Word: crowning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With the war Hirohito lost all but symbolic power. Installed as Crown Prince in 1916 and enthroned as Emperor ten years later, he was pressed by General Douglas MacArthur to relinquish his claims to divinity in 1946. Under the 1947 constitution the Emperor was identified as nothing more than "the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people." Commoners were no longer forbidden to speak his name or look at his face; 90% of his wealth, estimated at $250 million, was confiscated. Characteristically, the bespectacled monarch absorbed such indignities without comment, let alone complaint. Taking cheerfully...
Hirohito's other favorite subject is his 1921 voyage to Europe, which made him the first member of the Japanese royal family to set foot outside his homeland. During that trip the 20-year-old Crown...
...encounter was appropriately symbolic. Just as the newsmen from Hong Kong pressed their Chinese hosts, so too in broader ways has the freewheeling British crown colony from which they came. But Britain's lease on most of Hong Kong's territory runs out in 1997, and the Chinese are determined to reimpose their sovereignty. That demand has turned Hong Kong into a city uncertain of its future and worried by the lack of progress in negotiations to resolve it. But now there is at least some cause for hope. After nine months of official silence, Britain and China...
...wittiest, if not the surest, books are the Gault/Millau guides (Crown; $11.95 each) to Paris, London, New York and France. The work of two dedicated French cuisinartistes, to whom a badly cooked meal is a personal, nay national, affront, Henri Gault and Christian Millau's assessments of hotels and restaurants are unfortunately often more informed with high passion than sound taste. More reliable is the august Guide Michelin, long the three-starred supreme arbiter of hotels, restaurants and touring, not so much written as compiled as if by God himself...
...special quality of Richard is not his glacial cruelty or that he has some half a dozen people butchered to achieve the crown but that his mere presence instills fear in all, generates a nervous electric tension with every crooked step. Even his broad streak of sardonic humor (said to be shared by Stalin) is chilling...