the combination of a repentant Hirohito and the U.S. desire to maintain order pointed towards sparing, and using, the Emperor.  In his 2010 book Cultures of War, MIT historian John Dower adds that Hirohito may have  feared that his defeated subjects might engage in “revolution from below” and depose him; MacArthur’s fear of civil unrest, in reverse. But Dower’s account fully confirms the general’s mammoth status: “MacArthur’s authority was, literally as well as nominally, supreme. For all practical purposes Japan had a new, Caucasian, emperor.”

Why this film, and why now? The World War II generation will soon be gone completely, and that may be reason enough. Those who like war films for the action will be disappointed; apart from a brief bar fight, this is a talk-fest. And this is not a film about MacArthur’s larger-than-life presence in Japan, although it left me interested to see what Tommy Lee Jones would have done with such a biopic (since he may have shot his brief screen time “Emperor” in a handful of days.) This is a film about the opening days of one of America’s most consistent foreign policy engagements: its post-WWII relationship with Japan. America directed the creation of Japan’s constitution, and its re-establishment of parliamentary democracy. It helped rebuild its postwar economy, and guided its security relationships as a demilitarized nation. MacArthur’s tenure in Japan lasted until 1951,when he moved to Korea to command U.N. forces there. The primacy of the U.S.-Japan relationship remained long after.

The easiest parallel to draw with current events — the ongoing U.S. role in Iraq — is not a direct one. Opponents of the Iraq War contested the war’s legitimacy on the grounds that the U.S. was not attacked first, as its was by Japan. The administration that directed the war saw the U.S. role as that of “liberators,” not occupiers, and a long-term U.S. presence in the country was not part of the initial plan. Pressure to remove U.S. troops from Iraq was in part driven by comparisons to the timeline of their role in postwar Japan. The question now seems to be what sort of sustained engagement — short of a military presence — will the U.S. maintain after its war of choice, and how much influence will it have on Iraq’s long-term stability.

In the short term, after much “shock and awe”, there has been less for the U.S. to swagger about in Iraq. In addition to serving as a nostalgia trip to a high point in U.S. military history, one message “Emperor” carries is a more realistic vision of the time and engagement it takes to turn a war zone around.  The film also clearly demonstrates the value in knowing your enemy, even if you’ve already defeated him.