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In many ways, Hirohito perfectly reflected his country's fascination with the West. When Hirohito embarked on a six-month tour of Europe in 1921, he became the first member of the Japanese royal family to set foot outside his homeland. For the rest of his life, the Emperor treasured the Paris subway ticket that was his first purchase and a reminder of his first glimpse of freedom. He also took home a taste for Western food and clothes that he never lost. In 1975, 54 years after he expressed a determination to visit the U.S., Hirohito finally realized his dream. During his 15-day tour, he attended a football game, met John Wayne and visited Disneyland. For years thereafter, a Mickey Mouse watch could be seen on the imperial wrist.
From the beginning, the Emperor commanded more respect as a symbol than as a personality. Installed as Crown Prince at 15, he ascended to the Chrysanthemum Throne in 1926 as the 124th Living God in a dynastic line stretching back more than 26 centuries. Children were told they would be blinded if they saw Hirohito's face; the very mention of his name was taboo. Yet Hirohito was well aware that he was to be as much pawn as ruler. Even as his advisers refrained from looking at him, they also refused to listen to him. His divine authority was not enough to suppress the military officers who began taking control of the country in the 1930s.
Hirohito's reticence made it difficult to determine whether he was guilty of complicity in, or mere compliance with, the expansionism that characterized Japan during his first two decades as Emperor. Ultimately 2.3 million Japanese soldiers and 800,000 civilians died in World War II. But most of the evidence suggests that Hirohito was at heart a peace-loving man. At a Cabinet meeting in 1941, when his ministers agitated for the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Emperor surprised them all by suddenly reciting a poem composed by his grandfather, the Emperor Meiji: "In a world/ Where all the seas/ Are brethren/ Why then do wind and wave/ So stridently clash?" With that, he fell silent.
Silence, however, finally proved untenable. In 1945, with Tokyo aflame, Hiroshima and Nagasaki reduced to rubble, and military officers still eager to fight, the Emperor insisted on announcing his country's surrender. As he spoke, he publicly betrayed emotion for almost the only time in his life: his voice broke.
Later that month the poker-faced monarch humbly presented himself before a moved and astonished General Douglas MacArthur to accept full responsibility for all his country's martial transgressions. In 1946 Hirohito renounced the "false conception that the Emperor is divine." Commoners were no longer forbidden to look at his face. The state confiscated most of his $250 million fortune.
The shedding of divine status came naturally, perhaps, to a man who had never seemed at home amid the panoply of godhood. Instead of the ornate Imperial Palace, Hirohito chose to live in a nondescript two-story Western- style house deep inside the palace grounds. Rather than hold court in resplendent formal dress, he preferred to putter around in battered Panama hat and short-sleeved shirt. More than formal dinners, he relished quiet nights at home with Empress Nagako, now 85, a cheerful wife with whom he had two sons and five daughters.