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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."