1. His Father Was Called a God. She Called Him ‘Jimmy.’
[...] It was the autumn of 1946, a year after the end of the Second World War, and he was a 12-year-old boy, the crown prince of a defeated land, sitting in an unheated classroom on the outskirts of Tokyo. [...]
“In this class, your name is Jimmy,” declared the teacher, Elizabeth Gray Vining, a 44-year-old librarian and children’s book author from Philadelphia.
“No,” Akihito swiftly replied. “I am Prince.”
[...]
“Yes, you are Prince Akihito,” she said. “That is your real name. But in this class, you have an English name. In this class, your name is Jimmy.”
Vining waited. The other students glanced at one another nervously. Finally, the crown prince smiled, and the class beamed.
[...]
The Japanese planned to hire an Englishman to tutor the prince but MacArthur’s aides maneuvered to put in an American.
[...]
Then and now, there were people unhappy with her appointment. “Of all the things that America did to postwar Japan, one of the rudest was to provide the crown prince with the woman tutor Vining,” a conservative Japanese critic grumbled decades later.
[...]
But it wasn’t easy drilling the notion of equality into the royal pupil. Once, another tutor asked Akihito if he would rather be an ordinary boy. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I’ve never been an ordinary boy.” Another time, Vining asked the class what they wanted to be when they grew up. Akihito wrote, “I shall be emperor.”
Even Monopoly was a lesson. On a quiet afternoon in 1949, the tutor invited Akihito and some of his classmates to her home to play the quintessential capitalist board game with a few sons of Allied officials.
Tony Austin, 84, one of Akihito’s playmates that day, recalled that the foreigners had quickly beaten the young Japanese. “It wasn’t fair to play Monopoly with them, really,” he said. “They weren’t really familiar with it.”
The boys worried they had been rude, but Akihito was unruffled. As his new friends noted, the prince was learning to be a good loser.
2. The Long Shadows of a Failed War
[...]
[Isao Chinen] was 25 [...] lit a Molotov cocktail, raised his arm high in the air and flung it at his target--Crown Prince Akihito.
“Down with the emperor!” he shouted. “Go home, Crown Prince!”
[...]
“I wanted the emperor to apologize,” Chinen, now 68, recalled recently. Like many, he blamed Hirohito for extending the war by refusing to surrender sooner. Going after the crown prince, he said, was just a way to get to the emperor.
[...]
Chinen, who was arrested and spent 30 months in prison, said he had never intended to hurt Akihito. “I wanted to shock and astonish him,” he said.
Given the security breach, there must have been talk of canceling the rest of the visit. But Akihito and Michiko pressed on.
[...]
That night, Akihito issued an unexpected statement from his hotel, referring to Okinawa as the only battlefield in Japan “where residents were dragged into a great number of miserable sacrifices in the last war.”
[...]
Okinawa was just the beginning. After becoming emperor when his father died in 1989, he took that same message of contrition across Asia.
[...]
Though many said it was not enough, his pacifist message helped rehabilitate Japan’s reputation abroad. At home, opinion was divided.
With the end of the U.S. occupation, a fault line had emerged in Japan over how to think about the war. Some on the right sought to minimize the Imperial Army’s actions, and derided Akihito’s “apology tour,” arguing that Japan had apologized enough.
[...]
, but it probably constitutes a welcome change from his daily routine.
