Controversies Regarding The Role Of The Emperor Of Japan
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Controversies Regarding The Role Of The Emperor Of Japan
There have been several controversies regarding the role and the status of the Emperor of Japan. This is due in part to the variety of roles the Emperor has historically filled, as well as the competition for power with other parts of Japanese society at several points in history. Meiji Constitution In the Meiji Constitution which occurred in 1889, the emperor was sovereign and was the focus of the state's legitimacy. The preamble stated, "The rights of sovereignty of the State, We have inherited from Our Ancestors, and We shall bequeath them to Our descendants." In the postwar constitution, the emperor's role in the political system was drastically redefined. A prior and important step in this process was Emperor Hirohito's 1946 New Year's speech, made at the prompting of General Douglas MacArthur, renouncing his status as a divine ruler, without however repudiating that he was a descendant of Amaterasu as arahitogami. Hirohito declared that relations between the ruler and his ...
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Emperor Of Japan Birthday Akihito 2017
An emperor (from la, imperator, via fro, empereor) is a monarch, and usually the sovereign ruler of an empire or another type of imperial realm. Empress, the female equivalent, may indicate an emperor's wife ( empress consort), mother (empress dowager), or a woman who rules in her own right and name (empress regnant). Emperors are generally recognized to be of the highest monarchic honor and rank, surpassing kings. In Europe, the title of Emperor has been used since the Middle Ages, considered in those times equal or almost equal in dignity to that of Pope due to the latter's position as visible head of the Church and spiritual leader of the Catholic part of Western Europe. The Emperor of Japan is the only currently reigning monarch whose title is translated into English as "Emperor". Both emperors and kings are monarchs or sovereigns, but both emperor and empress are considered the higher monarchical titles. In as much as there is a strict definition of emperor, it is that ...
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Shinto
Shinto () is a religion from Japan. Classified as an East Asian religion by scholars of religion, its practitioners often regard it as Japan's indigenous religion and as a nature religion. Scholars sometimes call its practitioners ''Shintoists'', although adherents rarely use that term themselves. There is no central authority in control of Shinto, with much diversity of belief and practice evident among practitioners. A polytheistic and animistic religion, Shinto revolves around supernatural entities called the . The are believed to inhabit all things, including forces of nature and prominent landscape locations. The are worshiped at household shrines, family shrines, and ''jinja'' public shrines. The latter are staffed by priests, known as , who oversee offerings of food and drink to the specific enshrined at that location. This is done to cultivate harmony between humans and and to solicit the latter's blessing. Other common rituals include the dances, rites of pass ...
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Changde Chemical Weapon Attack
The Battle of Changde (Battle of Changteh; ) was a major engagement in the Second Sino-Japanese War in and around the Chinese city of Changde (Changteh) in the province of Hunan. During the battle, the Imperial Japanese Army extensively used chemical weapons. The purpose of the Japanese offensive was not to hold the city but to maintain pressure on the Chinese National Revolutionary Army to reduce its combat ability in the region and its ability to reinforce the Burma Campaign. The Japanese were initially successful in their offensive operation by bacteria-infected bombs and captured parts of the city of Changde, which forced civilians to evacuate. However, the Japanese were pinned down in the city by a single Chinese division long enough for other Chinese units to surround them with a counterencirclement. Heavy casualties and the loss of their supply lines then forced the Japanese to withdraw, which returned territorial control to the original status quo. Some contemporary W ...
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Hirohito And The Making Of Modern Japan
''Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan'' is a book by Herbert P. Bix covering the reign of Emperor Hirohito of Japan from 1926 until his death in 1989. It won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction The Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are awarded annually for the "Letters, Drama, and Music" category. The award is given to a nonfiction book written by an American author and published duri .... Much of the information in the book was uncovered by Japanese people who worked with Bix, but publishing companies and press in Japan at the time chose not to reveal the information. Bix stated that he did not want the book to be used as a weapon against the Japanese people. References External links *''Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan'' at Google Books
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Herbert Bix
Herbert P. Bix (born 1938) is an American historian. He wrote ''Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan'', an account of the Japanese Emperor and the events which shaped modern Japanese imperialism, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2001. Bix was born in Boston and attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He earned the PhD in history and Far Eastern languages from Harvard University. He was a founding member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. For several decades, he has written about modern and contemporary Japanese history in the United States and Japan. He has taught at many universities, including Hosei University in Japan as of 1986 and 1990, and Hitotsubashi University as of 2001. As of 2013 he is Professor Emeritus in History and Sociology at Binghamton University. His book 'Peasant Protest in Japan, 1590–1884' was hailed as 'a sensitive rendering of the actions of great masses of people' and a superior 'Marxist history'. Selected ...
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Battle Of Wuhan
The Battle of Wuhan (武漢之戰), popularly known to the Chinese as the Defense of Wuhan, and to the Japanese as the Capture of Wuhan, was a large-scale battle of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Engagements took place across vast areas of Anhui, Henan, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, and Hubei provinces over a period of four and a half months. It was the longest, the largest, and arguably the most significant battle in the early stages of the Second Sino-Japanese War. More than one million National Revolutionary Army troops from the Fifth and Ninth War Zone were put under the direct command of Chiang Kai-shek, defending Wuhan from the Central China Area Army of the Imperial Japanese Army led by Shunroku Hata. Chinese forces were also supported by the Soviet Volunteer Group, a group of volunteer pilots from Soviet Air Forces. Although the battle ended with the eventual capture of Wuhan by the Japanese forces, it resulted in heavy casualties on both sides, as high as 1.2 million combined ...
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Chemical Weapons
A chemical weapon (CW) is a specialized Ammunition, munition that uses chemicals chemical engineering, formulated to inflict death or harm on humans. According to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), this can be any chemical compound intended as a weapon "or its Precursor (chemistry), precursor that can cause death, injury, temporary incapacitation or sensory irritation through its chemical action. Munitions or other delivery devices designed to deliver chemical weapons, whether filled or unfilled, are also considered weapons themselves." Chemical weapons are classified as weapons of mass destruction (WMD), though they are distinct from nuclear weapons, biological warfare, biological weapons, and radiological weapons. All may be used in warfare and are known by the military acronym NBC (for nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare). Weapons of mass destruction are distinct from conventional weapons, which are primarily effective due to their explos ...
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Prince Kan'in Kotohito
was the sixth head of a cadet branch of the Japanese imperial family, and a career army officer who served as Chief of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff from 1931 to 1940. During his tenure as the Chief of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff, the Imperial Japanese Army committed numerous war crimes against Chinese civilians including the Nanking massacre and the systemic use of chemical and bacteriological weapons. Prince Kan'in Kotohito died several months before the end of the Second World War and was not tried for war crimes. Early years Prince Kotohito was born in Kyoto on November 10, 1865 as the sixteenth son of Prince Fushimi Kuniye (1802–1875). His father was the twentieth head of the Fushimi-no-miya, one of the four shinnōke, branches of the Imperial Family which were eligible to succeed to the throne if the main line should die out. Since the infant mortality rate in the main imperial household was quite high, Emperor Kōmei, the father of Emperor Meiji, ...
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Yoshiaki Yoshimi
is a professor of Japanese modern history at Chuo University in Tokyo, Japan. He is a founding member of the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan's War Responsibility. He was born in Yamaguchi Prefecture, and studied at the University of Tokyo. Notable research Yoshimi has done major research on war crimes perpetrated by the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy during the first part of the Shōwa period. He has published his studies on the use of chemical weapons by Japan, ordered by Michinomiya Hirohito himself. Yoshimi is mostly noted for his work on sex slaves. He found the first documented evidence at the "Defense Agency Library" of Tokyo that the Imperial Japanese Army established and ran "comfort stations." He discovered plenty of documentation and testimony to prove the existence of approximately 2,000 comfort women centers where as many as 200,000 Korean, Filipina, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Dutch, Australian, and Japanese women, many of wh ...
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Fumimaro Konoe
Prince was a Japanese politician and prime minister. During his tenure, he presided over the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the breakdown in relations with the United States, which ultimately culminated in Japan's entry into World War II. He also played a central role in transforming his country into a totalitarian state by passing the National Mobilization Law and founding the Imperial Rule Assistance Association. Despite Konoe's attempts to resolve tensions with the United States, the rigid timetable imposed on negotiations by the military and his own government's inflexibility regarding a diplomatic resolution set Japan on the path to war. Upon failing to reach a peace agreement, Konoe resigned as Prime Minister on 18 October 1941, prior to the outbreak of hostilities. However, he remained a close advisor to the Emperor until the end of World War II. Following the end of the war, he committed suicide on 16 December 1945. Early life Fumimaro Konoe was born in To ...
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Hajime Sugiyama
was a Japanese field marshal and one of the leaders of Japan's military throughout most of World War II. As Army Minister in 1937, Sugiyama was a driving force behind the launch of hostilities against China in retaliation for the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. After being named the Army’s Chief of Staff in 1940, he became a leading advocate for expansion into Southeast Asia and preventive war against the United States. Upon the outbreak of hostilities in the Pacific, Sugiyama served as the army’s commander-in-chief until his removal by Prime Minister Hideki Tojo in February 1944. Following Tojo's ouster in July 1944, he once again held the post of Army Minister in Kuniaki Koiso's cabinet until its dissolution in April 1945. Ten days after Japan's surrender on 2 September 1945, he committed suicide. Early life and career Born to a former ''samurai'' family from Kokura (now part of Kitakyushu City is a Cities of Japan, city located in Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan. As of ...
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