‘Our islands are being violated one after the other’ : Emperor Hirohito’s prayerful reports to his Imperial ancestors, October 1937 - August 1945

On September 9, 2014, Japan’s Imperial Household Agency released Shōwa Tennō jitsuroku (True Documents of the Shōwa Emperor, 昭和天皇実錄). The official day-by-day account of the Shōwa Emperor’s life and times, Jitsuroku totals roughly 12,000 pages and sixty-one (unpublished) volumes. Twenty-four years in the compiling, it draws upon some 3,000 separate documentary source materials. Many of those source materials, such as the diary of wartime Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Kido Kōichi, have been available to researchers for decades. Yet, at least a few dozens of the cited materials, including for example the diary and papers of wartime Grand Chamberlain Hyakutake Saburō, remain otherwise inaccessible to researchers. Herein lies Jitsuroku’s principal point of scholarly value, for its in-depth use of source materials means it is a goldmine of hitherto-unknown historical facts centering on the Shōwa Emperor. This study draws from Jitsuroku a select few of these hitherto-unknown facts. It examines, in their entirety, those prayerful reports reproduced in Jitsuroku, which the emperor delivered to his Imperial ancestors between the outbreak of Japan’s war in China on July 7, 1937 and the end of World War II on August 15, 1945. Jitsuroku reveals that the emperor delivered at least forty-six prayerful reports during the war. Of the forty-six wartime prayers which it mentions, Jitsuroku reproduces the texts of five. It is precisely these five prayerful reports, which this article discusses: one from October 17, 1937; another from December 9, 1941; two separate prayers from December 12, 1942; and a fifth prayer which was delivered on July 30, 1945 and repeated three days later. By delving into the emperor’s prayerful sincerity, this essay purports to provide insights into the emperor’s innermost thoughts at key moments in Japan’s wartime history.