Japan's modern rise began with the Meiji Restoration by Emperor Hirohito's grandfather, Emperor Meiji, and through the efforts of two generations of Emperor Meiji and Emperor Taisho, when the Throne of Japan passed to Emperor Hirohito in 1926, Japan was already the strongest country in East Asia at that time.
Japan's rising power contrasted sharply with the turbulent China of the Republic of China, and emperor Hirohito's ambitions continued to breed. He began to think: "If Japan occupies the vast land of China, how far can it develop?" So in 1928, Zhang Zuolin, the king of the northeast, died in the "Huanggutun Incident"; so in 1932, the puppet state of Manchukuo was established.
Unlike his brother Emperor Hirohito, The youngest son of Emperor Taisho, Prince Mikasa Mikasa Mikamiya Takahito, who was born in 1915, was 14 years younger than Emperor Hirohito, and the age difference between him and the other two brothers was also very different, so he did not grow up together, which also added a little more rationality and desire for peace to his personality.
In 1943, the 28-year-old Mikasa Palace began to really embark on the battlefield of the Japanese invasion of China, serving as a lieutenant staff officer in the Nanjing headquarters of the Japanese army invading China, and had only maintained telephone contact with the Cavalry Tactical Communication Command. It was only at this time that he really understood through personal experience what kind of harm the invading Japanese army had caused to China, so he awakened the anti-war soul.
Taking advantage of his royal status and his good grades in the military academies, he soon climbed into the military education bureau system. But the Japanese fascists did not know that he was actually an unofficial member of the "pacifist faction" within Japan. On January 5, 1944, he gave a speech entitled "Inner Reflections on the Events in China as a Japanese."
The content of the speech not only openly exposed the atrocities committed by the Japanese army in invading China, saying that Japan's behavior toward China was "everything that is taken and plundered," but also highly praised the Chinese army's strict military discipline and very friendly to the people, believing that the Japanese army, which only knows how to sabotage, "cannot confront the Chinese Communists." ”
It was only not long after this speech was published that it was immediately confiscated by the Japanese side as a "dangerous document", and it was not until 1994 that Japanese scholars turned it over from the archives, and people understood what kind of attitude Mikasa Palace held toward the war.
Unable to succeed in another plan, he decided to take the fierce and brutal leader of the invasion, Hideki Tojo, to open the knife. Together with some other anti-war Japanese, he planned the murder of Hideki Tojo and made himself commander-in-chief of the Chinese Dispatch Army, hoping to replace Hideki Tojo and achieve the goal of stopping the war through high-level decision-making, but the coup was not successful.
Mikasa finally understood that the war could not be resolved through these methods, so in September 1944, he became the deputy of the Army's Armored Minor, and began to prepare for power by mastering the troops. This move, combined with the murder of Hideki Tojo, aroused the vigilance of Emperor Hirohito, who asked him what his plans were when the war was not over in 1945.
But Mikasa Palace had no intention of taking power, he didn't want to take power at all, and as soon as Japan surrendered, he ran to become a professor at a Japanese university. The japanese imperial family did not bring him an aura, but became the basis for his self-reflection. In his autobiographical work Emperors, Tombs and People, he openly criticized war and the imperial system.
He refused to enjoy the privilege and commuted to work every day by train, which caused widespread discussion in Japan. In 1998, when a Chinese delegation visited Tokyo, Japan, Mikasa Miya publicly apologized for the war of aggression against China at a Japanese state banquet: "My conscience still hurts me, and I want to apologize to Chinese people." ”
In 2016, Prince Mikasa died at the age of 100.