How responsible for WWII was Hirohito?

He mostly signed of on things that probably would've went ahead anyway. Hirohito was seemingly pretty uninterested in being emperor and seemed to enjoy marine biology and travel more.

Well he was basically forced to be a Hikikomori when he was in Japan, of course he liked travel

Pretty much, when he was in Britain he was quite amazed at the lifestyle of the British royalty and how casual it was compared to his life. He was kind of a teaboo.

why did japanese soliders kill and rape so many fucking civilians? i mean they fucking bayoneted babies what the fuck was their problem

Turns out having an honourable warrior culture on paper doesn't translate well into real life.

Harsh and brutal officers and enlisted
Propaganda

Is that why all those Japs generals made unit 731 to surprise him for his birthday?

that is just chinese slander

he didnt really do anything, his high ranking military officials and his cabinet really ran the show. The kwantung army acted on it's own in the mid 30s and essentially forced the situation on the empire. Hirohito dindu nuffin

Keeping him out of prison and out of a noose was the least bad option. Better any "un-atoned" (whatever that means) and powerful ally than a country plunged into chaos and disorder by grief-stricken, suicidal nips.

T.Hajimemashite Miyamoto

Those are lies, how could the Japanese even get the chance to do that when the Chinese were such great warriors?

>they fucking bayoneted babies
>I swallow the weakest propaganda and I like it
They allegedly bayoneted prisoners for training in one occasion, and that's the worst we know on this topic.
On the other hand, GIs collected human trophies by the thousands, what the fuck was their problem?

Do you have a source that says this picture is fake?
And while looting was very widespread among marines and infantrymen in the pacific, actual human trophies were much rarer.

Additionally to the classic effects of brutal warfare and militarist upbringing on the mind came the following:

-Their Zen Buddhism was molded into a militarist ideology and the war became a religious struggle as well. The term "holy war in China" was routinely used. If its divinely sanctioned, you can do no wrong.

-They were taught for generations that the Japanese are a master race that has the divine mission to unite all (Asian) nations under a perfect Nipponized utopia and they became increasingly frustrated and resentful that their "self-less" act of incorporating China into the new world order was not only not celebrated but fought against with tooth and nail.

But I am by no means an expert, that are just my shady memories of the explanations given in "Forgotten Ally: China's World War II," and "The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945"
I always wanted to read "Zen at War" regarding that topic, but didn't.

>actual human trophies were much rarer
It depends what you mean by "rare".
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanese_war_dead
>When Charles Lindbergh passed through customs at Hawaii in 1944, one of the customs declarations he was asked to make was whether or not he was carrying any bones. He was told after expressing some shock at the question that it had become a routine point.[23] This was because of the large number of souvenir bones discovered in customs, also including “green” (uncured) skulls.

there wasn't "generations of teaching"
The establishment of state shinto and the idea of the greater asian co prosperity sphere didn't really come into play until just before the war.

Asian wars are always brutal.
West became too soft

fair enough.

What is your opinion where the brutality of the Japanese army came from?

He didn't cause the 2nd Sino-Japanese war but he had a better chance than almost anyone in Japan of stopping it and he didn't act. That said, even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki they tried a coup against him, so who knows; maybe efforts earlier would've just led to Emperor Yasuhito, which would've been an even bigger nightmare for everyone.

Japanese are autistic island chimps when they lose societal control

You didn’t provide a source stating that photo is fake. Why?

Reading Jansen, he mentions how Hirohito was fucking pissed about the Mukden Incident and demanded that the perpetrators be punished, then was even more pissed when they all got away scott free, then realized that he basically needed to shut up or bad things would probably happen to him more or less.

So I'd say he's "responsible" in the sense that he didn't hold any real power and either he does what the army wants or the army deposes him/kills him and replaces him with someone more pliable.

No

He was just breaking balls a little bit, that's all. He was only kidding with USA.

I've seen people on Veeky Forums unironically use Iris Chang as a valid source of what the Japs did in China.

he was practically treated like this anyway

Because there's no source proving it's real? This picture has been posted countless times on bizarro sites without any source, and that's the only occurence of "baby bayoneted"... (note that OP said "babies", plural)
Meanwhile the human trophies collected by US troops are widely documented, to the point even the POTUS was involved.

Hirohito was also a big western suit enthusiast

war is war and similar kinds of brutality were exercised by all sides. The cases of Japanese being extremely brutal is probably the result of the concept of the greater collective. Even in contemporary Japan the individual feelings a person have are subservient to the group. All it takes is a few actual psychos to dictate how everyone else should act. Personally I place the blame of the Japanese actions on people like Tojo and the kwantung army. After purging dissenting opinion within Japan he was able to hijack the cause. Ideas like the greater asian co prosperity sphere came from a guy named Kita Ikki. Ikki himself stated that for Japan to be a truly global empire it had to accept other ethnicity and races. After being purged in 1937 his ideas were co opted and mutated to fit the goal of the warmongers of the Tosei faction.

For the memes