The World: Hirohito: The First Gentleman

TWICE a year, Emperor Hirohito of Japan greets his subjects from a balcony of the Imperial Palace in the heart of Tokyo. Even these rare public appearances—on Jan. 2 and April 29, his birthday—have an atmosphere of isolation. Since 1969, when a deranged man fired a metal ball at them with a slingshot, Hirohito and Empress Nagako have been protected by a thick transparent shield. Last week, when four students invaded the palace grounds to protest the Emperor’s trip to Europe, they had no idea where to locate him. When they hesitated, palace guards caught up with the four and arrested them.

The royal existence behind the moated walls of the 300-acre royal compound is well-cocooned and calm. Emperor and Empress rise early in their 15-room apartment in the small Fukiage Palace. Hirohito does not particularly enjoy coffee, but drinks it because he considers it an essential part of the Western breakfasts (toast, bacon and eggs or oatmeal) he has eaten since his first trip to Europe 50 years ago. After his meal, he is bowed out the door by the Empress and strolls to the new Imperial Palace, built in 1968 at a cost of $36 million to replace one fire-bombed in the war. The Emperor spends the day with briefings, audiences and paperwork. He signs some 2,500 documents a year, stamping them with a 7.7-lb. gold seal.

Hirohito is a TV watcher with a preference for soap operas, scientific programs and news. Each summer he dons waders and plants a rice crop in a special royal paddy field within the walls; in the fall, like other Japanese farmers, the Emperor harvests his rice. The Emperor’s favorite pastime, pursued since childhood, is the study of marine biology. He spends two afternoons a week in his laboratory. On his periodic field trips he is so impatient to peer into the dredges to see what they have brought up from the sea bottom that he sometimes bumps heads with his fellow scientists. Occasionally Hirohito reaches into a dredge and gets nipped by a crab.

The Emperor’s scientific pursuits have earned him induction into Britain’s 300-year-old Royal Society, a ceremony likely to be a high point of his European trip. Only British kings can pull rank to get into this learned group. The only other foreign monarch who is a member now is Sweden’s King Gustav VI Adolf, a horticulturist.

Periodically, the Emperor and Empress receive their five surviving children (two daughters are dead) and ten grandchildren. Rigid court protocol requires that the receptions be held separately. The two sons and daughter of Crown Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko are royal. The seven children who belong to the Emperor’s three daughters cannot be received at the same time because they are considered commoners; their mothers married commoners and thereby lost royal status.

Akihito, 37, has inherited his father’s biological interests and specializes in fish morphology. Second Son Hitachi, 35, is also a scientist. One of his specialties is Japanese bird lice. Hirohito’s youngest daughter, the chic former Princess Suga, 32, was once a disk jockey in Tokyo, is now consultant in a boutique in Tokyo’s Prince Hotel.

The imperial family costs the National Treasury $10 million a year for upkeep, but not many Japanese seem to mind. An opinion survey conducted some years ago showed that 62% either “felt warmly inclined towards the Emperor” or “held him in worshipful regards.” Many younger Japanese, however, unworshipfully refer to him as “Ten-chan,” or “Heavenly Boy.”

Hirohito is not a scintillating conversationalist; when he visited Hiroshima for the first time, two years after it was leveled by the atomic bomb, he said: “There seems to have been considerable damage here.” But the Emperor is a noted writer of waka, the traditional 31-syllable poems. In 1955, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Japan’s surrender, he produced one that read:

Awakened from sleep while on a

trip

My heart choked With memories of things a decade

ago.

He was, of course, referring to the war that nearly destroyed his island kingdom and made a mockery of the name given to his reign when it began in 1926: “Showa,” or Enlightened Peace. A month after the war ended, Hirohito requested an audience with General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Allied occupation, at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. When the Emperor arrived, in top hat and cutaway, the general offered him a cigarette. Though he never smoked, Hirohito accepted it. MacArthur thought that the Emperor was afraid that he was about to be charged as a war criminal and was there to plead for leniency.

Finally Hirohito came to the point. In his reedy voice, he said that he had come “to bear sole responsibility for every political and military decision made and action taken by my people in the conduct of war.” On that basis he was subject to the death penalty. In his Reminiscences MacArthur confessed that he was “moved to the very marrow of my bones.” Wrote the general: “He was an Emperor by inherent birth, but in that instant I knew I faced the First Gentleman of Japan in his own right.”