When Hirohito Returned to Europe

Although the streets of London were thronged with people, all was quiet. The silence was broken only by the rattle of the carriages, the snap of the Japanese and British flags straining in the wind, and the clatter of the horses’ hooves. The crowds glared at the two ornamental carriages that rolled by. Not even Queen Elizabeth II’s presence in the first raised a cheer, because of the man who sat on her left. With the queen rode the Japanese emperor Hirohito, who had led his country during the Second World War, and whose soldiers had enslaved, tortured, beheaded, starved, mutilated, and massacred British troops in Southeast Asia. It was 5 October 1971 and Hirohito, who had been permitted to remain on the Chrysanthemum Throne after the war had ended, had arrived in the UK for a controversial state visit.

The people who turned out to watch Hirohito were silent because they remembered. They remembered his declaration of war on Britain in 1941; how his men had swarmed across Asia and the Pacific; and they remembered the friends and relatives who had been killed, summarily executed, or abused beneath the flag of the Rising Sun. They had not forgotten that, throughout the Second World War, the Japanese had ignored almost every law of war, and had been merciless in their treatment of prisoners.

Captured soldiers had been housed in appalling conditions, deprived of medicine, and starved. They had been made to work, and those who had been unable to had usually been shot or stabbed with bayonets. Japanese troops had taken prisoners on marches that would have tested the healthy, and those who had fallen had been killed on the spot. Airmen who had crash-landed in Japanese territory had been tortured and then executed. Some had been beheaded with spades, others drenched with petrol and set alight. The brutality was exceptional. Whereas four in 100 British and American troops imprisoned by the Germans or Italians had perished, 27 in 100 had died in Hirohito’s camps. The Japanese had been equally brutal with civilians in the territories that they conquered. Those who destroyed crops, food, and fuel had been dealt with summarily; men had been killed and women raped while the commanding officer watched. It may have been more than 20 years since the war had ended, but the British people remembered. As the Spectator editorialised on 9 October 1971: ‘The Emperor Hirohito is a despicable man.’

Hirohito was viewed by a large section of the British public as being as murderous a villain as Hitler or Mussolini. After the emperor had surrendered in 1945 many in Britain had wanted him dead, along with the ministers who had answered to him. But the Americans who occupied Japan disagreed, fearing the instability that might result from his prosecution and potential martyrdom. So Hirohito never stood trial for his involvement in his nation’s war crimes. Mussolini had been hanged and Hitler had shot himself; Hirohito had clung on. He renounced his divinity and remained emperor, clearly implicated in Japan’s crimes yet, by international consensus, left alone. He remained in place as his country rebuilt itself and became, once again, an economic power. Japanese ascendancy made the British government eager to improve relations, and the case for re-engaging with Hirohito had grown. In 1970 he was invited to make a state visit to Britain, and he accepted.

Former friend

The prospect of visiting Britain also stirred up the past for Hirohito – but his mind was not on the Second World War. He remembered his first and only previous trip to Britain in 1921, and the memories of this visit – British diplomats in Tokyo noticed – reliably caused the otherwise reticent emperor ‘to unbend’. In those days Japan had been a British ally, and the countries had fought alongside each other during the First World War. Hirohito, then aged 20, had been the crown prince of Japan and he was greeted as a friend by the British people, who had turned out to cheer him and King George V. The monarch had bedecked his guest with the Order of the Garter, the GCB, and the CVO. Hirohito had even been made a field marshal. But those honours had all been stripped in 1941, and British goodwill with them. When the news of Hirohito’s visit was announced in early 1971, the memory of the Second World War suddenly and violently re-emerged. Jack Halls, the chairman of a branch of the Far East Prisoners of War Association, declared himself ‘very opposed to the visit and so are many of our members. We do not propose to demonstrate – we are loyal subjects of the Queen. But we do feel we should express our dissatisfaction’. Prime minister Edward Heath was concerned, and instructed the Foreign Office that ‘nothing should go wrong’.

It was a vain hope. Trouble started before Hirohito’s arrival. The emperor remembered so many details of his 1921 visit, not least the honours he had received. Now he wanted them back, and this wish was communicated to London. For a man who had declared war on Britain to become a field marshal in the British army was out of the question, but his name was restored to the Garter Roll and, as unobtrusively as possible, his banner re-hung in St George’s Chapel at Windsor. Word immediately got out and John Marsh, a Second World War veteran who had been captured by Japanese troops, returned his medals to the Ministry of Defence. ‘As far as I am concerned’, he told journalists, ‘awarding the Emperor our highest order for chivalry makes my award meaningless.’

E.W. Phillips was also outraged. Twenty-eight years earlier he had been a British soldier and captured by the Japanese. He remembered the day in 1943 when a Japanese officer had ordered him to find 200 men to work on a railway line. Phillips had spoken to the camp’s British medical officer, who had replied that only 150 men were fit for work. Phillips and the medical officer told the Japanese soldier that there were not 200 men capable of labour. ‘The Emperor of Japan does not care if all the prisoners die’, the officer had responded. ‘The Burma railway will be finished on time.’ Fifty men were taken from the hospital and by the next day four of them were dead. ‘You say it was twenty-six years ago’, Phillips wrote to the Sunday Mirror, in response to an article suggesting that it was time to forget. ‘I’m sorry, for me it was only yesterday.’

Many veterans wrote to the queen or the prime minister deploring Hirohito’s presence. Others laid wreaths. One was found on the Cenotaph, accompanied by a card: ‘With vivid memories of treachery and inhumanity of the Japanese.’ Police officers scooped it up, removed the message, and put it back. The man who had put it there was named Robin Charles who, noted the Sunday Express, had been in Japanese captivity for three and a half years. His brother-in-law, a civilian on a New Guinean rubber plantation, had been beheaded by Hirohito’s men. Charles felt disbelief that the emperor was being welcomed and honoured, and was outraged by the police’s actions. In Bristol another wreath laid on a war memorial read: ‘Our memories are not as short as a government which today welcomes those who inspired your suffering and death.’

‘An insult to the dead’

The silence on the streets of London could hold for only so long. As Hirohito’s carriage rattled towards Buckingham Palace, a few onlookers began to boo. Then a man rushed out of the crowd, and sprinted towards Hirohito. Once within range he hurled his coat at the emperor. He missed, striking an interpreter instead. Two mounted guards swung their swords in the assailant’s direction, and the police seized him and bundled him off. The impassive emperor appeared not to notice.

His ability to ignore anguished hostility stood him in good stead. After settling into Buckingham Palace, the emperor visited Westminster Abbey to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A silent crowd awaited him at the abbey doors. As he shuffled forward, The Times reported, a British veteran shouted: ‘It’s an insult to the dead.’ An American who had commanded a battalion on D-Day was standing next to him. ‘You can’t spend the rest of your life hating’, the American told him.

From the abbey it was on to St James’s Palace, where Hirohito was watched by another sullen crowd. As his vehicle approached the palace gate a man broke the silence and began to scream. ‘Kuri, Kuri’, he yelled in a strong Midlands accent. ‘Look at them, look at them!’ he cried. ‘I think it is disgraceful that they should come here!’ The police pulled him away. Reporters from the Evening News and other newspapers surrounded him. What had ‘Kuri’ meant? It meant ‘come here’, he replied. That was what his Japanese jailers had shouted at him when he had been a prisoner of war. ‘I was tortured for three months’, he said. ‘I think it’s disgraceful that our establishment should be showing hospitality to these people.’

Something different awaited the emperor at Claridge’s Hotel. Before a reception for Japanese citizens resident in London, a Scotsman headed straight for Hirohito, shoving his way through the crowd until he was in earshot of the emperor, and a journalist from the Detroit Free Press, who scribbled down his words: ‘Fascist! Fascist! Fascist!’ he yelled. ‘Murdering bastard!’ During the Second World War, the man’s father had been captured by the Japanese, and worked to death beneath the Burmese sun. He could not forgive the emperor.

Officialdom felt little sympathy for this behaviour, and senior Foreign Office figures expressed frustration that hatred lingered on. ‘My attitude on this matter is that we cannot forget atrocities perpetuated by the Japanese, nor should we do so’, John Pilcher, the British ambassador in Tokyo wrote:

On the other hand, we should have got beyond the stage of bleating about them. Therefore dignified publicity recalling what they did is all right. Publicity, however, smarting still at their deeds tends to reflect badly on those who have not been able to forgive.

As Elizabeth II would be hosting the emperor, her attitude towards the Japanese needed to be considered. ‘I do not think that The Queen is affected in the slightest degree by the[se] sentiments’, the Foreign Office assured Pilcher. Nonetheless, the briefing book that mandarins prepared for the monarch suggested that ‘topics to be avoided are the Emperor’s role in World War II and his religious functions’.

The queen was also warned that she was unlikely to enjoy her guest’s company. ‘The art of conversation as such has never been generally practised in Japan’, she was advised, ‘and Their Majesties are not easy to talk to. His Majesty suffers from jerky movements of the head which become agitated at times. His voice tends to be loud and harsh.’ It would be best, officials concluded, for the queen to confine her conversation to the emperor’s memories of his European tour of 1921 and his passion for studying the crabs that flourished in Japan’s Sagami Bay.

During the state banquet, the queen delicately acknowledged the war in her speech. ‘We cannot pretend that the past did not exist’, she said:

We cannot pretend that the relations between our two peoples have always been peaceful and friendly. However, it is precisely this experience which should make us all the more determined never to let it happen again.

Hirohito made no mention of the war in his response. Rather than show any awkwardness, he seemed delighted to be back in Britain.

He had been particularly overjoyed by London’s scientific offerings. He moved around the capital’s zoo in a state of rapture, and was enthralled by Chi Chi, the giant panda. ‘What a beautiful animal’, the emperor remarked, staring at the bear as it munched away. ‘Those bamboo shoots are oriental – where do they come from?’ ‘Cornwall, in southwest England’, Prince Philip replied. As he left, Hirohito waved goodbye to the panda. At his request, the emperor also visited Kew Gardens and obliged his hosts by planting a ten-foot sugi. Within a week, the tree had been chopped down and a pint of sodium chlorate poured around its stump. A note was left: ‘They did not die in vain.’

European disappointments

Hirohito’s visit to Britain was part of a wider European tour. Before landing in London the emperor had visited Denmark, Belgium, and France. Nowhere had been a success. In Copenhagen students carrying helmets, sticks, and a Molotov cocktail had been arrested by police. In Antwerp Hirohito had been greeted by trumpets, a 51-gun salute, and an egg hurled at his windscreen. In Paris he had encountered another kind of disappointment. All the emperor wanted to do, the Japanese had explained to the incredulous French, was feed the carp at Fontainebleau. But to Hirohito’s sorrow, swans ate the food he threw to the fish, and he barely caught sight of them. When the emperor had lunch with President Pompidou at the Elysée Palace, the Foreign Office in London was informed, it ‘was particularly frigid and painful and … His Majesty’s volleys of “er”s … nearly caused some of the French present to lose all the required gravity of demeanour’. Hirohito had wanted to dine at La Tour d’Argent in the evening but, even for the occupant of the Chrysanthemum Throne, the restaurant’s proprietor refused to serve dinner at the ‘unseemly hour’ of six o’clock. Hirohito bowed to the restaurateur’s wishes and arrived at a later time to eat the oysters and canard à la presse. This rich food did not agree with the emperor, whose usual diet was largely fat-free and extremely simple. From Paris, it was on to London, and then the Netherlands for a private visit, where the worst awaited him.

There, the emperor received a reception notable less for its reproachful silence, and more for its violence. The Dutch felt even more strongly than the British that the emperor should not have come. This was also a legacy of the Second World War. When the Japanese had occupied the Dutch East Indies in 1942 they had treated hundreds of thousands of Dutch citizens abominably.

The Dutch went further than the British and an anonymous telephone call was placed to the Reuters office in the Hague. Hirohito, the caller declared, ‘will not survive his visit’. The Dutch government responded by implementing their most stringent security measures, while ministers and spokesmen alike made clear that Hirohito ‘was not in Holland as the result of any Dutch invitation’. No member of the royal family met him at the airport, nor at the palace in which he was lodged. Nor would any member of the Dutch cabinet meet with him. A member of the lower house of the Dutch Parliament gained some approving headlines by announcing that he had asked the state prosecutor to arrest Hirohito.

A heavy police presence did nothing to pacify the crowds. As Hirohito travelled through a suburb of the Hague, a man hurled a vacuum flask at his vehicle, shattering its windscreen. Others set fire to the Japanese flag and flung the smouldering fabric at the car. Dutch flags flew at half-mast. Signs reading ‘I owe it to my dead fellow POWs to protest against [the] arrival of a murderer’, ‘Hirohito – War Criminal!’, and ‘Murderer go home’ were held by protesters, who chanted ‘Hirohito, go! go! go!’ When the emperor emerged from his car, the crowd opted not for British silence but for shouting and booing. Although there were strong penalties under Dutch law for threatening or insulting a head of state, no arrests were made. The emperor, the Foreign Office in London was informed, was ‘hurt by his reception and kept referring to the warm welcome extended to him by the Dutch during his pre-war visit as Crown Prince’.

Hirohito’s appearance at the National Museum in Amsterdam provoked two rapid and instinctive responses from Dutch crowds. Some raised their fists and shook them at him. Others raised their arms and made Nazi salutes. As the crowd bristled one old woman dressed in black held a sign: ‘Hirohito, where is my father?’ When the emperor travelled to Amsterdam Zoo, the San Francisco Examiner reported on 10 October, one man broke from the crowd, rushed forward and smacked the back of the vehicle. What had he been hoping to achieve? he was asked. ‘I was going to slap him in the face’, he replied. After the emperor’s car had sped through the zoo gates, six women attempted to lock them. ‘Keep him inside, that is where he belongs’, they shouted. Inside, he was booed and jeered. ‘The Emperor is indifferent to the Dutch protests’, the Japanese ambassador rather gamely insisted, ‘as he does not consider himself guilty of any bad action against the Netherlands and its people.’ The Netherlands and its people did not agree, and bricks were hurled through the windows of the Japanese embassy. The mood was calmer when Hirohito reached Switzerland and a scan of the Swiss who stood along the road revealed only a single sign, raised by a hitchhiker, requesting a ride.

‘The scars of war’

Usual service was resumed when the emperor reached West Germany. Left-wing elements in West German society were determined to protest, and students were particularly opposed to his visit. Fifteen minutes before the emperor was expected in Bonn’s central square, a gigantic banner reading ‘Out with the war criminal Hirohito’ was unfurled across the university’s psychology institute’s building. Two policemen rushed in and told the students to take it down. Meanwhile, 300 young left-wing activists marched through the city, chanting ‘Hirohito is a fascist’ and ‘HiroHitler’, holding signs that read ‘Down with Japanese militarism’ and ‘Hitler six million Jews, Hirohito 50 million Asians’. To make them disperse, the police initially tried persuasion. Then they turned on their firehoses.

In the German cities that followed, it was a little easier. Several thousand people watched the emperor arrive at Cologne Cathedral and the reaction was friendly. But, elsewhere in the city, a female student daubed red swastikas on the Japanese cultural institute’s walls, four drunk men were arrested and found to be in possession of a rifle, and 80 protesters attempted to block Hirohito from entering the Japanese cultural institute by staging a sit-in. In Koblenz the situation seemed better, and onlookers actually complained that they had not seen enough of Hirohito who, rather prudently by this point, did not linger when confronted by crowds. The people’s friendliness was not the only unusual occurrence. Whereas in Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Finland, Hirohito had eschewed any mention of the war, in West Germany he spoke of it. ‘The links in our destinies are not limited only to our particular relations in the past’, the emperor acknowledged at a dinner in Bonn, ‘but were also illustrated in the bitter experiences which we both had to suffer during and after the last war.’ From West Germany, he returned to Japan.

The memory of the Second World War had not, by 1971, faded in Europe. Anyone over the age of 25 had lived through at least a part of it. Millions had lost family or friends; others their health, homes, livelihoods, or possessions. The war would stay with them for as long as they lived. Anniversaries, commemorations, books, articles, films, or television programmes could easily bring surging back the memories of the atrocities and the losses. But nothing could rile the countries that fought the Axis powers quite like the arrival in their own countries of one of the Axis’ leaders.

Japanese citizens, who had naively assumed that bygones had become bygones, were shaken by this realisation. ‘What surprised me about the reports of the European trip of Their Majesties was how deep the scars of war still are’, one man wrote in wonder to the BBC in Tokyo. What shocked the Japanese was obvious to the British. ‘There are thousands of us still living who had comrades murdered by the people he [Hirohito] represents’, the veteran C. Todhunter wrote to the Kent Evening Post. ‘We may try to forgive, but to forget is asking too much.’

Joel Nelson is the author of Kennedy’s Only Hero: How JFK’s Obsession with Winston Churchill Defined His Presidency (PublicAffairs, 2026).