Half a century ago, when he was 19, Crown Prince Hirohito of Japan boarded the battleship Katori for a six-month grand tour of Europe. The trip only whetted his appetite for more: in Paris, he told an American newsman that he hoped a visit to the U.S. would only be a briefly "deferred pleasure." It turned out to be a long postponement. Soon after he returned home in 1921, Hirohito was declared Prince Regent for his deranged father; by 1926 he was Emperor, and a few years later Japan embarked on the ill-starred...
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