Word: palanquin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...steady, cold drizzle fell on the austere black hearse as it moved slowly off the grounds of the Imperial Palace and onto the streets of Tokyo. Thousands of Japanese watched its silent passage, some bowing, some weeping. At Shinjuku Gyoen, an imperial garden, the black-painted palanquin was hoisted by 51 members of the Imperial Guard. Above, silk curtains draped the coffin made of Japanese cypress. Within rested the body of Hirohito, the reluctant monarch who on Jan. 7, at 87, succumbed to cancer after occupying the Japanese throne for 62 years...
...displayed his prodigious gift for things scientific, teaching himself the principles of the combustion engine and fixing the palace's generator whenever it went on the blink. To satisfy his insatiable curiosity about a world he was permitted to glimpse only through the silk-fringed curtains of his golden palanquin, the young ruler set up a projector by which he eagerly devoured Tarzan movies, Henry V and, best of all, home movies of his own capital. Often, he recalls, he would take a telescope onto the palace roof and wistfully gaze at the boys and girls of Lhasa carelessly going...