Word: hirohito
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...part of the celebrations, 2,500 cities and towns have adopted civic projects that range from Ottawa's plan to plant 70,000 flowering crab apple trees to a Japanese garden in Lethbridge, Alta., that expects to get a school of royal carp from Emperor Hirohito's moat. Athletically, Canada will be host to no fewer than 17 international competitions, from snowshoeing (in Ottawa) to water skiing (in Sherbrooke, Que.) to the Pan American games in Winnipeg...
Gentle Family Man. The most remarkable thing about the unremarkable-looking little man who is Emperor Hirohito, the Magnanimous-Exalted, the Sublime Majesty, the Imperial Son of Heaven of Dai Nippon, is that none of his rigorous childhood lessons really stuck. When he was 14, he threw his history teacher into a flap by stating that he thought most of the details of his supposedly divine descent were pure moonshine. They had to be, he pointed out politely, because they were biologically unsound and physically impossible...
...proved to be a disappointment in other respects. Unlike his father, Emperor Taisho, a dandy who liked to emulate Kaiser Wilhelm by waxing and curling his mustache and galloping around on a horse, Hirohito neither looked nor acted warlike. From a gentle, somewhat toothy, thin-chested little boy, he grew into a gentle, somewhat toothy, thin-chested little man, who loved nothing better than to go splashing around for specimens for his marine-biology collection. Unlike his bold and high-living grandfather, Emperor Meiji, who used to select his bed partner by dropping a silk handkerchief in front...
...Down to Size. Such biographical details, competently researched, make good reading. But Leonard Mosley, a columnist for the London Daily Express, pads his story needlessly. He speculates on whether Hirohito could have prevented Pearl Harbor. Mosley says yes-but that the Emperor's advisers cleverly avoided giving him complete information until it was too late. Chances are, however, that Hirohito could not have prevented the war, since for all practical purposes he was a prisoner of his own warlords...
...drawn up long before Japan toppled. The U.S. needed the Emperor to save the Japanese nation from disintegration. But only by destroying the myths of royal invincibility and divinity could the victors set the stage for political democracy in Japan. The plan succeeded admirably-and it is the reason Hirohito is the happy and admired monarch he is today...