Word: emperor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...When Emperor Hirohi to announced over the radio Japan's surrender in World War II, Tomiichi Murayama, Japan's current Prime Minister, was a 21-year-old soldier on the southern island of Kyushu. At that time, he would have fought to the death for the Emperor. But when Murayama, the son of a simple fisherman, attended university after the war, his view of traditional authority changed. He read Marx and became a socialist. He joined a club devoted to the study of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who put him on guard against the foolish consistencies that are the hobgoblins...
...right wing insists that Japan's "guilt" is a fiction created by Japan's conquerors. The majority of Japanese, how ever, believe their country should express contrition. In their eyes, Murayama did not go far enough. For one thing, he told reporters that Emperor Hirohito was not responsible for any wrongdoing. But a full airing of Japan's record, many believe, must begin with the admission that Hirohito himself largely conducted the war. Nevertheless, Murayama seized a dramatic occasion to say what thus far had been unsayable...
...tradition, the Emperor kept silent during high-level strategy meetings. But on June 22, Hirohito spoke. His words were cloaked in the subtle and elliptical language of the court, but his meaning was clear: an effort must be made to negotiate an end to the war. The words provided no clear direction for his government. Though officials were eager for peace, few were willing to sue for it, certainly not with the U.S. Military factions were ready to stage assassinations or a coup if bureaucrats tried such a move. Japanese diplomats approached the Soviet Union, then neutral in the Pacific...
...Kokura, Niigata, Nagasaki and Hiroshima seemed to have been spared; but they were on a special list. "Day by day, Japan turned into a furnace from which the voice of a people searching for food rose in anguish," wrote Shigemitsu. "And yet the clarion call was accepted. If the Emperor ordained it, they would leap into the flames." On Okinawa, Marine Private Eugene Sledge and his compatriots prepared for the invasion "with complete resignation that we would be killed...
Neither do the operagoers. As usual at Glimmerglass, they were riveted by what was happening onstage. The Handel opera was Tamerlano, a 1724 rarity about a Saddam-like emperor in the 15th century. It's been fashionable to update obscure Baroque works by putting them into contemporary settings, the more incongruous the better (or worse). At Glimmerglass, British director Jonathan Miller and set designer John Conklin play it sumptuously straight. On a richly lighted stage dominated by an enormous sliding screen of gold, extravagantly costumed singers enact the intrigues of the despot's court with the stylized poise and dignity...