Word: emperor
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...sacrilege such as the desecration of a church would be to the invaders. Most Americans were unaware of the sacrilege.* To them this god looked like a somewhat toothy, somewhat bandy-legged, thin-chested, bespectacled little man. But to 70 million Japanese he was divine. He was the Emperor Hirohito...
Slowly, as they came to bloody grips with their exotic enemy, Americans were beginning to realize that to the Japanese mind (an entity utterly alien to them in culture and almost as uncontemporary with them as Neanderthal man), the Emperor Hirohito was Japan. In him was embodied the total enemy. He was the Japanese national mind with all its paradoxes-reeking savagery and sensitivity to beauty, frantic fanaticism and patient obedience to authority, brittle rituals and gross vices, habitual discipline and berserk outbursts, obsession with its divine mission and sudden obsession with worldly power...
...this sense, the war against Japan was inevitably a war against its Emperor. In this sense, the great U.S. military redeployment from West to East was aimed directly at the myth of the divine Mikado, ruling a divine nation on the warpath. Grimy U.S. soldiers and marines who were last week digging out their diehard enemy from the caverns of Okinawa and Luzon were just as surely digging out this myth from the dark corners of the Japanese mind...
...Clouds of Time. The Emperor Hirohito's millennial origins were lost in the clouds of time. In the beginning, say the Japanese history books, Heaven & Earth were one, a primal protoplasm drifting in the void like a jellyfish on water. Then the Universe took form. On the Plain of High Heaven the first gods appeared. The Sky Father, Izanagi, stood upon the Rainbow Bridge to Earth and dipped his jeweled spear into the sea. The drops that fell, as he withdrew the blade, congealed into the Japanese archipelago...
...incendiaries were unloaded on the Itadashi Arsenal and 30 other targets in five square miles of the city. The U.S. crews noticed that the raging fires they started were swept by the wind toward the Imperial Palace. The Japs screamed that the palace had been set afire and the Emperor Meiji's shrine damaged; the people were "irresistibly indignant...