Word: hirohito
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Emperor Hirohito, in cutaway and striped trousers, and Empress Nagako, in a pastel kimono and silver fox furs, greeted some 170,000 well-wishers in Tokyo from the balcony of a pavilion on their palace preserve. Customarily presenting a poem to his subjects on New Year's Day, Hirohito this year delighted everyone by producing two. Both, as always, suffered from translation into English. The first, inspired by Japan's annual tree-planting rites last spring, was titled Reforestation...
...other was prompted by Hirohito's visit last fall to Osaka, a heavily bombed city in World War II, where he saw signs of Reconstruction...
Since the war. the legend has dimmed. Few knowledgeable Japanese have taken the tale seriously since Emperor Hirohito conceded in 1946 that he was only human, after all. Last week, determined to clear up the matter of the nation's divine origins, a band of 30 jeep-riding scientists swarmed around the mountain peak of Takachiho on the island of Kyushu, where, according to legend. Ho-wori-no-mikoto, the heavenly ancestor of emperors, came to earth...
...tide began to turn when Emperor Hirohito visited Lake Akan. He watched marimos gamboling, but when a local official fished one out to give to him, the Emperor drew back in horror. "They are national treasures," he said reprovingly...
Marimos were discovered in Lake Akan in 1897, and Japanese biologists, including Emperor Hirohito, have studied them lovingly in every possible way. But no one has figured out why they thrive in so few places, or how they reproduce. One theory is that water currents of just the right kind are needed to bounce the marimos along the bottom and detach bits of fuzzy green stuff to grow into young marimos. No marimo lover, however skilled, has duplicated this process...