Eighty years ago this week a living god steps down
In a New Year message to the Japanese people Emperor Hirohito explicitly labelled the conception of his own divinity as false . He had never in fact been openly designated as a god although his claim to be descended from Ameratsu, the sun goddess and senior divinity in Shinto, had lent him at least indirect divine status. By force of uninformed repetition during the war years it had become generally thought that he was truly divine. Hirohito did not disclaim Ameratsu as an ancestor but, on a more practical level, he also declared that the belief that the Japanese people was superior to all others and fated to rule the world, as false. Demoting Hirohito to human status was part of an American strategy designed, on the one hand, to extirpate any possibility that Japanese militarism would revive but, on the other, positioning him to be accepted as a relatively normal constitutional monarchial figurehead for a democratic Japan fit to become a stable member of the community of n...
