Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (200 page)

8.
Makino's diary entry of Oct. 28, 1926, furnishes a good example of Hirohito's taciturnity:

I visited Prince Saionji as promised, and he told me that he had an audience the other day with the prince. He told him that he was
getting old and worried about the future. Hereafter you question the privy seal if there is political strife or change. Even after I am gone, question him chiefly. If the privy seal needs to seek other opinions or consult with others, he will ask you for permission to do so; you should grant it so that he can question them…. Saionji added that…the prince didn't reply, but of course he expected that.

  
MNN
, pp. 261–62.

9.
The novelist
e Kenzabur
remembered the strange dread that came over him when, as a little boy, he laughed on hearing Hirohito's voice for the first time on the day Japan capitulated:

We didn't understand what he was talking about, but we certainly heard his voice. One of my playmates, wearing dirty short pants, was able to skillfully mimic it. We all laughed loudly as he spoke in the “emperor's voice.”

 
   Our laughter rang through the quiet mountain village at high noon on a summer day and vanished with an echo into the blue sky. Suddenly a feeling of anxiety, of having committed a sin, gripped us disrespectful children. Falling silent, we stared at one another. Even for mere grammar school students, the emperor was an august and overwhelming presence.

   
e Kenzabur
, “Tenn
,”
Sh
kan Asahi
(Jan. 4, 1959), p. 30. For a fuller account of the different ways the Japanese people received Hirohito's voice on the day of the famous broadcast, see Takeyama Akiko,
Gyokuon h
s
(Banseisha, 1989), pp.53–54.

10.
After 1927 the Photography Department of the Imperial Household Ministry banned the taking of pictures that showed the upper half of Hirohito's body or his back (he had a slight curvature). Thereafter he was typically photographed with an unsmiling expression, standing motionless or at ramrod attention, his arms straight down at his sides. Nakayama Toshiaki,
Noriko hi no migite: “okaminaoshi” shashin jiken
(K. K. J
h
Sentaa Shuppan Kyoku, 1992), p. 104.

11.
Watanabe Ikujir
,
Meiji tenn
no goseitoku to gunji
as cited in Fujiwara Akira,
Sh
wa tenn
no j
gonen sens
(Aoki Shoten, 1991), p. 46.