Japan: An Enigmatic Still Life

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.