Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:05)
Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Pradyumna Prasad about the book, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix. Pradyu is an incredibly smart young guy. He has a blog and a podcast called Bretton Goods, which you can find at brettongoods.substack.com. Just some context, in the last quarter of the conversation, we are discussing our budding blogs and podcasts, and that discussion was recorded before the crazy events of the last week or two happened. But it might give you some interesting window into how we were thinking about these projects of ours before the crazy shit started happening.
But yeah, I hope you enjoy and thanks for watching.

**Pradyumna Prasad** (0:56)
Cool.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:57)
All right, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Pradyumna Prasad, who has recently graduated high school in Singapore. And now he just received an Emergent Ventures Grant very recently to continue work on his great podcast and blog. Excellent, excellent. So yeah, you got the Emergent Ventures Grant. What are your plans? What are you doing?

**Pradyumna Prasad** (1:18)
What I'm going to do with it, at the moment I'm working on a bunch of stuff on deserve currencies. It has been an obsession of mine for a very long time. So it's all the readings going to end up in writing at some point.
On the longer term, I want to have a blog where I can answer every single economic history question or economics question I don't know the answer to. And nobody else has the answer to, I can answer it here. So pretty much going to be a mini encyclopedia of questions I'm interested in.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:55)
Excellent, excellent. Okay, yeah, I'm looking forward to produce and for the time being, today we're discussing this book you recommended to me, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix.
And so just to give a little bit of context, well actually, just let us say who Hirohito was, right? He was the Japanese emperor.

**Pradyumna Prasad** (2:13)
He was the third emperor after the Meiji Restoration. He was the first one to see Japan as an international power. He was the first and last one to handle it as an international power.
And yeah, Hirohito was the guy responsible for a lot of stuff that happened in East Asia across the mid 20th century.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:39)
Right, including by the way World War II, right? So he was Japanese emperor during World War II. And there's a big controversy around Hirohito because he was in charge of Japan during the time that Japan invaded China and committed all the atrocities that we know happened there, including the rape in Nanping. And he was also the Japanese emperor during World War II, during Pearl Harbor, obviously. So the book takes a very critical stance on Hirohito. It claims that Hirohito could have stopped or at least in many ways dulled these atrocities. He had that authority.
The opposite view, I guess, which is the conventional view, is that Hirohito was kind of a constitutional monarch, much like a British monarch, and that he didn't really have the authority to intervene in politics. And then to the extent that he did, he did his utmost to lessen the impacts of the war, for example, by surrendering in 1945
So now, what were your overall impressions of the book of how well he did defending the thesis that Hirohito should have been tried as a war criminal?

**Pradyumna Prasad** (3:46)
Yeah, no, I think the book sort of goes like a synthesis of these two. It says that Hirohito was a constitutional monarch, but he was a constitutional monarch because he chose to be a constitutional monarch. So yeah, in theory, on paper, he couldn't do it.
It's one of those things where Japanese constitutional law wasn't very well done. I mean, for any anocracy, constitutional law isn't well done, and much more so for Japan. But Hirohito could have done something. He did not. He chose to be a constitutional monarch. So anyways, the book was well written towards the end, poorly written towards the start. I think the difference between a collection of events and a biography is a story. And there was no story at the start.
So I think that book could have been much improved. But I also think that it's very hard to find people who read through original language sources, in this case, Japanese, and to a very small extent, Chinese and English, and then put it into English. But I think the author deserves a lot of commendation for that.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (4:55)
Okay, excellent. Yeah, yeah. So I agree. The most interesting part about the beginning, and I agree, was pretty dull, was the author talking about how much the Hirohito was influenced by his grandfather, Meiji.