We can further analyze MacArthur’s agency by comparing his self-portrait in Reminiscences to Japanese documents that show Hirohito’s actual wartime role. By HIPP, we can also examine MacArthur’s purpose and audience, for example, his memoir is written after the war to defend his choices to a global readership, so it downplays U.S. strategic calculations and moral compromises.
We will use the Constitution and the public speeches by MacArthur and Truman to trace how American leaders framed the preservation of the monarchy as compatible with democracy, while also securing U.S. strategic interests in Asia. We will also identify how these documents were produced in a Cold War context, when American policymakers wanted a stable, anti-communist Japan more than a completely revolutionary transformation.
We can use POV to compare how Japanese and American leaders constructed competing narratives of the same events for their domestic audiences. For Japanese documents, we should emphasize how wartime and postwar speeches tried to preserve the emperor’s legitimacy by shifting from a divine-warrior image to a human, symbolic monarch, and how this served the agency of the imperial institution. For American sources, we should highlight how Roosevelt and Truman framed the U.S. as both victim and liberator, using emotional language and moral claims to justify total war, atomic bombings, and a transformative occupation.