Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (144 page)

Apparently it was Maj. Gen. Courtney Whitney who first confronted the problem of T
j
's testimony about the emperor's war
responsibility. According to Shiobara Tokisabur
, T
j
's defense lawyer, sometime before T
j
began giving his pretrial depositions (and probably before Yonai and his interpreter had met Fellers), Whitney had told Yonai that MacArthur and President Truman “wanted to protect the
kokutai
by making the emperor bear no responsibility.” But there was “considerable opposition” in the United States to doing that. T
j
could either answer his American interrogators in a way that encouraged the emperor's opponents or he could help to control the situation.
¹³
Whitney's remarks reflected MacArthur's hypersensitivity to any interference from the United States in the conduct of the occupation, as well as the supreme commander's determination to use the Tokyo trials as his instrument for waging peace.

Yonai reported this conversation to lawyer Shiobara, and the latter promised to help T
j
plan his defense with American public opinion in mind. Subsequently, both in his depositions and in his court testimony, T
j
followed the Japanese government's official line on the emperor's role in 1941: namely, that only the advisers to whom the emperor delegated authority bore responsibility for the decisions made then, and “since the highest organs of the state had decided there was no alternative, the emperor had to give his sanction” to war.