Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“A startling work -- awesomely ambitious, faultlessly researched, daring in its thesis, and profound in its implications."  — Business Week

"Magnificent. . . . everything a political biography should be."  — Richmond Times-Dispatch

This rich and powerful biography is now given fresh relevance with a new introduction by the author that explores how Hirohito’s legacy persists in Japan to this day, and how US foreign policy in the region in the last ten years is informed by our troubled past with Japan and with Hirohito as a ruler specifically.

Trained since childhood to lead his nation as a living deity, Japan’s Emperor Hirohito cultivated the image of a reluctant, detached monarch, a façade which masked a fierce cunning and powerful ambition. Historian Herbert P. Bix has unearned hundreds of previously untappe