Volume 38, Number 20 · December 5, 1991
Against the Japanese Grain
By Ian Buruma
In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: A Portrait of Japan at Century's End
by Norma Field
Pantheon, 273 pp., $22.00
In December 1988, the late Showa emperor, better known outside Japan as Hirohito, was dying very, very slowly, losing large quantities of blood every day. Public life was much affected. Not only was every hemorrhage reported in the press in respectful but clinical detail—by the time he died, the emperor had received about thirty gallons of blood in transfusions—but traditional New Year celebrations were canceled, television commercials toned down, weddings and festivals postponed, and shop-window displays muted, all in the name of national 'self-restraint.' Even the liberal newspaper Asahi Shimbun began to use the most archaic honorifics to describe every imperial bowel movement.
Review, 4548 words
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