A Japanese professor of politics named Kato Tetsuro discovered some recently-declassified documents detailing the U.S.’s propaganda campaign against Japan in the U.S. National Archives, and Japan Today has what I consider to be a teaser article up about it. (Ignore the stupid “who cares?” comment; Japan Today’s comment section is absolutely worthless, a quagmire of smallmindedness, intolerance, and idiocy, as I’ve mentioned before.)
Masanori Nakamura, professor of modern Japanese history at Kanagawa University, said it cannot be claimed that the idea of using the emperor as a peace symbol as presented in the document led directly to the postwar imperial system, but it is significant that the United States harbored such an idea at an early stage in the war with Japan.
This is pretty interesting, and I would like to read the full documents, as well as Kato’s article.