Word: emperors
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Last year, the company performed Julius Caesar, in which the would-be emperor, clad in a sequined blue toga, died of a paper cut and Brutus and Antony played rock-paper-scissors for the rule of Rome...
...dismay at the way our ancestral Japan had put a curse on all Japanese living in Hawaii. Other ethnic groups looked upon us as the enemy, not to be trusted. Our village elders soon got together to burn or destroy anything to do with Japan: photos of the Emperor, flags, swords and even shortwave radios that could be turned into transmitters. Still, the police on the sugar plantation where we lived led the FBI into Japanese homes. Many people were rounded up: language teachers and martial-arts instructors as well as labor leaders and businessmen. My future father...
...Zedong inexplicably arrived an hour early at the red-lacquered Gate of Eternal Peace, entrance to the 500-year-old palace of China's emperors. He had chosen a symbol of ancient power in which to declare his new China. The man in charge of preparations, a loyal soldier named Guo Ying, 24, who had been fighting with the communists since he was 13, seated Mao in the former emperor's waiting room and fetched him a bowl of apples. There Guo learned that Mao, in his haste, had forgotten the ribbon that each new communist leader pins...
...Critically, Japan's new conscript armies were made accountable only to the Emperor, who was cast in the role of a living deity who would reign but not rule. Starting in the 1930s, Buruma writes, this "militarist monster" lurched from Manchuria to Pearl Harbor as factions of courtiers, generals and bureaucrats jostled for power, their decisions often driven by fanatical subordinates in the field...
...Buruma also finds fault with General Douglas MacArthur for botching the chance to rebuild Japan on a solid democratic foundation. MacArthur's self-serving notion of the Japanese "as a childlike people who would run amok without imperial guidance" led him to protect Emperor Hirohito from prosecution as a war criminal, Buruma asserts, blurring the nation's responsibility for atrocities carried out in his name. And the war-renouncing constitution written by the Americans merely shifted the highest prerogative of state from the hands of a divine Emperor to a foreign capital, he says, institutionalizing an "infantile dependency...