Word: hirohito
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Policy & Prospect. There had been a few faint peace feelers, but none to which Washington gave even fleeting thought. Unconditional surrender was still the policy, and the fanatic followers of Hirohito, Son of Heaven (see FOREIGN NEWS), as yet showed no signs of breaking...
...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...
...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...
Thus, in the year 660 B.C. began the divine dynasty whose 124th scion is the Emperor Hirohito, the Magnanimous-Exalted, the Sublime Majesty, the Imperial Son of Heaven of Dai Nippon (Great Japan), in whose reign the Japanese nation was fated to attempt to carry out the Emperor Jimmu's command...