There has been an emperor in Japan for more than 15 centuries, making the Chrysanthemum Throne the world's oldest continuous monarchy. Today, the emperor stood down, yielding to his eldest son in the first abdication in 200 years. This is the family's story.
1. His Father Was Called a God. She Called Him 'Jimmy.'
Prince Akihito would never wield the power of Japanese emperors of old. But he just might help heal his country.
We know him as Akihito, the emperor of Japan, a gentle figure who championed peace in a nation devastated by war. But 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. There, a new American teacher insisted on a more prosaic name for his highness. His father, the wartime emperor, Hirohito, had been revered as a god, but she made clear he never would be.
"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."
Vining pushed back. She had already given names — Adam, Billy — to several of Akihito's classmates at Gakushuin, a school for the children of nobility and wealth.
"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.
Outside that schoolroom — in a flimsy building with muddy floors — much more than a name hung in the balance.
Only a year had passed since Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of a war in which tens of millions of people had been killed, including more than 3 million Japanese. Tokyo was in ruins, with much of its population living in shanties. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, assigned to lead the U.S. occupation, had established his headquarters in the Dai-Ichi Life Insurance Building — opposite the Imperial Palace.
Would the world's oldest monarchy survive?
Akihito, a lonely child raised by chamberlains and nursemaids since age 3, had spent the final year of the war outside the city to escape the Allied bombing. Not long after the Nazi surrender, a napalm raid set the imperial compound ablaze.
On a summer morning a few months later, the chamberlains ushered him into a small room in the hotel where they were hiding. His father was on the radio. "The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage," Hirohito said, announcing the unconditional surrender. It was the first time the Japanese people had heard his voice.
After the broadcast, Akihito wiped away tears. "I think I must work harder from now on," he wrote in his diary.
"The chamberlains didn't know what would happen if the crown prince returned to Tokyo," recalled Mototsugu Akashi, 85, a classmate who was evacuated from the capital with Akihito. "The Allies were unpredictable. We worried they might kill him."
In the United States and other Allied nations, pressure mounted for Hirohito to be indicted as a war criminal. Leading intellectuals in Japan called on him to set a moral example by stepping down. Some members of the royal family urged him to abdicate and let young Akihito take the Chrysanthemum Throne under the supervision of a regent. The prince could not be blamed for the war, they argued, and that would limit U.S. leverage over the monarchy and protect it.
MacArthur had other ideas. The brash general enjoyed almost unchecked authority in Japan and, early on, he decided to spare Hirohito — and to use him.
With a presidential run in mind, MacArthur saw the emperor as key to demilitarising Japan and remaking it as a democratic nation. "He's a symbol which unites all Japanese," the general wrote in a secret telegram, warning that a million U.S. soldiers would be needed to subdue the country if Hirohito were put on trial.
And so the royal family escaped prosecution. Others took the fall instead, including one Japanese general who was hanged for the Nanjing Massacre instead of Hirohito's uncle.
The monarchy, of course, had to change. A new constitution stripped the emperor of his divine status and made him a figurehead. And Akihito would be groomed as a conduit to transmit the values the Americans intended to reshape Japan.
The Japanese planned to hire an Englishman to tutor the prince but MacArthur's aides manoeuvred to put in an American.
Vining was selected in part because she was a Quaker — a circle of Japanese Quakers surrounded the royal family — and a widow. Her husband had died in a car accident, and some thought the tragedy might help her understand Japan's sorrow.
Then and now, there were people unhappy with her appointment. "Of all the things that America did to post war Japan, one of the rudest was to provide the crown prince with the woman tutor Vining," a conservative Japanese critic grumbled decades later.
Vining set about her task with stubborn earnestness, sometimes sparring with the chamberlains who surrounded Akihito. "It was recognised that the teaching of English was only a medium for the larger task of opening to the crown prince and others the thought and practice of American democracy," she recalled in a best-selling memoir.
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
He sought to make peace with the lands his country once conquered. But at home, too, there were fences to mend.
Isao Chinen was biding his time, deep inside the island cave, waiting for the dignitary to arrive.
For six days, he and a fellow conspirator stayed out of sight, surviving on canned food, chocolate and biscuits. On the seventh, they huddled over a transistor radio to follow the news as the visitor approached.
Chinen was 25, a law student who had dropped out of university for this mission. Emerging from the cave that morning, in a khaki jumpsuit and a black helmet, he 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!"
It was the summer of 1975, and Akihito had just landed in Okinawa. He was 41 and facing the hard question of the monarchy's purpose in modern Japan. The trip would become the start of what would be a hallmark of his reign: a long campaign to repent for the nation's wartime sins.
Three decades earlier, Okinawa had been the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War, a nightmare that lasted more than 80 days and involved hundreds of thousands of troops on land, sea and air. It was the last stand of the Imperial Army, which deployed kamikaze pilots by the hundreds to repel the Allied invasion.
The fighting claimed the lives of 95,000 Japanese soldiers and 12,500 American personnel, but also nearly 100,000 civilians — about a quarter of Okinawa's population — including teenagers forced to take up arms and entire families ordered by Japanese soldiers to commit suicide rather than surrender.
For the next 27 years, the United States governed Okinawa, building military bases, using them in its wars in Korea and Vietnam, even deploying nuclear weapons to the island south of mainland Japan despite local opposition.
Neither Hirohito nor any other member of the royal family dared visit. Imagine the intensity of public sentiment, then, during Akihito's trip, three years after Okinawa returned to Japanese control.
"I wanted the emperor to apologise," 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.
Akihito had not come alone. At his side was his wife, Princess Michiko.
They had been married 16 years, after meeting on a tennis court and getting engaged over the objections of Japan's traditionalists, including Akihito's mother, Empress Nagako. Michiko was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, but her family was not of noble birth, which made her the first commoner to marry into the imperial family in centuries.
Part of their wedding had been televised — a first — and the couple became celebrities and symbols of the new Japan. They were likable, urbane, athletic and spoke English, and they soon had three children, two boys and a girl. While the emperor was rarely seen in public, the crown prince and princess were beginning to redefine what it meant to be royals in Japan.
On that summer day in Okinawa, they had just laid white chrysanthemums at a memorial when the Molotov cocktail exploded in front of them. Security officers quickly pulled the couple away from the fire, then rushed them back to their motorcade.
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 cancelling the rest of the visit. But Akihito and Michiko pressed on.
Hiroaki Yamashiro, who photographed Chinen holding the firebomb aloft in front of the royal couple, recalled watching the prince later in the day at Okinawa's peace memorial museum and thinking, "This is not something that a regular human could do."
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."
"When thinking of the victims and their bereaved families," he wrote, "I'm filled with sorrow and bitter grief."
Okinawa was just the beginning. After becoming emperor when his father died in 1989, he took that same message of contrition across Asia.
Akihito traveled to China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Palau, the Philippines, Saipan, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam — all places that had suffered from Japan's wartime aggression.
At every stop, he honoured Japan's war dead while also paying tribute to its victims. At every stop, he spoke of peace, promising his nation would never repeat the horrors of war.
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 minimise the Imperial Army's actions, and derided Akihito's "apology tour," arguing that Japan had apologised enough.
A planned visit to Pearl Harbor in 1994 was derailed by nationalist protests. Akihito laid a wreath at a war monument a few miles from the site of the Japanese attack instead.
Under the constitution, the emperor is barred from participating in politics. Akihito nevertheless served as a check on Japan's far right. As traditionalists, they revered the monarchy. Yet they chafed at his refusal to let the nation forget its past.
In 2015, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pushed through legislation that opened the door to allowing the Japanese military to fight in foreign conflicts. The same year, Akihito added a phrase to his annual address on the anniversary of Japan's surrender.
"Reflecting on our past and bearing in mind the feelings of deep remorse," he said, "I earnestly hope that the ravages of war will never be repeated."
The "deep remorse" was new, and it seemed an unmistakable rebuke of Abe. He has repeated the phrase every year since.
3. The Reluctant Bride
She had her sights on a career in diplomacy. He had his sights on her.
They spoke for only a few minutes, but that was enough.
He was 26, an affable prince who had studied history at Oxford and happened to be second in line to the throne.
She was 22, a bright Harvard graduate following her father into a career in the Foreign Ministry. Or so she thought.
On an October afternoon in 1986, they met at a reception he hosted in Tokyo for Princess Elena of Spain.
As a string ensemble performed classical music, the diplomat's daughter, Masako Owada, sipped orange juice. Naruhito, eldest son of Crown Prince Akihito, circulated among the 120 guests. When the two were introduced, he asked, "What kind of diplomat would you like to be?"
History does not record her reply but years later Naruhito would say that he enjoyed their conversation — and was smitten. "Although she is very modest," he recalled, "she says what she thinks clearly, and is very intelligent."
This was no chance encounter. The survival of the monarchy, which was more popular in Japan than most politicians, hinged on Naruhito finding a wife — and fathering a son. He would be emperor one day but he needed an heir.
The chamberlains of the Imperial Household Agency had orchestrated Owada's invitation to the reception after noticing she was one of three women to pass Japan's notoriously tough foreign service exam that year. That, and a few other meetings at events around town, was all it took to spark Naruhito's ardour.
Owada was flattered by the interest but demurred. She was a fledgling diplomat and devoted to work. Still, he sent her flowers on her birthday. A year later, the Foreign Ministry sent her to study international relations at Oxford. Reporters hounded her until she called an impromptu news conference on the library steps and denied any romantic connection to the prince.
For the royal matchmakers, it hardly seemed a disaster at first. They had long lists of potential princesses, all daughters of Japanese nobility, wealth or the educated elite. By one count, the search team had compiled dossiers on nearly 200 women, each with a photo. Certainly, they thought, Naruhito would hit it off with one of them.
But he did not. With each passing year, fears grew that his failure to marry might jeopardise the monarchy. The talk only intensified after 1989, when Akihito assumed the throne, making his son the new crown prince.
It did not help that Naruhito's younger brother, Akishino, who had impulsively proposed to his college sweetheart at a Tokyo crosswalk, married her in 1990. The chamberlains had wanted him to let his brother marry first. Apparently, he got tired of waiting.
He wasn't alone. The entire country seemed impatient. One newspaper declared in 1991 that "the biggest concern of the people is the marriage issue." Reporters chased after potential princesses. But Naruhito never appeared in public on so much as a date. (He did once meet Brooke Shields.)
A tabloid published digitally altered photos of Naruhito sporting different hairstyles, suggesting his coiffure was too nerdy to attract a wife. Others thought he might be too dull, noting the title of his Oxford thesis, "The Thames as Highway: A Study of Navigation and Traffic on the Upper Thames in the 18th Century."
Pressed by reporters, Naruhito insisted he had no interest in his future wife's family pedigree, nor in what schools she had attended or even her height. (The chamberlains wanted a princess shorter than the 5-foot-4 prince.)
What he was looking for, he said, was someone who shared his values; who appreciated beauty, not baubles from Tiffany's; who got along easily with people, and who was willing to express her opinions, "when necessary."
Most of all, he said, he wanted to choose his own bride.
Akihito urged patience. "I think it's important to watch it quietly," he told reporters when asked if he was worried about his son.
What was unclear at the time, but later became the stuff of royal legend, was that all along Naruhito was holding out for a woman who fit the glass slipper: Masako Owada.
In many ways, she was an unlikely princess. She had spent half her childhood abroad, spoke at least four languages and had graduated from an American public high school before studying economics at Harvard. She was also slightly taller than the prince.
Most of all, she had a career, which no previous Japanese crown princess ever had. Since returning to Tokyo in 1990, Owada had risen swiftly in the Foreign Ministry, where she was known for putting in long hours — sometimes all-nighters — defending Japan's trade practices in talks with Washington.
None of that deterred Naruhito. If Owada was not interested, he told court officials, he might not marry at all.
By the spring of 1992, a scramble to persuade Owada to go on a date with Naruhito was underway. Various diplomats were enlisted in the effort, eventually including Owada's father, a senior official in the Foreign Ministry.
How could she still say no? Owada agreed to tea with the prince. It must have gone well, because less than two months later, they met again, this time at an imperial duck pond. Naruhito, who was 32, proposed.
Owada asked for time to think.
Accepting meant giving up her career for a life of severe constraints. It was well known that Empress Michiko, the last crown princess, had once suffered a breakdown attributed to bullying by her mother-in-law and others who resented her commoner roots.
But Owada was 28 and knew she might soon have to choose between career and family even if she declined. An overseas posting was approaching, perhaps an ambassadorship, and in Japan, that would sharply reduce her marriage prospects.
Before year's end, she told the prince yes.
When they announced the engagement, she recalled that he had assured her, "I will protect you for my entire life."
If only she knew what she needed protection from.
4. A Princess in a Cage
The survival of a monarchy rested on her shoulders. No one ever let her forget it.
The Asahi Shimbun had the scoop. On the morning of Dec. 10, 1999, Japan's No. 2 newspaper by circulation published the front-page headline the country had been waiting for: "Princess Masako Shows Signs of Pregnancy."
It had been six years since a brainy young diplomat named Masako Owada gave up her career to marry Crown Prince Naruhito, the next emperor of Japan. Some predicted she would help modernise the monarchy, and perhaps even the nation itself.
Now, as the country woke to the news of her pregnancy, that prospect seemed like a fading dream. The intervening years had reduced the multilingual trade expert who had studied at Harvard and Oxford to a woman failing at the only duty in her new job that seemed to matter to Japan: producing an heir to the throne.
In the Japanese press, Masako was a walking womb in waiting. If she wore low-heeled shoes, or failed to appear at a reception, the tabloids rushed to speculate that she might be expecting. So when The Asahi Shimbun, a respectable broadsheet, published its scoop, the hoopla that followed was just an echo of what Masako had endured for years.
Reporters staked out her parents' home. Analysts discussed whether a royal baby might help Japan's sagging economy, or portend a reversal of its declining birthrate. A witness recalled seeing her sipping a glass of wine — gasp! — at a reception earlier in the month. One magazine gleefully guessed at the date of conception and figured out where the royal couple had spent that night, down to the large double bed in the hotel's imperial suite.
Three weeks later, the palace held a news conference: Masako had suffered a miscarriage, seven weeks into term.
The pundits criticized the palace for not cancelling a royal trip to Belgium when the princess might have been pregnant. The palace criticized The Asahi Shimbun for causing the princess "extraordinary stress" by disclosing the pregnancy before formal confirmation. The princess herself disappeared from view.
Behind the royal drama was a quiet national unease — once again, the monarchy faced extinction.
The Chrysanthemum Throne has persisted for more than 15 centuries, a succession of emperors and princes made possible by an unusual variation on the practice of concubinage: For much of Japanese history, the families of the aristocracy had volunteered their daughters to serve on a rotation of part-time mistresses to the emperor, ensuring a male heir was almost always available.
But Hirohito, Naruhito's grandfather, abolished the practice, and in 1947, the Americans pressed Japan to remove all branches of the imperial family from the line of succession except direct male descendants of the current emperor or his brothers and uncles.
The new rules, written into law, were intended to block any attempt to use another branch of the family to revive the militarism that led to World War II.
Back then, a succession crisis hardly seemed likely. Hirohito had three brothers, two sons and three eligible nephews.
By the time of Masako's miscarriage, however, there were only a few male heirs to the throne left. Akihito's one brother, Hitachi, had no children. Akihito's younger son, Prince Akishino, had only two daughters. The future of the monarchy seemed to depend on his eldest son, Crown Prince Naruhito, and his wife, Masako.
The burden weighed heavily on the crown princess. At her first solo news conference in 1996, she felt compelled to reassure the public that she was "not in a state of depression."
After the miscarriage, though, she did not appear in public for more than 40 days. She missed the funeral of Akihito's mother, Empress Nagako. She also skipped the annual imperial poetry reading ceremony, though she contributed a verse:
With my husband as my guide through these seven years,
our wolds of the heart grow deeper with each passing day.
Two years later, after nearly a decade of marriage, a few days before her 38th birthday, Masako finally had a child — a girl. The couple named her Aiko, meaning "love."
But the pressure to produce a male heir remained. The palace barred Masako from making trips abroad and the news media continued to scrutinise her every action. By 2004, it was so bad that she stopped appearing at public events altogether.
Naruhito, looking grim, asked the press to back off and seemed to take a swipe at palace officials for restricting his wife's travel.
"We are well aware of the importance of the issue of the succession, and hope that we will be able to live our lives in peace without pressure from those around us," he said. "I think it would be better if Princess Masako could go out with a little more freedom and be able to do a variety of things."
There was, of course, a seemingly simple solution. Japan could change the law to allow women to take the throne. That would add Akihito's three granddaughters — little Aiko and her two cousins, Mako and Kako — to the line of succession.
Junichiro Koizumi, the prime minister in the early 2000s whose lion's mane of hair and promises of reform made him popular with voters, pledged to make the change "in order that the imperial throne be continued in a stable manner." The Asahi Shimbun endorsed the idea, too, as did a clear majority in polls of public opinion.
But the proposal drew fierce opposition, especially from the nationalist wing of Koizumi's party. One former Cabinet minister called the imperial family's male line "the precious, precious treasure of the Japanese race."
Before the matter could come to a vote, fate intervened. Naruhito's brother and his wife, Prince Akishino and Princess Kiko, had a third child — a boy — giving the emperor a grandson. They named him Hisahito.
For another generation at least, the male line of the Chrysanthemum Throne seemed secure.
And, finally, the pressure was off Masako, Japan's next empress.
5. The Suitor With the Shaggy Hair
Princess Mako was never getting anywhere near the throne. But the public still seemed to have a say over her dating life.
The last time the paparazzi got a good look at Kei Komuro, he was arriving at law school in New York for the start of the fall semester, swinging a soft briefcase and looking stylish in an off-white blazer, khakis and brown brogues.
Then, a few weeks ago, a magazine published a photo of Komuro off campus in an untucked shirt in need of ironing and a pair of Crocs. His hair had grown shaggy, and he was ordering an afternoon snack at a falafel cart.
The pundits on television in Tokyo wondered: Had he been so busy studying that he didn't have time for a haircut? Was he having a late lunch to save money?
The question actually on their minds — on most everyone's in Japan, really — was more pointed: Is this guy good enough for Princess Mako, the eldest granddaughter of Emperor Akihito?
The imperial family has never suffered from lack of drama. In recent decades, though, it has escaped the kind of scandals that have damaged monarchies elsewhere. There have been no extramarital affairs, no divorces, no influence-peddling or gambling outrages.
On the contrary, the Japanese royals have come across as studious, empathetic and almost unnaturally well behaved. But how will the Chrysanthemum Throne weather the era of TMZ and Instagram?
Two years ago, Mako introduced Komuro, 27, to reporters in Tokyo as the man she intended to marry.
They had been dating since college. She said his smile was as bright as the sun. He said she watched over him as quietly as the moon. They added that Akihito himself had given them his blessing, and the public swooned.
The tabloids, though, put him under a magnifying glass. Less than a year later, they reported that Komuro's mother, a widow, had borrowed 4 million yen, or about $36,000, from an ex-boyfriend and never paid it back.
The story had nothing to do with her son, who was then working as a paralegal, but in a society where family background carries great weight, it fueled suspicion that he was courting the princess for status and money.
Public opinion turned against him. Weeks later, the palace announced it was putting off a formal ceremony to mark the engagement. "I wish to think about marriage more deeply and concretely," Mako, 27, said.
Komuro then decamped to Fordham Law School, prompting speculation that the palace had pressured him to leave or that he had manipulated the situation to gain admission to the school, on scholarship no less.
Mako's father, the emperor's younger son, Prince Akishino, told reporters he could not bless the relationship until his potential son-in-law "solved the problems that have surfaced." (Never mind that once upon a time, Akishino himself had defied the palace to marry before his older brother.)
Komuro explained that the $36,000 had been a gift and apologised for "causing anxiety." His lawyer — yes, he had retained counsel — said in a recent interview that his client's feelings for the princess had not changed. Yet he declined to say whether the two were still talking.
"Normally, any engaged couples will communicate," he said. "It would be strange if they didn't."
A generation earlier, the tabloids had obsessed over whether Crown Prince Naruhito — the next emperor — would find his Cinderella. Now, they were close to toppling a prospective royal suitor. Both stories were reminders of the monarchy's fragile existence: If Naruhito did not marry, he would not produce an heir. Even if Princess Mako married, she would not be allowed to.
In fact, she would have to surrender her title and leave the imperial family. That is a requirement of all royal daughters under the law that excludes women from the line of succession. Princess Nori, the emperor's daughter, for example, became plain Sayako Kuroda when she married 14 years ago.
This means the royal family has several phantom branches, all cut off from the throne. One leads to Akifumi Kikuchi, 34, who writes advertising copy by day and performs spoken-word poetry by night. He is the son of one of Emperor Akihito's cousins, a princess who lost her title when she married the scion of a great teahouse.
Kikuchi says it doesn't much bother him to be left out of the line of succession, though he allowed that in another country, "I would be in the top 100." As for Mako, whom he has met only briefly at weddings and funerals, he said he hoped she would be able to "pursue what she wants."
That is also the position of Emperor Akihito, now 85, and his wife, Empress Michiko. They issued a statement last year saying they would not express a direct opinion of the engagement but believed everyone should "wait for Princess Mako to make her own decisions."
Epilogue
One week in July 2016, the emperor hosted teas for the ambassadors of Bulgaria, the Netherlands, South Africa and Thailand.
He was briefed on a campaign for athletes with disabilities. He attended the opening of a museum exhibit and several concerts, including a fundraiser to support children with cancer.
A survivor of prostate cancer himself, as well as heart surgery, Akihito also had two medical exams. Then he and Empress Michiko repaired to a vacation villa on the coast.
While they were out of town, Japan's public broadcaster, NHK, interrupted its programming one evening with a bulletin. Citing anonymous sources, it said the emperor wanted to abdicate and retire.
This was stunning news. No emperor had abdicated in more than 200 years, a move that would require action by Parliament.
A month later, Akihito addressed the nation on television.
"When I consider that my fitness level is gradually declining," he said, "I am worried that it may become difficult for me to carry out my duties as the symbol of the state with my whole being as I have done until now."
Over the decades, Akihito had quietly remade the monarchy into a bulwark against the return of militarism in Japan. In doing so, he acknowledged truths that some Japanese politicians would rather deny or forget.
Now, perhaps for the last time, gingerly and with public opinion on his side, as usual, Akihito was pushing the politicians again.
The conservatives in power hesitated. They worried about opening the door to another push to let women ascend to the throne. So it took nearly three years to get to this point:
On Tuesday afternoon, the 125th emperor of Japan — whose father brought the nation to the brink of destruction yet refused to abdicate — will himself voluntarily surrender the Chrysanthemum Throne.
Then, the man whose English teacher once called him Jimmy will accept an unusual new title: Emperor Emeritus.
Written by: Motoko Rich
© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES