His stories are enough evidence to tell me that Japan was not the defender of East Asia. My grandfather, who is still alive, lived most of his youth during the colonial period. This attitude is still kept by a large portion of the Japanese population and the government is actively re-writing history to make themselves look like the heroes. It even says that they declared war to stabilize East Asia. The problem with the speech is that it doesn’t say that they did anything wrong. You are correct about the speech breaking the morale, as people didn’t really believe that the Tenno was a god but admitting that he was a man has much more meaning than the literal context. However, even if his position was more of a symbolic one, he still had immense popular support and could have used that power to change things around, instead of basically giving the go-ahead for barbaric acts rarely seen in history. He didn’t really have control over much, especially with the whole war effort.