Word: emperor
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...Indian troops (called sepoys) in the town of Meerut mutinied against their officers. They shot as many as they could, then rode through the night to the old Mughal capital of Delhi. There they massacred every Christian man,woman and child and declared the 82-year-old Mughal Emperor Zafar their leader. The rhetoric of the uprising explicitly revolved around the threat that the British posed to Indian religions. As the sepoys told Zafar on May 11, "We have joined hands to protect our religion and our faith." British men and women who had converted to Islam were not hurt...
...often you see Napoleon Bonaparte while performing an early-morning yogic salute to the sun. But then, not every place that the old Emperor conquered is so fond of his memory that they annually dress a short man in a big hat and parade him around to mark the anniversary of his death. Welcome to the island of Elba, off the west coast of Tuscany, and more specifically to Tenuta La Chiusa, a working vineyard where the warmonger once spent two nights during his nine-month Elban exile, before escaping to prepare for his last battle. Today, peace lovers...
...first time in recent memory that political violence has struck Nagasaki, the second Japanese city on which the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb in 1945. In 1990, Itoh's predecessor, Hitoshi Motoshima, was shot by a member of a far-right-wing group after stating that Emperor Hirohito bore responsibility for Japan's actions in World War II. (Hirohito had been exempted from any charges at the Tokyo War Crimes trials, and his guilt - or innocence - remains highly controversial in Japan to this...
...museums in Japan that translates its impressive Japanese-language exhibits into English. Sample one of the opening epigrams, by the 8th century poet Otomo no Yakamochi: "We shall die in the sea / we shall die in the mountains / In whatever way / We shall die beside the Emperor." Visiting Americans also get a novel take on history in the museum's explanation that because the U.S. imposed heavy sanctions on Japan in 1941 and called on it to withdraw from China, Tokyo had no choice but to start the Pacific...
...reality, there's no such rise. The vast majority of Japanese remain knee-jerk pacifists, and you'd have a difficult time finding anyone among Japan's disaffected youth willing to die for much of anything, much less for the emperor. But the past still matters. It would be right - to Japan's wartime victims and to Japan itself - to have a memorial that honors the war dead without honoring the ideology that cost them their lives. As peaceful a square as any you might find in Tokyo, Yasukuni shrine could be that place, but only with a radically different...