(See Cover)
As the U.S. pivoted its great war effort from Europe to the Pacific, it came face to face with a startling fact—it was waging war against a god. Its sea armada had already crushed his island outworks. Its planes were pulverizing his cities. Now its armies were preparing to invade the sacred soil of his homeland.
To the god's worshipers this would be a sacrilege such as the desecration of a church would be to the invaders. Most Americans were unaware of the sacrilege.* To them this god looked like a somewhat toothy, somewhat bandy-legged, thin-chested, bespectacled little man. But to 70 million Japanese he was divine. He was the Emperor Hirohito.
Slowly, as they came to bloody grips with their exotic enemy, Americans were beginning to realize that to the Japanese mind (an entity utterly alien to them in culture and almost as uncontemporary with them as Neanderthal man), the Emperor Hirohito was Japan. In him was embodied the total enemy. He was the Japanese national mind with all its paradoxes—reeking savagery and sensitivity to beauty, frantic fanaticism and patient obedience to authority, brittle rituals and gross vices, habitual discipline and berserk outbursts, obsession with its divine mission and sudden obsession with worldly power.
In this sense, the war against Japan was inevitably a war against its Emperor. In this sense, the great U.S. military redeployment from West to East was aimed directly at the myth of the divine Mikado, ruling a divine nation on the warpath. Grimy U.S. soldiers and marines who were last week digging out their diehard enemy from the caverns of Okinawa and Luzon were just as surely digging out this myth from the dark corners of the Japanese mind.
Who was this man who was also a god?
The Clouds of Time. The Emperor Hirohito's millennial origins were lost in the clouds of time. In the beginning, say the Japanese history books, Heaven & Earth were one, a primal protoplasm drifting in the void like a jellyfish on water. Then the Universe took form. On the Plain of High Heaven the first gods appeared. The Sky Father, Izanagi, stood upon the Rainbow Bridge to Earth and dipped his jeweled spear into the sea. The drops that fell, as he withdrew the blade, congealed into the Japanese archipelago.
The Sky Father purified himself by bathing in the sea that washed Japan. He washed his nose: the Storm God was born. He washed his right eye: the Moon God appeared. He washed his left eye: lo! resplendent Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, leaped into being.
Later, the Sun Goddess sent her grandson, Prince Rice-Plenty, to govern the Earth. In good time, the Sun Goddess' great-great-grandson, Jimmu, became Japan's first emperor. He commanded his descendants to bring all the eight corners of the universe under the one roof of Japan.
Thus, in the year 660 B.C. began the divine dynasty whose 124th scion is the Emperor Hirohito, the Magnanimous-Exalted, the Sublime Majesty, the Imperial Son of Heaven of Dai Nippon (Great Japan), in whose reign the Japanese nation was fated to attempt to carry out the Emperor Jimmu's command.