Word: emperor
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...royal existence behind the moated walls of the 300-acre royal compound is well-cocooned and calm. Emperor and Empress rise early in their 15-room apartment in the small Fukiage Palace. Hirohito does not particularly enjoy coffee, but drinks it because he considers it an essential part of the Western breakfasts (toast, bacon and eggs or oatmeal) he has eaten since his first trip to Europe 50 years ago. After his meal, he is bowed out the door by the Empress and strolls to the new Imperial Palace, built in 1968 at a cost of $36 million to replace...
Hirohito is a TV watcher with a preference for soap operas, scientific programs and news. Each summer he dons waders and plants a rice crop in a special royal paddy field within the walls; in the fall, like other Japanese farmers, the Emperor harvests his rice. The Emperor's favorite pastime, pursued since childhood, is the study of marine biology. He spends two afternoons a week in his laboratory. On his periodic field trips he is so impatient to peer into the dredges to see what they have brought up from the sea bottom that he sometimes bumps heads with...
...Emperor's scientific pursuits have earned him induction into Britain's 300-year-old Royal Society, a ceremony likely to be a high point of his European trip. Only British kings can pull rank to get into this learned group. The only other foreign monarch who is a member now is Sweden's King Gustav VI Adolf, a horticulturist...
Periodically, the Emperor and Empress receive their five surviving children (two daughters are dead) and ten grandchildren. Rigid court protocol requires that the receptions be held separately. The two sons and daughter of Crown Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko are royal. The seven children who belong to the Emperor's three daughters cannot be received at the same time because they are considered commoners; their mothers married commoners and thereby lost royal status...
...imperial family costs the National Treasury $10 million a year for upkeep, but not many Japanese seem to mind. An opinion survey conducted some years ago showed that 62% either "felt warmly inclined towards the Emperor" or "held him in worshipful regards." Many younger Japanese, however, unworshipfully refer to him as "Ten-chan," or "Heavenly...