Edward Behr cleaned up some of the difficulties in Bergamini’s work, and then there’s Hata in Japan, who unfortunately hasn’t always been very scholarly but his evidence is difficult to refute.
The essential point is that Hirohito wasn’t the figurehead-nerd-marine-biologist that what today we would call the fake news painted him as. The one thing I have never understood is why he didn’t simply abdicate to take responsibility and put his young son on the throne, then pull the strings from even further behind the curtain. Maybe not abdicating was part of the deal SCAP made with him to keep the country from revolting after the occupation began.
Yep, which would have been a bit hard to believe in any case given Hirohito's occasional public appearance in uniform and on horseback. But it's a reasonable assumption in Japan because nearly all of modern Japanese history (Tokugawa through Meiji) has the Emperor a virtual prisoner of the military. I sort of lean toward Bergamini's picture of a 25-year-old taking over from his father and wanting to assert himself and his country in a new, exciting, industrializing, expansionist world. It's a little hard to accept that Hirohito was either ignorant of or incurious about the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and of China in 1937. That was a decade of warfare before Pearl Harbor. He wasn't cleaning test tubes all that time.