Word: emperors
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...still vaguely, was an American with the face of an aging movie idol, the vision of a statesman and the stature of a great fighter. He was General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) and (in the words of the Japanese), Yankee Emperor of Nippon...
...even in this scene, the country was in ferment. The "bloodless revolution" was in full swing. Just two years ago, the Diet passed Japan's new constitution. MacArthur himself had written the first draft in his clear, old-fashioned hand. It reduced the Emperor from godhead to symbol, abolished the feudal aristocracy, gave the Diet genuine power to make laws, guaranteed popular liberties, decreed sex equality, renounced the nation's right to make war, even for self-defense. It contained such alien concepts as "public servants" (ancient custom made bureaucrats responsible only to the Throne) and "pursuit...
...Formerly," said a brown-kimonoed matron, "the Emperor was the focus of the state. Now where is the focus and what can we strive for? If it is for democracy, what is the exact goal? No one seems able to tell us our objective...
...admired object was the Portland Vase, a ten-inch-high urn of deep blue glass, decorated with white cameo figures of Peleus and Thetis. According to common, if unproved, legend, it was supposed to have come from the sarcophagus of the 3rd Century Roman Emperor Alexander Severus and to have once contained his ashes. Sir William Hamilton, otherwise known to history as the husband of Horatio Nelson's mistress, Emma, had brought it to England in 1770. Josiah Wedgwood had copied it, the Duchess of Portland had bought it (whence its present name), and her son had handed...
...Haitian Jean Leon Destine and his troupe to do the voodoo dances. He would have had to look far for a better baritone than the Met's burly Robert Weede to sing the lead role of Jean Jacques Dessalines, the Haitian slave who made himself (in 1804) an emperor, then a tyrant, only to be duped by his mistress and shot in the back. With Marie (The Medium) Powers as the rejected wife who came back faithfully to bury her husband, and George Balanchine to tune up a satirical little minuet, Troubled Island should have had no trouble...