Word: hirohito
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Prince played golf with the dashing Prince of Wales and, Hirohito later recalled, "first experienced freedom" after having been raised "like a bird in a cage." Upon his return, he permanently adopted the Western style of dressing, eating and sleeping. Even now the Emperor treasures his first purchase, a 1921 Paris Metro ticket...
...Hirohito finally visited the U.S. Over 15 days, the Emperor traveled from Williamsburg to Hawaii, attending a professional football game, meeting John Wayne and delightedly visiting the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. For years after his trip to Disneyland he sported a Mickey Mouse wristwatch...
...Hirohito remains haunted by the war that claimed the lives of 2.3 million Japanese soldiers and 800,000 civilians. As he told TIME in a rare interview in 1975, "The saddest thing in my reign was the Second World War." Some revisionists now say that the Emperor's melancholy reserve masks the spirit of a shrewd and scheming warmonger. Most historians, however, contend that in spite of, or indeed because of, his unassuming pacifism, the unworldly scholar was often unable to dominate his nation's ruthless army. In 1941, for example, Japan's leaders turned to Hirohito...
Under the terms of the constitution, Hirohito's successor will have little opportunity to extend imperial power. Meanwhile, though most of Hirohito's subjects regard him with fond bemusement, some are beginning to suggest privately that he should abdicate. But the Emperor remains steadfast. When questioned once about his long reign, His Imperial Majesty simply recited a proverb: "Not even under the heaviest snowfall will willow trees snap." -By Pico Iyer...
...shrines stand a stone's throw from each other in Tokyo's Shibuya district. One looks toward the past; the other embodies the present. The first, the Meiji memorial, a Shinto edifice of Japanese cypress embellished with gilded copper, is dedicated to Emperor Hirohito's grandfather. The other, which glints a deep azure in the sun, is the modernistic steel-and-glass headquarters of NHK, Japan's public broadcasting system, symbol of a national obsession: television...