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Fun and games with the emperors of Japan

The first half went down easier than the second--i.e., the history of the Meiji, Taisho, and Showa emperors up to 1945 isn't bad, as opposed what follows. The Seagraves have a knack for making individuals and situations come alive. Alas, they also have a knack for small but irritating mistakes: MacArthur escaped from Corregidor by PT boat, not submarine. Japan had army and navy air forces, not a distinct "Japanese Air Force." The great fire raid on Tokyo featured incendiary bombs, not napalm, an entirely different technology, and it killed about half the 200,000 people cited by the Seagraves. In 1948 Edward Lansdale was only a major, three promotions shy of general....

More ominously, for a book that purports to give the inside scoop on the Emperor System, the Seagraves don't read Japanese and rarely if ever had translations made. (I can't be sure of this because the citations are obscure.) Most of their sources are English-only historians who themselves relied on English-only sources. For the first half of the book, I read the copious notes along with the text, never finding an instance in which the Seagraves refer to a Japanese text. I can't be sure of this because I gave up the practice when I realized that the really interesting stuff was never supported by a source I knew and trusted.

Then there's the Seagraves' fondness for conspiracy. As one small example, they quote what seems to me an entirely reasonable memo by Bonner Fellers, presenting the case for not trying the emperor Hirohito as a war criminal. Then they darken it by calling Fellers "one of the exorcists carefully put into place by Joe Grew and Herbert Hoover." Oh, that all-powerful, ever-present VRWC! ("Tokyo," the Seagraves gravely explain at one point, "would be the Asian base for the Republican Party and its Wall Street supporters.... This plan was spoiled by Pearl Harbor.")

Then there is the flat statement, supported only by a British history of intelligence during the war years, that Roosevelt signed a secret executive memo in April 1941 pledging to come to the assistance of British and Dutch possessions if they were attacked by Japan. I doubt this very much. I also doubt that Roosevelt and Churchill knew all about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor before it happened, and did nothing about it, so as to have an excuse for the U.S. to enter the war with both feet.

Finally there's the core of the book: that Japan systematically looted the nations it conquered (as it certainly did); that Hirohito's brother among others hid this vast wealth in caves and sunken ships, in an operation called Golden Lily; and that after 1945 this money was used to enrich the emperor, bribe Douglas MacArthur and Herbert Hoover, finance Japan's postwar expansion, and fund the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Here, as you might expect, the citations vanish altogether. The treasure cached for the emperor in the Philippines alone supposedly amounted to $100 billion--more money than the U.S. government spent for all purposes, military and civilian, during the war's final year. As for the CIA, "documents show" that Lansdale had 20,000 metric tons of gold in a Geneva bank, which is absurd: such a hoard would have a present worth of $185 trillion.

I suspect that The Yamato Dynasty was born in this fashion: First the Seagraves fell in with Joe Curtiss, the American mining engineer who supposedly helped recover some of this treasure, or with some other informant, perhaps English-speaking Japanese. Perhaps, as they say, their informants fear for their lives and therefore can't be identified. In any event, the Seagraves then took Golden Lily and spun a book around it. Not reading Japanese, and for the most part not caring to commission the translations they needed, they wrote it almost entirely from English-language sources.

Can you imagine a Japanese history of the U.S. role in World War II, written without reference to American texts? We'd laugh it out of the bookstores. Yet that's essentially what the Seagraves have done for the Japanese imperial family. Read the book by all means (the first half especially) but don't take it too seriously (the second half especially).

Better yet, ignore this book and read Herbert Bix's Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan instead. -- Daniel Ford