Akihito and the Sorrows of Japan: The Anxious Emperor (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Akihito and the Sorrows of Japan: The Anxious Emperor (2020)

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53 pointsTomte69 comments

Hmm, the Japanese monarchy is one of the ones I like better. If anything I feel bad for them.

You only have to look at the Japanese publics reaction to the princess Mako deciding to marry a guy that happens to have an estranged father.

Now he’s caught up in it as well, and the public went wild over his hairstyle a few weeks back. I can totally see why they’re moving to the US basically right after marriage.

Life as Japanese royalty has very few upsides, and a ton of downsides. It’s really more of an obligation you cannot rid yourself of.

I like to imagine them as having loads of fun outside the public eye though.

Long ago, way back in high school philosophy I wrote a paper arguing against the monarchy (I'm in Canada) on the grounds that raising a child born into that position with no life choices is a form of child abuse. I was a bit tongue-in-cheek at the time. But I still haven't encountered any decent counterargument.

I think the counterargument is basically that trying to apply ethics to the royal family is like trying to apply orbital dynamics to a whale. Everything about how the whale lives and looks references its formative environment, and I guess you could put it in a rocket and see how it works as a satellite, but it would probably just turn red, bloat, then explode into a cloud of gore.

What a great article. One point missed here is the hereditary link of Shinzo Abe to his grandfather, Kishi, who was a war criminal. It is amazing and absurd that the supposed patrilineal links to the sun god remain today. Perhaps the very power of such ideas are their obvious fallacy that is asserted as a show of power.

> It is amazing and absurd that the supposed patrilineal links to the sun god remain today

The current emperor is (it seems) the last one in the patrilineal lineage.

I expect strangeness when succession becomes a legit topic. Will adopting his daughter’s spouse be enough? Will they move to just blood line rather than only patrilineal blood line? Will they breed an extramarital son somehow?

It will be an interesting time.

Not really? Crown Prince Fumihito is the current emperor's brother, and he has a son, Hisahito.

Hisahito's birth was not expected, and there was serious consideration for amending the rules to allow (restore) female succession, but as things stand there's little pressure to change anything.

Serious question… do you think Hisahito is the crown prince?

While possible, I bet the don’t on Hisahto becoming emperor.

it is more amazing and absurd that casual observers across the globe know more about how another society should be run, their values and their cultural history

Yeah I really did not like this article. How about the West lets Japan figure out its own proper government and role for the emperor, rather than continuing to insist that our ways are unquestionably superior? The entire mood of this piece is dismissive and arrogant. Poor journalism.

Are we reading the same article? The West already dictated Japan's form of government, including the role of the Imperial family, after WW2.

The article is quite negative and assumes that Western ideas are inherently superior, all monarchies are bad, etc. To be expected for a left-wing literature journal, obviously, but that doesn’t make it any less culturally imperialistic.

Humanity is moving past the age of monarchies and kings in general and has been for at least 300 years. There is no cultural exceptionalism for this trend.

No, it isn’t, and the “moving past X toward a democratic future” is an Enlightenment idea rooted in Western culture, largely enforced upon other states via violence, economic sanctions, and colonialism. As the West continues to decline, so will the appeal of its political structures.

This is fairly obvious if you pay attention to Russia, China, India, and other powerful countries. It isn’t 1990 or 1950. The world isn’t trying to reinvent itself in the mold of the West anymore.

You bring up a valid point and it is interesting to hear a perspective in favor of dictators, monarchs, and rule by the divine rights of kings. But look at it another way and the entire global economy runs on money and capitalism, which is inherently democratic by design in that many decisions contribute to the overall direction, rather than a single decision maker. If you think that system is going away, I would find such a view hard to imagine, but would consider it. The late David Graeber certain would have agreed with you that a post-capitalist society might be possible, though it is almost unimaginable at present.

>_money and capitalism, which is inherently democratic by design in that many decisions contribute to the overall direction, rather than a single decision maker_

That's an anti historical view. If there's one thing capitalism is definitely not, it's "democratic by design". South America 60s-90s, Europe 1930s etc.

Also absurd to just assume it will win "just because". Even fukuyama gave up on this idea after his "end of history" theory completely flopped.

I fail to see how any force can negate the power of world economies at this point. Even Germany had to pay back its war debt and had to do so after changing its political system, therefore the power of economies is--historically--far greater than the power of political systems.

> money and capitalism, which is inherently democratic by design in that many decisions contribute to the overall direction, rather than a single decision maker

No, that's not what “democratic” means. Its true that capitalism is inherently oligarchic rather than monarchic, because of the property you describe above (minus the improper reference to “democratic”) but that's...a far cry from democratic.

Whether or not capitalism can be classified as oligarchic or democratic, I would argue that capitalism has pervaded the world and is a stronger force at this point than any political system, ruler, or ideology. Redefining terms when it is convenient, without even providing a definition, I might add does not negate the fact that when many contribute that system can be classified as participatory rather then exclusive.

> Whether or not capitalism can be classified as oligarchic or democratic, I would argue that capitalism has pervaded the world and is a stronger force at this point than any political system, ruler, or ideology.

Liberal capitalism is both a political (politico-economic) system and an ideology. It also peaked in its dominance of the developed “West” (an imprecise term by any geographic interpretation, due to exports and alignments and remnants of colonialism putting Western outposts all over the globw, but there's no really good alternative, either) a bit over 100 years ago, the modern politico-economic system that pervades the developed West is a hybrid of socialism and capitalism (“the modern mixed economy”) derived through a process of proletarian reaction against capitalism very similar to the early stages of motion away from feudalism toward capitalism through bourgeois reaction against feudalism (though much faster).

State capitalism is also a significant politico-economic system and ideology, though a different one than liberal capitalism, and arguably still on the upswing (state capitalist regimes, without any exceptions I am aware of, all borrow the rhetoric of class-participatory socialism, but have practical rule by a self-selected cadre that exercises power through, among other key levers, exclusive control of the means of production.)

Got it, so more a more exclusive control of capitalism is the big distinction unshackling Japan from colonialist structures. Groundbreaking.

Ignoring whether anti-monarchy is a western idea or not, monarchy has quite a lot of deficiencies.

Japan itself I would argue has highlighted said deficiencies. Emperor Taishō had various neurological problems. His son Emperor Shōwa (AKA Hirohito) seem alright physically but just wasn’t that good a statesman, in the eyes of some like the British who did not see him as malicious (https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2017/07/758307910564-hiro...) anyway, in that he couldn’t rein in the military and the rest is history.

It’s the luck of the drawn if you have a good leader and if you end up with a bad one it is nigh impossible to replace him without major social upheaval.

Quantified by global economic productivity, I agree that China and India have seen recent ascendency, but not Russia. China has failed at even developing its own native microchip industry, thus Taiwan has become a political football. We are living in a post-national world where key intermediates come from multiple countries. The Russian Federation is a petro-state that generates less than 3% of global wealth. Sure, they may have temporary disrupted the US political system, but that will run its course. The Republican/Russian cause knows it will ultimately lose because they have embraced the symbol of every other lost cause from the Confederacy to Nazi Germany.

Journalists can draw contrasts. We are all humans and just drawing comparisons across monarchies, which until recently existed in every culture and country. In an age of global pandemics, the world is a single neighborhood. Drawing contrasts does not suggest any course of action.

Which leads to the imperialism that they claim to hate. Ironic isn't it?

How?

Well, Kishi was certainly a war criminal. And the relationship to the sun god is perhaps a matter of faith to some, but obviously false. Just pointing out the obvious.

> the relationship to the sun god is perhaps a matter of faith to some, but obviously false

How do you know it's false? Are you in touch with the sun god? How do you know there is only one sun god and you are in touch with the right one?

It is too convenient for a ruling family to have the mandate of the one true God. They are flesh and blood with DNA, diseases, and all of the other problems of humanity. But I won’t tell you what to believe. My view is that these are just people, and if they weren’t, where are their magical powers? And if they have no such powers, even if they were divine, would it matter?

Ok, you don't know one way or another. I'd agree that a safe assumption is that family members are not descended from a supernatural being. On the other hand, your assertion does not address any specific supporting evidence the family might muster. It would be helpful to support your counterclaim with information specific to Japanese beliefs and practices. For example, you state that the imperial family "are flesh and blood with DNA, diseases, and all of the other problems of humanity," presumably as a counter to the family's claim of supernatural origin. But does that really contradict their claim? For example, in some Christian mythologies the Jesus character was at the same time the son of the central deity as well as being the central deity and at the same time born from a non-supernatural mother. Have the Japanese imperial family claimed that they are not "flesh and blood with DNA, diseases, and all of the other problems of humanity?" Have they claimed "magical powers?" I don't know and you have not established these as claims about which to offer counterclaims. My understanding is that this form of rhetoric is known as "strawman."

Their “divine” power comes from belief in such power by the people they rule. Without that, they are the real straw man. And that is what they are, figureheads and cultural tokens. It’s not good for the Japanese people and it is not good for the figureheads themselves. There is one miracle I would fairly attribute to the royal family, though, and that is ending WWII. It was not a supernatural, though, just rarely exercised authority that came from belief. Beyond that, there is no magic involved. I would also argue that the artifacts supposedly from the sun god look about like what you would expect from a good artisan a few thousand years ago. If they were advanced technology, I might give it a second thought. Lacking magic, authority, and power, what is left is a quaint memento of a long-gone past. That is what royal families are—-nothing more.

Ok, it sounds like you don't have a specific claim on the part of the Japanese imperial family to falsify.

Now there is an additional claim that belief in such power is not good for the Japanese people. Japan as a nation seems to have done pretty well for itself. If belief in a supernatural power is present in a society that seems otherwise well-adapted evolutionarily, what is "not good" about it? Maybe they would do better without it? How would that claim be different from a claim that they might have done worse without it?

Not divine. Not relevant.

I appreciate not agreeing with a claim of divinity in that it is unfalsible, but to claim something is false without offering evidence is just as much a naked assertion as the original claim.

As to the relevance of the imperial family in Japanese society the fact that they are being discussed is a variety of relevance if only in the same manner as reality television or professional sports. For some reason the story of the Babel fish comes to mind.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/35681-now-it-is-such-a-biza...

Amazing how this comment was downvoted so much. Sorry, no divinities or demigods actually exist. Is that really controversial? I guess most of humanity is still amusing themselves with elaborate lore.

Of all the dark, unaccounted, and probably dangerous-to-world-peace factors that run modern Japan, the emperor is the least problem - in fact, Hirohito and hopefully his son, have repeatedly spoken out against the prevalence of far-right nationalist chauvinists in the highest positions of Japanese politics and economy.

Citation needed. As the friendly article explains in detail, Japanese emperors do not "speak out" about anything at all, and are in fact constitutionally forbidden from doing so.

So they whisper very loudly.

If all you say is 100% scripted those few times you deviate are very loud indeed.

They don't whisper so much as signal and allude, and as the article also explains, Akihito was quite good at tweaking the noses of the far right. However, this is a far cry from denouncing "the prevalence of far-right nationalist chauvinists in the highest positions of Japanese politics and economy".

Exactly. Or not making a statement at all when you're expected to address something. That's why American visitors like the guy above you are often so lost in Japanese culture, they can't "read the air".

That article isn't the end-all take on communication methods in confucian societies, I'd say. "Speak out" is still the applicable term in Japan, even if over there, it might be making a certain facial gesture or positioning of the body on part of the Emperor that does the speaking. Everybody raised in that culture will understand it. Often, it's more. Like not supporting an idea vocally is tantamount to heavy criticism.

I've never understood why Hirohito was kept in-place by McArthur and the USA (the OP touches on this only briefly).

The institution of Emperor is closely tied-up with rightwing Japanese nationalism, whatever the imperial flavour-du-jour is. I fear and dislike all rightwing nationalism. But an "emperor" is a byword for invading and dominating your geographical neighbours. An emperor that is also a god seems like a particularly bad idea.

The Japanese emperor concept precedes Western “invade everyone” imperialism by about a thousand years and has historically almost nothing to do with other countries. It really took Western ideas of imperialism to get Japan to be interested in the outside world.

Which of course is also the go-to "excuse" of the modern Japanese right-wingers to deflect any blame from the "pure" Japanese for what they did.

Not sure how that has anything to do with my comment.

I’ll repeat it: the primary reasons which caused Japan to become “imperialist” are directly tied to Western imperialism. The Japanese emperor was mostly a political symbolic figurehead that united the Japanese islands, not a Roman emperor or British monarch intent on conquering the world.

This is all basic Japanese history.

Are you forgetting the 1592 Japanese invasions of Korea which had the intent of conquering the Korean Peninsula and then the whole of China?

I don’t think he is. Not even Korean right wings blame emperors for that invasion. By all intents and purposes it is Hideyoshi’s invasion.

My comment was in response to his assertion that "the primary reasons which caused Japan to become imperialist are directly tied to Western imperialism".

These are indeed matters of basic Japanese history as GP claims, although I’m not too sure whether “basic Japanese history” is actually common knowledges except for Japanese history majors or someone who has gone through Japanese compulsory education.

Wikipedia article on Shogun[1] has a nice quick summary on pre-modern Shogunate system. It’s similar to British constitutional monarchy in a sense: the emperor was to delegate all power to the government and was to remain within instructions and supervisions of the government.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogun

Oh, it has everything to do with it. I don't understand how you couldn't see that, immediately, so I don't think further explanation would help you.

The Romans were into the "invade everything" business, 2,500 years ago. They ruled over kingdoms all around the Mediterranean.

The Greeks (well, Macedonians, if you prefer) built an empire that lasted 1,000 years, and stretched from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan. All during the lifetime of a warrior who died aged 32 (?). That was around 320BC.

So you have to go quite early in history, to find a culture that precedes "invade everything" imperialism (I doubt that there is any "beginning" to invade-everyone imperialism).

It seems the common explanation is that the US went the "reverse course" to have a bulwark against the rise of communism in East Asia. Japan was not to adopt communism at any cost. And the best way to ensure a society does not adopt communism is to give the diametrically opposed forces in the country the upper hand: Right-wing nationalism.

So many people who were responsible for the worst atrocities Japan committed in the last two decades in Asia were made leaders of the new "democratised" Japan. Hirohito as the spearhead was only one example. The people who were actuallt prosecuted and sentenced to death for war crimes were all deemed expendable by the Japanese anyway.

This is what haunts Japan until today - Nippon Kaigi, Nippon Foundation (aka Sasakawa Foundation), etc. are all basically think tanks and well-budgeted secret government agencies promoting right-wing nationalist or even borderline fascist ideas in Japan and astroturfing them overseas.

Just read about the Sasakawa Foundation to get an idea.

Japan has had an Emperor pretty much since Japan became a thing, going back at least since 100-ish BC and maybe a few hundred years beforehand. Getting rid of such a foundational institution is _not_ the way to get the population on your side and back to work.

> An emperor that is also a god seems like a particularly bad idea.

Remember that a condition of retaining the institution of emperor was the public renunciation of the emperor's godhood: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanity_Declaration

> But an "emperor" is a byword for invading and dominating your geographical neighbours.

This might be reading too much into the English translation; we'd want to ask what the actual Japanese title is and what semantic implications it has in Japanese.

I'd also like to point out that "invading and dominating your geographical neighbours" has actually been the norm throughout all of human civilization until very recently - and it still happens but under convoluted pretenses.

> until very recently

I do not think that custom has gone away. I seem to be at war with my next-door neighbour, over rubbish-disposal; I just don't know which neighbour, what he looks like, or what his name is (but I'm not trying to seize his property by force of arms!)

People go to war with their neighbours over REAL things, like water-rights, and access to minerals and other resources. Those real things are still real. Fortunately, imperial wars don't seem to happen much these days; perhaps because great imperial powers can now transport a heavily-armed army of 200,000 across the world in a few days, squishing your imperial ambitions.

But the motivation is unchanged. Perhaps the Chinese occupation of Tibet is an example?

(Tibet used to be the imperial power, once upon a time - Chinese diplomats in the 14th C used to kow-tow to Tibetan kings)

Because WW2 was over and everyone thought WW3 was imminent.

The Japanese were extremely anti communist to the point that it would make McCarthy look like a hippie.

"Never trust a hippie"

~ Johnny Rotten

As a one-time hippie, I'm with Rotten on that. Very few hippes retained their principles. Lots of them had trust-funds. Lots of them are here on HN (sorry chaps; I don't mean to imply that you're all money-grubbing wretches, happy to have swapped your principles for a San Francisco developer's salary!)

"Emperor" is a Latin title (through Old French). Whatever martial implorations might simply not exist in Japanese.

English isn't the universal language, its semantics aren't enough to describe all of humanity's reality.

天皇 is literally "heavenly king", and the full Japanese WW2 war cry was 天皇陛下万歳 Tennou heika banzai, "May the Emperor live ten thousand years". So yes, the implications are pretty martial, although the Emperors themselves don't sully themselves with actual fighting.

Yeah, and “For king and country!” Is not? I’m not sure what you are trying to say. Obviously war cries are going to be, well, martial.

I don’t see anyone shouting that now, and even if they did there wouldn’t be any martial connotations.

GP was suggesting that emperor/天皇 may not have martial connotations in Japan, I'm pointing out that it does. As a perhaps better example, Japan's official name is now the bland State of Japan 日本国, and the old Great Japanese Empire 大日本帝国 sounds positively jingoistic.

And FWIW, it's not particularly hard to find fringe groups in Tokyo that proclaim their devotion to the Emperor from black vans equipped with loudspeakers.

>So yes, the implications are pretty martial

The implications of these terms are spiritual, cosmogonic and social. I don't see what's martial about calling the big guy heavenly king or to wish "ten thousand years", all the more so that the later is a Chinese stock phrase and Japan imported their governance model part and parcel.

If the Australian army went to war at the cries of "Vegemite or death !", would you say Vegemite has martial implications ?

"Emperor" is an English word, referring to the ruler of an empire. It is derived from the Latin title "imperator" (meaning commander; same root as the word "imperative").

The Old French connection is interesting - thanks. I guess most English words derived from Latin arrived via Old French. But this doesn't shed any light on why the Japanese Emperor is called an emperor in English. He's called an emperor because he rules an empire.

As I understand it, the emperor of Japan ruled over a number of subordinate, regional rulers, right up until the late 19th C. I understand "emperor" to mean a person who rules over kings, which is what the Emperor of Japan did. Why do I need to get involved with Japanese semantics, when the word we are discussing is an English word, being used correctly to refer to a ruler over kings?

So if we're speaking of a ruler over kings, how's that different from the Emperor Napoleon, or the Empress of India?

Ruling over kings implies dominating the armies of those kings (a king with no army is known as an "exile"). You can't maintain an empire without at least threatening martial force. Nearly all emperors have been fighting men - either to establish the empire, or to maintain it. Emperors with no army get deposed, or the empire disintegrates.

I had to look up when did the Japanese monarchy lost its own military capacity - it was the aftermath of Jōkyū Disturbance(1221). Kamakura shogunate defeated force of a retired emperor and began disarming the Kyoto royal court(government). Since then, and through Meiji Restoration(1867) that transferred shogunate control back to Kyoto then to Meiji Government in Tokyo City, the pre-modern formal government in Kyoto remained a puppet of military shogunates and later democratic governments.

"The emperor of Japan ruled over a number of subordinate" is technically correct but it's mere matter of formality, or it could be said that formality had been their point of existence for along time. They've been out of the game for long time, not even around invention of gunpowder, but around the emergence of curved Japanese swords.

Thank you for this; I think I will look-up some Japanese history tomorrow (so far, I've been pulling factoids out of my fundamental orifice, a practice that HNers will reliably pull me up on).

Alright, since it's an interesting subject I'll take a detour :

The only reason the Emperor of Japan is called an Emperor in Western translations is probably because within Japanese historiography it's considered the highest possible title for a head of state of any kind and in European precedence tradition the equivalent is Emperor, with the exception of the King of France [1].

All that to say that there's no need to call back to the military history of the term to explain its significance in the context of Japan.

[1]: the Medieval Empire, that is what is commonly referred to as the HRE, being an outgrowth of the Frankish realm, there's been a tacit understanding that the King and the Emperor were of equal standing and wouldn't dispute each other's claims. Hence the notion that the King [of France] is Emperor in his Kingdom, which is of great importance in the conceptual history of sovereignty. Note that the King of France in the Age of Discovery had an Empire, but never claimed an imperial title as it was a core ideological principle that no title could possibly be above King of France. You can see some of that in the Japanese 天皇.

> the Medieval Empire, that is what is commonly referred to as the HRE,

Sure, the HRE name is three lies for the price of one, but its at least specifically understood in its referent; “the Medieval Empire” is...not. Byzantium, most notably, being a thing.

I'm using that terminology because, unless stated otherwise, in historical European documentation Empire used by itself usually means the HRE.

Furthermore including the Eastern Roman Empire as part of European Medieval history is dubious, or at least novel (and I'd wager the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Cold war and the EU have something to do with that shift in perspective).

The European title precedence tradition I'm referring to, and from which the translation of 天皇 as Emperor is affiliated to, was solidified in the context of Late Medieval/Renaissance diplomacy [1], in which the Eastern Roman Empire was neither considered as part of the Western world (it was quite literally the East), not relevant as it had become a rump state.

[1]: If you're so inclined, read about the councils of Constance and Basel-Florence-Ferrara. They involved a lot of international politics, petty quarrels on precedence and as a bonus, the almost-but-not-quite end of the Great Schism. My favourite tidbit is the Spanish and Swedish bishops arguing over who among them were the true Goths.

I don't know why you are downvoted. But given even Unit 731 was granted immunity by the US, I guess justice ceded its place back then.

It's sad to see politicians made those 'practical' decisions to protect those criminals. Let alone countless people lost their lives or suffered just because a room of people wanted wars.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

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