Word: kuni
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Bear the Unbearable." Two days later the Emperor's kinsman and Prime Minister, Prince Naruhiko Higashi-Kuni, spoke to the Diet. His flat face was inscrutable, his soldier's hands rigidly at attention. The legislators listened impassively (a few dozed), applauded and approved with the discipline of marionettes. But there was little to cheer in the Premier's words...
Prince Higashi-Kuni pictured Japan as virtually prostrate. The U.S. air, sea and island offensive had paralyzed commerce, crippled railways, dislocated industry, agriculture and home life. Now, "in obedience to the Imperial proclamation, we should bear the unbearable...
Catastrophe & Sin. Jap propaganda, by stressing the atomic bomb, likened defeat to a natural calamity. Said Premier Prince Higashi-Kuni: "The cause of our defeat was the sudden collapse of our fighting strength." Japanese seemed eager to accept this explanation. Perhaps they would never realize that, before the atomic bomb was dropped, their navy & merchant marine had been sunk, their air force whipped, their army outclassed...
...peacemaking Government of Premier Prince Naruhiko-Higashi-Kuni decreed-for what it was worth to the outside world-that autocracy was out, democracy in. An extraordinary "epochmaking" session of the Diet was summoned for Sept. 4 to legalize the shift. The influential Nippon Times editorialized urgently: "The old order is finished and the work of building a new world must be started immediately...
Then Prince Higashi-Kuni made pilgrimage to the famed Meiji and Yasukuni shrines. There he offered a Shinto prayer to Japan's fallen war heroes, those who "gave their lives to become the spirits which guard our Empire." There he pledged himself "to endure all hardships in safeguarding national polity . . . and reconstructing Japan...