Hirohito was born April 29, 1901 in Tokyo’s royal palace, also known as Kōkyo, which translates to imperial palace from Japanese. Hirohito was born into royalty, his grandfather being the emperor and his father being the crown prince, and at the age of 11 his grandfather passed away, making Hirohito’s father the new emperor of Japan and Hirohito the new crown prince. In 1921 Hirohito took a tour and traveled to Europe, going to many different countries such as France, Italy, and Great Britain, at the time being the first Crown prince to go to Europe. When he got back from his trip he discovered his father was sick and he got leadership of japan, being the emperor of Japan, his father died in 1926. As emperor he was taught when he was young that he should stay out of politics he was pressured into following the advice of his advisors, who wanted japan to grow in military and power, only reasoning for him wanting to do this is because he feared he would be assassinated. One major part of his career was the invasion of china. He successfully invaded china for natural resources because japan was a small isolated country. When taking china they took the northern region of Manchuria and took Nanking, the capital city. In 1940 japan allied with German Axis forces and formed the tripartite pact. In order for japan to expand they decided to attack pearl harbor to take over most of the south pacific, in a country with many nuclear bombs. Not very smart. At first in the war on pearl harbor they were winning until the war started turning against them and pushed them back to japan in 1945, they chose not to surrender. Then the 2 bombs that were mentioned before were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After seeing the devastation of the nuclear bombs, he decided to surrender. Many of the Japanese leaders were killed for war crimes, but Hirohito general Douglas MacArthur let him remain as a figurehead but he would have no power and would continue to reign as emperor until 1989 when he died of cancer. He was the longest reigning Japanese emperor