Who is Emperor Hirohito from the nonfiction book, Killing the Rising Sun?

Emperor Hirohito, the emperor of Japan, was seen as a god by the Japanese. This view was essential to the Japanese view of superiority over its neighbors – and even the rest of the world – because they, unlike other nations, were led by a living deity descended back millennia to the nation’s mythical founding. As a result, Hirohito was actually a short, slightly built man rarely seen and never heard from in public during the war, so as to maintain his mythical stature.