“EMPEROR HIROHITO was regarded as a living deity,” observed Japan Quarterly earlier this year. The Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan lists him as the 124th human descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami, who is identified as the “chief divinity of the Shintō pantheon.”

So when Japanese soldiers were asked to sacrifice their lives for this “living deity,” they did so with astonishing zeal. There were no fiercer combatants during the second world war than Japanese devotees who fought for their god, the emperor.

Overwhelmed, however, by military forces of superior numbers, the Japanese lost the war. Less than five months afterward, on January 1, 1946, Hirohito, in a historic edict, repudiated before the nation the “false conception that the Emperor is divine.” He said that “mere legends and myths” had been responsible for this belief.

What a shock! Millions of Japanese people were deeply shaken. For over 2,600 years the emperor had been considered a deity!a And now he is not a god? This man once so exalted that people would not even raise their eyes to look at him, he is not a deity? Giving up the long-held belief that the emperor was divine was not easy. Indeed, several former imperial Japanese soldiers, in a centuries-old tradition, killed themselves upon learning of the death of Hirohito.

When Confidence Is Misplaced

It might be said that millions of Japanese offered their lives on the altar of this Shinto deity, not to mention the lives of millions of others that were offered on the same altar by the emperor’s armies. Those who believed were led into the labyrinth of militarism in the name of their god, only to learn later that he was not a god after all. As the Asahi Evening News said: “Millions of Japanese had been sacrificed over the misunderstanding.”

What was the reaction of believers when their god renounced his godship in 1946? One who had fought for the emperor said that he felt like “a boat that had lost its rudder in the midst of an open sea.” His reaction was typical. Those who survived the war “were suddenly abyssed into a vacuum,” laments Sakon Sou, a Japanese poet. How could they fill that vacuum?

“I had been completely deceived. I had fought not for God but for an ordinary man,” says Kiyoshi Tamura. “What was there for me to believe in after that?” Kiyoshi worked frantically to acquire riches, but these failed to bring consolation. When your belief is shattered, empty values may rush in to fill the vacuum.

A lesson can be learned from reflection on Emperor Showa and his funeral. It is that worshiping “what you do not know” is disastrous. (John 4:22)

Devoted to a Man-God​—Why?

THE depth of devotion to the emperor during and prior to World War II may be hard for many today to comprehend. “A picture of Hirohito was stored in a special shrine at school,” Mitsuko Takahashi recalls, “and every morning pupils were to stop and do an act of worship toward that shrine.”

“When the emperor passed by,” Masato Sakamoto remembers, “we had to bow our heads very low. We were made to believe that the emperor was too awe-inspiring for ordinary humans to look upon directly.” Children, in fact, were told that they would be blinded if they looked at his face.

The military and political leaders of Japan used the educational system to indoctrinate devotion to the emperor. “I taught young ones, ‘Be willing to die,’” says Kazuo Matsumoto, whose 50 years of teaching included the war period. “I sent many youths to the battleground. I cannot blot out this blameworthiness from my past.”

The youths of Japan were told that subjects of the emperor were aohitogusa, or “growing human weeds,” and that they were to protect him by serving as his shield. Toshio Mashiko, who took part in several suicide attacks in the Philippines and survived them, explained: “We were taught that dying for the emperor was the highest honor for his subjects.”

Many actually believed in the saving power of the emperor, so they raced into battle with fearless abandon. Shunichi Ishiguro, for example, thought that bullets would bounce off his body because he was a soldier for what the people were taught was “the Divine Nation.”

When the tide of war had definitely turned against Japan, a young boy, Isamu, expressed his uneasy feelings to his mother. “Don’t you worry,” his Shinto mother assured him, repeating the widely held view: “We will never lose because the kamikazea (divine wind) will blow away our enemies.”

A God but Rarely a Ruler

Emperor worship has a long history in Japan, being a part of the lives of the people for well over a thousand years. And religious tradition is hard to eradicate. For example, even in Christendom people say: ‘If my religion was good enough for my parents, it is good enough for me.’ And, ‘Everyone believes this, and they can’t all be wrong.’ But over the centuries, hundreds of millions of people have been wrong in believing that their leaders were divine! Consider, briefly, the history of the Japanese emperor.

His role through the centuries has varied considerably. “The emperor was thought to possess magical powers to propitiate or intercede with divinities,” explains the Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. “But because of the awe that surrounded his person, it was also considered inappropriate for the emperor to concern himself with the secular business of the government. That business, including both the making and execution of policies, belonged to ministers serving the emperor.”

So the emperor served principally a priestly function, not a political one. “The only extended period of Japanese history in which the emperor combined both functions in a real sense,” observes the above-mentioned encyclopedia, “was from the reign of TENJI in the latter half of the 7th century through the reign of KAMMU at the end of the 8th and beginning of the 9th century.”