An account of how Emperor Hirohito was called to trial as a war criminal. The book examines whether he was prisoner of powerful and unscrupulous military advisors or whether he was a cunning opportunist who refused to take responsibility for his war crimes or those crimes his country committed. Behr uses contemporary accounts from Hirohito's close advisors and unpublished archive material to juxtapose the image of the Emperor in his wartime position as the sumptuously uniformed autocrat with that of him in his old age, pottering about his garden, diffident and peaceful. Behr is also the author of The Thirty-Sixth Way, Getting Even and The Last Emperor.