September 27
1540 The Society of Jesus (Jesuits), a Roman Catholic order, was founded by Ignatius Loyola. Jesuit priests such as Francis Xavier and Matteo Ricci would soon travel to Asia. Click here to visit a collection of resources on Xavier and Christianity in Japan.
1940 Tokyo joined the Berlin-Rome Axis, the Tripartite Treaty. The Avalon Project has an electronic summary of the three-party agreement.
1942 Australian forces defeated the Japanese in Papua New Guinea.
1945 Japanese emperor Hirohito met SCAP Douglas MacArthur in Tokyo at the US Embassy residence. Read a portion of their conversation below.
Voices from Asian History Today
General Douglas MacArthur asked how the emperor who had ended the war could not have prevented it.
Hirohito: "I felt my heart was breaking.... But the idea of gainsaying my advisers in those days never even occurred to me. Besides, it would have done no good. I would have been put in an insane asylum or even assassinated."
MacArthur: "A monarch must be brave enough to run such risks."
Hirohito: "It was not clear to me that our course was unjustified. Even now I am not sure how historians will allocate responsibility for the war.... [I now] offer myself to the judgment of the powers you represent as the one to bear the sole responsibility for every political and military decision made and action taken by my people in the conduct of the war."
Sept. 27, 1945 at the US Embassy in Tokyo
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© 2001 UCLA Center for East Asian Studies