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Scion of the Ages. Hirohito was born in the lying-in chamber of Tokyo's Aoyama Palace on April 29, 1901. Japan itself was suffering a rebirth. It was 48 years since U.S. Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry had opened the ports of the Land of the Gods to U.S. trade and western ideas. Four years hence Japan would defeat vast, backward Russia and emerge as a foremost Pacific power.
His grandfather, the reigning emperor, was the bold, shrewd Emperor Meiji, in whose name the nation had resolutely turned toward the West. Hirohito's father was the ailing Yoshihito, who died insane.
Careful & Colorless. The gods favor obscurity, and Hirohito's early boyhood was as obscure as a god could wish. He was brought up in imperial privacy, and rarely exposed to the eyes of his future subjects. (A memorable occasion was the day he deigned to visit the zoo.)
He is reported to have been a quiet, rather colorless, careful little boy—the kind of child who in the U.S. always eats his spinach. (Even today, though he is growing a little stout and his uniforms are rather tight in the wrong places, Hirohito is abstemious in his eating and drinking habits and a vigorous respecter of the modern gods of nutrition.)
Though slight and thin-shouldered, he practiced every sport, even wrestling. He was best at swimming. Years later he confessed: "I am not really good at any sport. In swimming, however, I rather think I can hold my own."
Ferocious Masks. In the quiet and careful seclusion of the imperial boyhood, war and the warrior mind, like the ferocious masks of Japanese No plays, loomed always in the background.
Two of Hirohito's earliest mentors were the war lords who had made modern Japan a power—stern General Maresuke Nogi, the victor of Port Arthur, and Admiral Heihatiro Togo, who, at Tsushima, had sunk most of Russia's feckless fleet in one of history's decisive naval battles.
When the future emperor was ten years old, Emperor Meiji died and General Nogi dramatized the most important element in the boy's education—Shinto—by an act that startled the world and can scarcely have failed to impress the child.
When the aging General and his wife learned of Meiji's death, they purified themselves by Shinto rites. Then according to the old Shinto practice of junshi (servants following masters in death), they knelt before their household shrine and with ceremonial swords committed hara-kiri by eviscerating themselves. Later, Americans, shocked and baffled when trapped Japanese soldiers blew themselves to bits with hand grenades, or Japanese civilians drowned themselves rather than surrender, might recall General Nogi's act, with a shudder.