Hirohito (Emperor Shōwa)

Where they went

3 related events

1. 1
   1936February 26 Incidentmonarch

   On 26 February 1936 young officers of the army’s Imperial Way faction seized central Tokyo with about 1,400 troops and murdered senior ministers in an attempted coup. After its suppression the rival Control faction took over and military dominance of politics was entrenched.

2. 2
   1937 – 1945Second Sino-Japanese Warmonarch

   A clash at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beiping on 7 July 1937 became the occasion for Japan’s full-scale invasion of China. China resisted for eight years through the United Front; from 1941 the war merged with the Pacific War, ending with Japan’s surrender in 1945.

3. 3
   1945Surrender of Japanmonarch

   Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration and Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender by radio on 15 August. The instrument of surrender was signed aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September, ending the Second World War.

People who appear alongside

• Saitō Makoto1858 – 1936

  Third and fifth Governor-General of Korea, who proclaimed "cultural rule" after the March First Movement

• Chiang Kai-shek1887 – 1975

  Leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party who unified China through the Northern Expedition and led the Nanjing government through the war with Japan; after losing the civil war he moved to Taiwan and ruled the Republic of China there

• Konoe Fumimaro1891 – 1945

  Aristocratic prime minister (1937–1939, 1940–1941) who widened the war in China and built the wartime order — the National Mobilization Law, the “New Order in East Asia” and the Imperial Rule Assistance Association; he took his own life when named a war-crimes suspect

• Wang Jingwei1883 – 1944

  Veteran Nationalist leader and follower of Sun Yat-sen who collaborated with Japan during the war and set up a client regime in Nanjing in 1940

• Mao Zedong1893 – 1976

  Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party who won the civil war and founded the People’s Republic in 1949, and launched the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution

• Douglas MacArthur1880 – 1964

  US General of the Army; as UN commander in the Korean War he directed the Incheon landing. Relieved of command in April 1951

• Chester W. Nimitz1885 – 1966

  Commander of the US Pacific Fleet who directed the Battle of Midway and signed Japan’s instrument of surrender for the United States

Themes this person appears in

• Republican China and Imperial Japan1912 – 1949

  The age when the Republic of China, born of the 1911 Revolution, passed through warlord division, the May Fourth Movement, the United Front and the Northern Expedition, fought Japan’s invasion and split in civil war — as Japan moved from Taishō democracy through the Manchurian Incident and military coups to the war in China and the Co-Prosperity Sphere, and colonized Korea resisted through the March First Movement and armed struggle

• World War II1939 – 1945

  From the invasion of Poland to the surrender of Japan — the largest war in human history, across Europe, Asia and the Pacific