An Enigmatic Still Life

By Pico Iyer

Impassive as ever, Hirohito prefers jellyfish to politics

Dressed in battered Panama hat, short-sleeved shirt, Bermuda shorts and ancient tennis shoes, he seems most in his element while pottering around the seashore inspecting biological specimens. His evenings are generally spent at home with his wife watching soap operas and sumo wrestling on TV. In conversation, he rarely ventures anything more voluble than "Ah so desu ka [Is that so]?" Such are the salient features of the still, shy life of Emperor Hirohito, born as the 124th Imperial Son of Heaven in an unbroken line stretching back 2,643 years. Schooled since birth in the remoteness and reticence that become a deity, Japan's 82-year-old monarch remains to this day as impassive and impenetrable as the stone walls of Tokyo's Imperial Palace.

Only twice in his life, indeed, has Hirohito publicly displayed emotion: in 1936, when the military assassinated two of his most trusted aides, and again in 1945, when he announced Japan's surrender by declaring, with broken-voiced dignity, "We must bear unbearable."

With the war Hirohito lost all but symbolic power. Installed as Crown Prince in 1916 and enthroned as Emperor ten years later, he was pressed by General Douglas MacArthur to relinquish his claims to divinity in 1946. Under the 1947 constitution the Emperor was identified as nothing more than "the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people." Commoners were no longer forbidden to speak his name or look at his face; 90% of his wealth, estimated at $250 million, was confiscated. Characteristically, the bespectacled monarch absorbed such indignities without comment, let alone complaint. Taking cheerfully to frugality, he began donating food from the imperial household to his beleaguered countrymen.

Hirohito now seems to relish his restricted but ritualized duties. Each year, he symbolically plants seedlings of rice on the 284-acre palace grounds; at least 20 times annually he dons flowing traditional costume as the nation's highest-ranking Shinto priest. In addition, each weekday he diligently repairs to his office to rubber-stamp government appointments, welcome foreign envoys and brushstroke his signature on an annual flood of 2,000 state papers. In return, the state devotes $41.1 million a year to the upkeep of palace property, including a taxable stipend of $936,000 for the Emperor.

The royal couple lives in the modest 15-room Fukiage Palace near the sumptuous $36.1 million official palace. Their compound includes a two-story lab in which the Emperor pursues his one consuming passion: marine biology. As the world's leading authority on hydrozoans (jellyfish and related creatures), he has written 16 books in the field.

Hirohito's other favorite subject is his 1921 voyage to Europe, which made him the first member of the Japanese royal family to set foot outside his homeland. During that trip the 20-year-old Crown

Prince played golf with the dashing Prince of Wales and, Hirohito later recalled, "first experienced freedom" after having been raised "like a bird in a cage." Upon his return, he permanently adopted the Western style of dressing, eating and sleeping. Even now the Emperor treasures his first purchase, a 1921 Paris Metro ticket.

In 1975 Hirohito finally visited the U.S. Over 15 days, the Emperor traveled from Williamsburg to Hawaii, attending a professional football game, meeting John Wayne and delightedly visiting the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. For years after his trip to Disneyland he sported a Mickey Mouse wristwatch.

But Hirohito remains haunted by the war that claimed the lives of 2.3 million Japanese soldiers and 800,000 civilians. As he told TIME in a rare interview in 1975, "The saddest thing in my reign was the Second World War." Some revisionists now say that the Emperor's melancholy reserve masks the spirit of a shrewd and scheming warmonger. Most historians, however, contend that in spite of, or indeed because of, his unassuming pacifism, the unworldly scholar was often unable to dominate his nation's ruthless army. In 1941, for example, Japan's leaders turned to Hirohito while deliberating whether to join the war. Without explanation, the poker-faced monarch proceeded to recite a gnomic waka (a traditional 31-syllable poem) composed by his grandfather, the Meiji emperor: "On the seas surrounding all quarters of the globe/ All people are kin to each other/ Why then do winds and waters of conflict/ Disturb peace among us?" He said no more on the subject.

The Emperor has shared his quiet life with Empress Nagako, 80, whom he married, by traditional arrangement, in 1924. A merry music lover who has enjoyed command performances by Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson, Nagako is also a distinguished painter. On walks, the royal couple like to collect plants, which, it is said, he studies and she sketches. Together they incarnate the classical Japanese ideal of mutual devotion.

Of the couple's seven children, both Crown Prince Akihito, 49, and his brother Hitachi, 47, have inherited their father's hobby.* The handsome, retiring elder son has published 23 monographs on ichthyology; Hitachi specializes in fish tumors. Second in line to the throne is Akihito's eldest son Hiro, 23, who recently left Tokyo to study medieval European history at Oxford.

Under the terms of the constitution, Hirohito's successor will have little opportunity to extend imperial power. Meanwhile, though most of Hirohito's subjects regard him with fond bemusement, some are beginning to suggest privately that he should abdicate. But the Emperor remains steadfast. When questioned once about his long reign, His Imperial Majesty simply recited a proverb: "Not even under the heaviest snowfall will willow trees snap." --By Pico Iyer

*Of the Emperor's five daughters, Princess Teru died in 1961 at the age of 35, and Princess Hisa died within six months of her birth in 1927. Kazuko Takatsukasa, 54, became a Shinto priestess after her husband died; Atsuko Ikeda, 52, is a businessman's wife; and Takako Shimazu, 44, is married to a banker. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.