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.