By DAVID W. MUNNS, Assistant Editor

AMERICAN SHOGUN: General MacArthur, Emperor Hirohito and the Drama of Modern Japan
by Robert Harvey, New York: The Overlook Press, March 2006. 464 pp. $35.00.
ISBN: 1-58567-682-9

Few events were as unprecedented as the meeting of U.S. Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Japan’s Emperor Hirohito two-and-a-half weeks after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that effectively ended World War II.

Both sides of the globe watched intently. The West was proud of what author Robert Harvey declares its “shogun” victor who had “conquered” the divine ruler of the East, Hirohito, who had waged war on American soil. But Hirohito’s continuing presence in office following the war was astonishing, and appalling, to many Americans.

The respect MacArthur accorded Hirohito reflects a Japanese sensibility that few Americans understood at the time. Hirohito had serious reservations about the war, and, although the emperor “indulged” in Japanese victory celebrations, “little else could be expected of the head of a nation at war, with soldiers dying in his service, even if he believed that conflict had been the consequence of misguided policies,” Harvey writes.

Despite Hirohito’s “somber,” strikingly deferent mannerisms, “he was perhaps unaware … that MacArthur was his foremost champion, or he would have been less nervous,” Harvey writes.

Indeed, the famous photograph of the two men taken during their meeting on Sept. 27, 1945, with MacArthur dressed in a tan Army shirt and pants, with no tie — standard dress for the occupying American forces — and Hirohito adorned in a top hat, striped trousers and a tailcoat, captures the symbolism of this meeting. The encounter was marked with feelings of resentment, respect, humility and pride. These two men had been at the helm of a change in the course of world history, and, ultimately, Western and Eastern civilization. The Japanese began a slow repudiation of divinity; America had just won a war that ultimately defeated fascism and dictatorial rule, proving democracy as the ruling force in international power.

Harvey, a British author and former conservative minister of parliament, paints the portrait of these two leaders as a microcosm for a period of almost a half century that ultimately both destroyed and renewed Japan while simultaneously leading to vast changes in ideology and wartime innovation within the United States. Whereas a brief “imperialist flurry” in the early 1900s serves as a preface for the United States to become a world superpower, Harvey reminds readers that the U.S. Army ranked 16th in the world as late as the 1930s.

MacArthur, who served as supreme commander of the Allied Powers in Japan at the end of World War II, handled both the American occupation and the first exportation of democracy and political and economic freedom. Harvey pins the success of this exportation with decidedly mixed results, relevant to the current cultural collusion in the war on terrorism.

The modern partnership between America and Japan, now the most developed democracy in Asia, was defined in terms of World War II, according to Harvey. “The extraordinary political, military and economic duel between the United States and its principal Pacific rival, Japan, that spanned most of the first half of the 20th century provides a penetratingly illuminating insight into America’s ability to relate to other countries with entirely different religions, cultures, ethnic makeups and political systems as well as much older histories,” he writes.

American Shogun traces both leaders’ lives from their first steps to manhood, with Hirohito taking reign of a more than 2,000-year monarchy believed to be in direct ascendancy with the sun god while MacArthur was born into an ordinary American heritage before marking a turning point when he was admitted into West Point in 1898.

Harvey offers nuanced reflections of these two men and their respective cultures. He writes with a prosaic pen, discussing a precarious period in history when not just countries but ideologies collided with an impact that still resonates around the globe. American Shogun at once divulges the passion of two cultures and reveals the continuum of rise and fall amid the expansion of empires.

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