Word: hirohito
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Scion of the Ages. Hirohito was born in the lying-in chamber of Tokyo's Aoyama Palace on April 29, 1901. Japan itself was suffering a rebirth. It was 48 years since U.S. Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry had opened the ports of the Land of the Gods to U.S. trade and western ideas. Four years hence Japan would defeat vast, backward Russia and emerge as a foremost Pacific power...
...grandfather, the reigning emperor, was the bold, shrewd Emperor Meiji, in whose name the nation had resolutely turned toward the West. Hirohito's father was the ailing Yoshihito, who died insane...
Careful & Colorless. The gods favor obscurity, and Hirohito's early boyhood was as obscure as a god could wish. He was brought up in imperial privacy, and rarely exposed to the eyes of his future subjects. (A memorable occasion was the day he deigned to visit...
...reported to have been a quiet, rather colorless, careful little boy-the kind of child who in the U.S. always eats his spinach. (Even today, though he is growing a little stout and his uniforms are rather tight in the wrong places, Hirohito is abstemious in his eating and drinking habits and a vigorous respecter of the modern gods of nutrition...
...Hirohito's earliest mentors were the war lords who had made modern Japan a power-stern General Maresuke Nogi, the victor of Port Arthur, and Admiral Heihatiro Togo, who, at Tsushima, had sunk most of Russia's feckless fleet in one of history's decisive naval battles...