Word: emperor
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...weekend Japan mourned the late Emperor Hirohito. But by Monday morning it was business as usual. Proving that few events, not even the death of an imperial leader who reigned for more than six decades, can turn off their entrepreneurial juices for long, eager businessmen besieged a Justice Ministry office to stake claim to use of the word Heisei (achieving universal peace), the name chosen to designate Emperor Akihito's reign. On Monday the Tokyo Stock Exchange's Nikkei average climbed to 31,006.51, an all-time high...
From the beginning, the Emperor commanded more respect as a symbol than as a personality. Installed as Crown Prince at 15, he ascended to the Chrysanthemum Throne in 1926 as the 124th Living God in a dynastic line stretching back more than 26 centuries. Children were told they would be blinded if they saw Hirohito's face; the very mention of his name was taboo. Yet Hirohito was well aware that he was to be as much pawn as ruler. Even as his advisers refrained from looking at him, they also refused to listen to him. His divine authority...
Hirohito's reticence made it difficult to determine whether he was guilty of complicity in, or mere compliance with, the expansionism that characterized Japan during his first two decades as Emperor. Ultimately 2.3 million Japanese soldiers and 800,000 civilians died in World War II. But most of the evidence suggests that Hirohito was at heart a peace-loving man. At a Cabinet meeting in 1941, when his ministers agitated for the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Emperor surprised them all by suddenly reciting a poem composed by his grandfather, the Emperor Meiji: "In a world/ Where all the seas...
Silence, however, finally proved untenable. In 1945, with Tokyo aflame, Hiroshima and Nagasaki reduced to rubble, and military officers still eager to fight, the Emperor insisted on announcing his country's surrender. As he spoke, he publicly betrayed emotion for almost the only time in his life: his voice broke...
Later that month the poker-faced monarch humbly presented himself before a moved and astonished General Douglas MacArthur to accept full responsibility for all his country's martial transgressions. In 1946 Hirohito renounced the "false conception that the Emperor is divine." Commoners were no longer forbidden to look at his face. The state confiscated most of his $250 million fortune...