Article: Imperial betrayal - Japan discovers 'royal-bashing.'

ON New Year's Day 1946, in a speech broadcast to the Japanese nation, the late Emperor Hirohito, direct descendant of Amaterasu-o-mikami, Goddess of the Sun, formally renounced his status as a god. Aged forty-five, he had ruled Japan, albeit as 'a puppet figure', since 1926. Few Japanese had ever gazed on his face (it was lese-majeste to do so) and even fewer had ever heard of such of his siblings as Prince Takamatsu and Prince Mikasa. In 1987 the French Ambassador to Japan, Bernard Dorin, described how the Imperial Household Agency Chamberlain (who directs the protocol of the court) instructed him to keep his eyes downcast in Hirohito's presence as 'one does not look at ...

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