Ten Thousand Things
Multicultural Webfinds

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

Remembering Emperor Akihito’s Millennial Birthday – Reclaiming Japan's East Asian Legacies

A palpable calm usually radiates from the Imperial Palace. Surrounded by 284 acres of centuries-old trees, then wide stone moats, and, finally, by the acres of concrete buildings and more than twelve million inhabitants of Tokyo, the palace sits at the center of the city. The landscaped grounds have insulated the seat of Takamikura, the Chrysanthemum Throne, since 1868, when the Tokugawa Shogunate fell, and the new Meiji government moved the imperial family from Kyoto, to what was then Edo Castle. Firebombs destroyed the original structure during the Second World War. The green-roofed palace was rebuilt in 1968, the year traditional novelist Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Fortifications seem to hermetically seal the inner grounds, closed to the public, except for two days each year, including Tenno Tanjobi, the emperor’s birthday on December 23, and the Ippan Sanga New Year’s commemoration on January 2.

In 2001, throngs of shivering people, both Japanese and foreign, stood waving tiny paper Japanese flags, in an outdoor courtyard, waiting to hear Emperor Akihito’s sixty-eighth birthday message. Men in business suits and women in heavy winter coats kept their distance from the small groups of ultra-nationalists wearing their peculiar bandannas and blue uniforms. At the announcement of the emperor's arrival, the crowd began to chant.

“Banzai! Banzai Denke Tenno Heika!”

“Hurrah! Hurrah! Happy Birthday to the Emperor!”

“Hurrah! Hurrah! Long Live the Emperor!”

The time just before and just after New Year’s Day holds deep spiritual significance in Japan. The adoption of commercial Christmas customs puts a contemporary frosting over the ancient mid-winter and New Year celebrations practiced for centuries in Japan. Kept in accordance with the Chinese lunar calendar until the revolutionary Meiji government adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1873, the cultural roots of these winter festivities run deep, back to the first agrarian societies in prehistoric China, and now linger in from December to mid-January.

The timing of Emperor Akihito’s birthday at the end of the year perfectly fits with this traditional season of introspective reflection. Bonenkai, year-end parties, symbolically wash away the past year’s frustrations and misfortunes. After the New Year is ushered in, Shinenkai, New Year parties, celebrate the year to come. Just now, though, this crowd was waiting for Akihito to speak on his first birthday of the first year of the millennium.

When the familiar dark-suited, gray-haired emperor emerged, with Empress Michiko by his side, both looking like miniatures at a distance behind the bullet-proof glass covered balcony of Chowaden (Lasting Peace) Hall, the crowded rapidly waved their little white and red flags. Smiling and waving back, Akihito, gave his birthday statement in ordinary, not royal, Japanese.

A week earlier, Akihito had expanded upon this message during his annual press conference in a red-carpeted reception room. Sitting at a small table covered with a silk cloth, in front of a gold leaf screen depicting large white chrysanthemums, Japan’s monarch responded to the first customary question about the preceding year by paying respect to the past year’s difficulties in Japan and in the world. Akihito described Japan’s rising unemployment, mad cow disease, the Ehime Maru submarine collision with an American ship, the September 11th terrorist World Trade Center attacks, Taliban destruction of the ancient Greco-Indian Bamiyan Buddhist statues, and the war in Afghanistan.

As with past years, he also brought attention to what inspired him. He spoke of his joy that a Japanese received a Nobel Prize in chemistry and at the success of Ichiro Suzuki’s move from Japan’s Orix Blue Wave team to the Seattle Mariners, becoming the first Japanese-born everyday position player in the American Major Leagues. He spoke of his admiration for the unbroken spirit of the people still working to rebuild their hometowns after the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in Kobe. He spoke of his hope that Miyakejima Island inhabitants, evacuated for over a year because of volcanic activity, would be able to return to their homes soon. He spoke of missing Empress Kojun who passed away the year before, and at his happiness at the birth of Princess Aiko, and his belief that there are “no great differences” between men and women in the Imperial Family.

Then in response to a third question about the Emperor’s thoughts on Korea, given Japan’s and Korea’s co-hosting the 2002 World Cup, he broke with the usual, and unexpectedly proclaimed his Korean heritage.

“I, on my part, feel a certain kinship with Korea.”

Akihito elaborated, explaining that the Shoku Nihongi, an eighth-century chronicle, traced the lineage of his eighth-century ancestor, Emperor Kammu, to King Muryong of sixth-century Paekche, one of Korea’s ancient kingdoms. Muryong, born and raised in Japan, had only returned to Paekche when he ascended his throne.

“King Muryong had strong relations with Japan, and it was from his time that masters of the Five Chinese Classics (Confucian texts) were invited to Japan, one after another, to teach Confucianism. King Song Myong, son of King Muryong, is recognized as the one who introduced Buddhism to Japan,” Akihito continued, detailing the genealogy of Japanese culture.

Kammu’s mother, Takano no Niigasa, a Paekche princess, who descended from King Muryong, was married to Japan’s Emperor Konin. Their son, Kammu, one of Japan’s most famous emperors, founded Japan’s third capital, Kyoto, in 794, beginning the Heian period, which ushered in a pinnacle of aesthetic achievement in Japan.

Akihito prefaced his declaration about Korean-Japanese kinship by outlining the blood ties and intimate relationships between the nascent kingdom of Yamato, situated in Japan’s central island, just south of Kyoto, and those of the ancient kingdoms, which occupied the territory now called “Korea.” Detailing their “deep interchange” recorded in the Nihon Shoki, another eighth-century historical chronicle, and other records, he explained that people from the Korean peninsula came to the nascent kingdom in central Japan, bringing East Asian culture and technology.

“Some of the musicians in the Music Department of the Imperial Household Agency are direct descendants of musicians who came over to Japan from Korea at that time and still perform the Gagaku (Imperial Court Music) on various occasions.”

The Emperor’s pronouncement about his Korean heritage may have seemed momentarily surprising. Some commentators say he made in only in connection the World Cup, to be co-hosted between Japan and Korea, the next year. However, from a longer perspective, his remarks actually seem fit into the whole of Akihito’s professed mission of supporting peace between Japan and the world.

This mission has been in the making since his childhood when he experienced drastic reversals of influence. Born in 1933, as assassins and thugs ushered in Japan’s militarist period, Akihito was raised by courtiers during this dark and violent time. At the war’s end, fanatics threatened the eleven-year-old prince with a kidnapping plot, planning to take him to a remote spot to continue the war in his name. A year later, he experienced an abrupt reversal of experience when an independent-thinking American Quaker widow and author of children’s books, Elizabeth Gray Vining, became his English tutor in the postwar period. During their four years together, she insisted on calling him by an English name, “Jimmy,” taught him how to play “Hide and Seek” and “Monopoly’,” and counseled him to follow his own mind, “daring to make mistakes.” Vining’s 1952 book about their time together, Windows for the Crown Prince,”(an excerpt with a delightful photo of the young crown prince and his tutor at this link) became an American best-seller. She was the only foreigner at Akihito’s 1959 wedding and these two unlikely temporary companions, thrown together by fate and history remained in life-long contact until Vining’s death at 97 years-of-age in 1999.

Considered the longest continuous monarchy in the world, the Japanese throne has survived incredible shifts in influence and power. Since the earliest centuries of its inception, political leaders controlling the state’s political and military powers, from medieval foreign ministers to shoguns to wartime fascists to postwar politicians, have manipulated the monarchy for their own ends. The early medieval Soga clan intermarried with royalty in order to control the throne, as did the Fujiwara family in later centuries.

The Tokugawa Shogunate shunted the imperial family aside, moving Japan’s capital to Edo, and leaving the monarchy behind in Kyoto for two hundred years. The Meiji rulers used the restoration of the Chrysanthemum Throne to legitimize their radical state-initiated transformations towards a modern authoritarian state. Scholars are still debating the actual extent of power of Japanese emperors since Meiji. Undebated is the fact that the war’s end resurrected a previous pattern of official royal official powerlessness.

Under the postwar Constitution, the emperor has no political power. According to historian Kenneth Ruoff, Akihito is not unanimously supported by the Japanese public. Many feel apathetic towards the royal family. Many progressive and liberal Japanese resent the Japanese throne as an anachronism and would like to see it abolished. The American Occupation leaders considered doing just that; however they decided to keep the emperor on as a figurehead of the nation.

A respected marine biologist, Emperor Akihito chose the name Heisei “to achieve peace,” to characterize his imperial era which began in 1989. Ruoff asserts that despite his lack of official power, Akihito has not acted simply as a puppet adding a symbolic stamp of approval on all government policies. Instead, he has gently used the throne’s symbolic power to consistently take Japan in discernable directions. Some consider him a constructive guiding force in Japanese society, even before his 1989 ascendancy. Many Japanese interpreted his marriage to a commoner, Empress Michiko, as a symbolic ascent to liberty and equality, two rights in the Postwar Constitution. When their children were born, the royal couple insisted on personally raising them instead of allowing courtiers to do so.

Ruoff, author of The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945-1995 commented on the emperor's recrafting of the symbolic power of the Japanese throne in this 2001 article, "The Royal Birth, Emperor Akihito's Remark about His Affinity with Korea, and Today's Japan"

Since ascending in 1989, Emperor Akihito has put his stamp on the monarchy and Japan not only with his informal style but with his sustained effort to bring "closure to the postwar era" by issuing apologies to neighboring countries for Japan’s wartime actions. Emperor Akihito seems to have a firm understanding of issues that continue to trouble his country, and he continues to carry out symbolic acts that send important social signals. On 23 December, 2001, during his annual birthday meeting with reporters, the emperor, in response to a reporter’s question, remarked that he felt a "certain kinship with Korea," and went on to explain his feeling as resulting from the fact that the mother of Emperor Kammu (736–806) was a Korean. The emperor noted that Koreans who immigrated to Japan in ancient times introduced culture and technology, and then called upon his countrymen never to forget the regrettable fact that Japan’s exchanges with Korean have not all been so friendly.

Although the emperor’s remarks went largely unreported outside of Asia, they are significant and were welcomed by the South Korean foreign minister. Emperor Akihito undermined myths of Japanese racial purity, which generally rely heavily on fanciful accounts of the imperial line. The emperor could go a step further by directly reaching out to Japan’s largest minority, Koreans, who continue to suffer social discrimination. The Japanese far right, among others, continues to include race in definitions of Japanese nationality, and thus the meaning of such an act by the emperor would be clear: one need not be ethnically Japanese to be an equal member of the national community. Japan is slowly but surely becoming more ethnically pluralistic, and now would be an especially appropriate time for Emperor Akihito to demolish nonsensical racial myths.

The emperor’s forward-looking vision has characterized his state duties as well as his personal life. Despite oppositional forces within Japan’s political elites, the emperor has repeatedly used his position to refocus Japan in a direction of domestic and international reconciliation and healing, working to actualize the name of his reign, “achieving peace.” In 1990, rebuking ultranationalists, he visited and expressed sympathy to Nagasaki mayor Hitoshi Motoshima, shot by extremists after he implicated Hirohito’s responsibility for Japan’s wartime militarism. During Akihito's 1992 visit to China, he expressed remorse for what Japan did in China, to the consternation of rightists in both Japan’s government and public. In 2005, while visiting Saipan, the emperor and empress made a surprise visit to the memorial honoring Koreans killed during World War II, who were brought to the island as conscripts or as forced laborers in the Japanese military. In his 2006 birthday message, Akihito said that the destruction of the Second World War must be taught to future generations to prevent future wars.

Since the postwar period, the Korean ties of the Japanese royal family and much of Japan's aristocracy have been like the story of the Emperor’s Clothes or the family secret everyone knows about but no one talks about. Accordingly, Emperor Akihito’s ten words on his 2001 birthday –“I, on my part, feel a certain kinship with Korea” – reflected a radical shift publicly reconnecting the Japanese throne with the East Asian historical regional cosmos. With his new millennial birthday statement, Akihito's reclamation of Japan’s real history put his royal stamp of approval on an ongoing revisioning Japan’s national identity -- a paradigm shift taking place for decades among serious scholars on Japan – for the most part below the horizon of both the Japanese and overseas media.

The Emperor's remarks met with acclaim in the Korean and East Asian media. However, most of the North American, European and Japanese press ignored his groundbreaking acknowledgment. The Mainichi Daily, the Yomiuri Daily and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun did not cover the Emperor’s statement, perhaps because of self-censorship, in deference to their presumption that the Imperial Household Agency which is under the control of the Prime Minister’s Office, (most of the IHA staff are senior officials on temporary loan from various ministries), did not want the comment widely disseminated. In contrast, the Asahi Shimbun and the English-language Japan Times were among a few Japanese newspapers that highlighted his remarks. The British newspaper, The Guardian, also covered the story.

In the past five years since the Emperor's statement, a reactionary trend characterized by the provocative posturing of certain leaders of the LDP, underscored by the atmosphere created by the same kind of political bullies who have intimidated rational people in Japan since the Meiji era, has seemed to drown out quieter reconciliatory shifts at the grassroots, including the Korean Boom in Japan, and other changes at the popular level. But, mostly below media radar, the movement towards reconciliation, friendship, and increased educational, cultural, and business ties continues.

And, at the same time, exciting new archaeological finds, coupled with fresh and innovative scholarship inside and outside of Japan, have pushed open the "island nation" concept of "Japan." Scholars are increasingly recontextualizing Japan within its historical ties with East Asia and the rest of the world and new scholarly perspectives focus on the seas as a connector between the archipelago and the continent instead of a divider. These academic epistemological shifts are happening in concert with a burgeoning of self-generated educational, cultural, NGO, and business ties between Japan and the world.

Emperor Akihito's 2001 birthday message seems to be have been as much about Japan's present and future in our present millennium, as about the archipelago's history in past millennia.

Previous ........... Next
Back to Ten Thousand Things index page...