Emperor Akihito
Akihito was the first Japanese emperor to inherit a throne that the constitution defined as a symbol, and he spent thirty years deciding what a symbol was for. He was eleven when the war ended and his father renounced his own divinity, and he was educated partly by an American Quaker tutor engaged by the occupation, which was itself a statement about what the monarchy was to become. In 1959 he married a commoner, the daughter of a flour company president, over the objections of the court bureaucracy and to enormous public enthusiasm; the wedding was the reason a generation of Japanese families bought their first television. He acceded in 1989 on the death of a father whose reign had covered the invasion of China, the Pacific war and the surrender, and whose responsibility for those things had never been settled in public. His answer to that inheritance was a sustained programme of acknowledgement conducted almost entirely through travel and phrasing. He went to China in 1992, the first Japanese emperor ever to do so, and expressed deep sorrow for the suffering inflicted. He visited the battlefields and the islands where Japanese and American soldiers and local civilians had died, went to Okinawa repeatedly despite having been attacked with a firebomb there as crown prince, and marked each war anniversary with language that grew more explicit as the political right grew keener to move on. He never criticised a government directly and never had to. The other half of the role he invented was consolation. After the Kobe earthquake in 1995 and again after the tsunami and the reactor meltdowns of 2011, he and the empress went to the shelters, knelt on the floor to speak to survivors at their own eye level, and stayed. No emperor had behaved like that, and it fixed the monarchy's postwar meaning more firmly than any statement could have. In 2016, at eighty-two, he addressed the country on video to say that he was no longer able to discharge the duties as he thought they should be discharged, which obliged a reluctant government to pass a one-off law permitting him to abdicate. He stepped down in 2019, the first to do so in two centuries.
- Lived: 1933 CE – ?
- Nationality: Japanese
- Roles: head_of_state
