A Royal Audience at Last?

Laughing too easily and smoking too furiously, Issey Ogata hardly looks like someone capable of impersonating an emperor.

Ogata is Japan’s master impressionist, a stage comedian who has built a career on a repertoire of Everyman characters: the suffering commuter, the inept husband, the fastidious bureaucrat.

“Playing an emperor is not my style, really,” says Ogata, 46, lounging at a Tokyo hotel. “I do regular middle-aged guys, like taxi drivers.”

But regal instincts apparently lurk within him too. Dress him up in a World War II military uniform, tuck a cotton ball under his upper lip for fleshiness and -- click: Ogata finds the inspiration to clench his facial muscles into the impassive mask of Hirohito, Japan’s 20th century emperor of war and peace.

Ogata steps out of comedy and into this imperial role in “The Sun,” Russian director Alexander Sokurov’s new film examining Hirohito at Japan’s moment of existential crisis. The film centers on the extraordinary events of August 1945, when Japan was burning, the Americans were at the gate and this remote man of supposedly divine descent was wondering what Gen. Douglas MacArthur had in store for him and his country.

Yet what is most remarkable about this dramatization is not the subject matter -- which raises no questions about wartime complicity, sticking instead to the conventional airbrushed history of a peace-loving emperor who saved lives by surrendering in defiance of his generals -- but the fact that Ogata dares portray Hirohito at all.

In the 60 years since those terrible days, there has been a virtual taboo in Japan against putting an actor in the emperor’s shoes. In movies about the Pacific war, Hirohito has been the ghost in the frame, the leading man who is almost never seen. Sokurov’s film is the first to put Hirohito at the center of a reenactment of those days, filming him up close and showing his personality tics as he agonizes over how to save Japan, and himself.

“For some reason, we subconsciously avoid dealing with the emperor in our movies,” says Kazuo Hara, director of a controversial 1987 documentary, “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On,” in which a bitter veteran rails against Hirohito for refusing to take responsibility for the war. The emperor didn’t appear even in Hara’s film, which was never shown on TV here and was relegated to small theaters after major Japanese distributors balked at screening it.

“Just a mention of the emperor and Japanese movie companies get scared,” Hara says.

The roll call of Japanese films featuring a Hirohito character doesn’t take long. “The Tragedy of Japan,” a 1947 documentary that accuses the emperor of being a war criminal, was swiftly banned -- by the American occupiers. It collided with MacArthur’s desire to cast Hirohito as a pacifist whose imperial aura had been exploited by Japanese militarists.

Postwar newsreel footage of Hirohito that made it past censors shows the emperor as comfortable with his subjects, his military uniform swapped for civilian suits as he inspects coal mines, pats horses and doffs his hat to cheering crowds.

His wartime role was not dramatized until 1967, when Kabuki actor Koshiro Matsumoto played Hirohito in “Japan’s Longest Day,” a look at the tense, internal struggle over whether to surrender. Matsumoto’s Hirohito was filmed only from behind or in a long shot, his lines limited to an emotional speech in which he tells his Cabinet, “No matter what happens, I can’t stand to let the people suffer anymore.” The only close-up is of the emperor’s white-gloved hand, clenching and unclenching to convey emotion.

Then ... nothing, until a Japanese-Canadian crew made a 1995 TV movie called “Hiroshima” that aired once on Japanese television before disappearing onto the back shelves of video stores. It featured actor Naohiko Umewaka as a pained Hirohito, gradually realizing that the cause was lost and the noose of devastation was tightening.

Umewaka, who comes from Japan’s traditional Noh theater, says he was chosen in part because he brought the dignity and stoicism of that tradition to the film role.

“I watched some of the old documentaries made after the war when he was traveling around Japan, but I don’t know how you can really act Hirohito,” Umewaka says. “I just wanted to let the sadness show, as we did in that last meeting with the generals. People are crying. There is emotion there.”

And that’s it, at least until “The Sun.” But it is far from certain that the Japanese public will ever see Ogata’s Hirohito -- the movie has yet to find a distributor in Japan.

Sokurov’s movie may offer a generous historical take on the emperor’s wartime culpability, but in Japan there is always an implicit threat of attack from right-wing extremists who jealously guard any infringement of the imperial image. No one has forgotten the near-fatal shooting in 1990 of Nagasaki Mayor Hitoshi Motoshima after he publicly declared that Hirohito bore some responsibility for the war.

Sokurov was worried enough about the prospect of disruption to shoot the movie in Russia and keep Ogata’s identity secret until every scene was in the can. At first, he even considered casting a Russian actor.

“But in the end, I felt a Japanese actor was needed for the proper execution of the role,” the director, who has a record of critical success in Japan, said in a written response to questions.

Ogata says he should have thought of the risk before he took the role.

“I hadn’t thought about the dangers when I accepted it,” Ogata says with another laugh. “But after I finished, then I started getting fearful. I started getting scared.”

The slightly built actor hasn’t had any trouble so far, but few Japanese even know Ogata has tried on the emperor’s clothes. He has given no interviews to Japanese media about what it was like to portray an ethereal national icon.

Industry executives and critics contend there is little clamor among Japanese audiences for a movie about Hirohito.

“The Japanese people don’t care one way or another about the imperial family,” says Donald Richie, an American who has lived in Japan since the 1940s and is a leading writer on Japanese cinema. “Who’s going to go to see a picture about him? They know it will be respectful.”

The film comes at a time of ambiguity in the Japanese public’s relationship with its imperial family. Hirohito died in 1989 (his reign is commemorated as the Showa era, loosely translated as “shining peace”) and the current emperor, Akihito, his son and heir, occupies a place much closer to the periphery of Japanese public life.

With its image sculpted by mother-hen bureaucrats intent on preserving mystique and tradition, the Japanese imperial family has avoided drifting into the risky game of celebrity royalty, like the House of Windsor.

Yet even as the imperial family seems decreasingly relevant to the lives of the people, conservative politicians are trying to reassert its symbolic claim to guardianship of Japanese identity.

The 60th anniversary of the end of the war is unofficially seen here as an opportunity to turn the page on history. The government is sending Akihito to Saipan in June, which will be the first visit by an emperor to any of the Pacific Islands once occupied by Japanese forces. And, after failing on two previous attempts, conservative lawmakers finally gathered enough support to pass a bill this month changing the April 29 holiday known as Green Day to Showa Day, to honor the original national celebration of Hirohito’s birthday.

For many Japanese, the restoration marks a rightful polishing of the Showa years into an era marked as much by peace and prosperity as by the nasty wars that opened it. But among Japan’s neighbors, many of whom were colonized and brutalized during the imperial era, it appears as a worrying sign of revived Japanese nationalism.

Into this mix comes Sokurov’s attempt to “humanize” Hirohito.

The film, the third in the director’s series of biopics, which previously featured Stalin and Hitler, premiered in February at the Berlin Film Festival. It portrays Hirohito as a peculiar man. With the Americans in charge of a smoldering Tokyo, Ogata’s Hirohito putters about the Imperial Palace gardens. He is flattered by comparisons in the American press to “this movie star” Charlie Chaplin. He is confused when confronted with a door handle he must turn without assistance for the first time.

Ogata says he did a minimum of research on the character.

“I had vague memories of what he was like based on my parents, my teachers,” Ogata says. The actor says he looked at pictures of Hirohito but has read little on the debate over the degree of Hirohito’s wartime guilt. “The director told me everything,” he says.

And Sokurov’s instructions were to capture the spirit of hope in the midst of catastrophe.

“Sokurov’s message is that people in the movie industry put too much effort into creating violence and destruction,” Ogata says. “He wanted to honor the most important thing: Life, life, life!”

But to do so, Sokurov had to bend his story around some uncomfortable facts about Hirohito. Despite a trove of historical evidence to the contrary, his film portrays Hirohito as another victim of the Japanese militarists, a man of peace who, when the crunch came, faced them down.

Screenwriting credit in this case should go, in part, to MacArthur. Eager for a peaceful occupation, the general effectively neutered Hirohito, then conscripted him into the mission to remake Japan as a democracy and a U.S. ally against the Soviet Union. That required absolving Hirohito of guilt for the war, leading to the newsreel footage of a benign monarch that became the narrative of the Showa era for many Japanese.

It is a view challenged by liberal Japanese and American historians, who contend that Hirohito could have ended the mayhem and killing much earlier had he not been so concerned about saving himself.

But Sokurov ducks that controversy, declaring himself more interested in the struggle inside the man.

“It’s a film that portrays the atmosphere of the soul, mood and reaction to life of an unusual person,” the director says. “I deliberately avoided touching on actual or painful political situations that, without question, took place. But whatever selfish motives guided Hirohito in 1945, his actions all the same prevented an even more monstrous ending to the war -- sparing the lives of about 100,000 American soldiers and a million Japanese.”

It is that ambiguity that should make Hirohito an alluring subject for filmmakers. A man revered as a god is left alone with a mortal’s terrible choice: fight to the death or surrender to an enemy armed with a weapon of otherworldly power? Thousands of young men have already gone to their deaths screaming his name as a battle cry. Thousands more innocents may die if he fights on.

And will surrender save his life? Or will his own officers kill him if he quits?

It is a drama of Shakespearean dimensions, studiously ignored by the postwar generations of Japanese filmmakers.

“No one wants to discuss it now,” documentary maker Hara says, reflecting the current mood of what the Japanese call shikata ga nai (it can’t be helped). “It’s not that the political environment is restrictive. It’s just complete indifference, about everything.”

Near the end of the film, Ogata’s Hirohito is left alone in a room. By now it is clear that MacArthur will spare him -- in fact, needs him for the reconstruction project ahead. Aware that he will survive, the emperor swings his arms and dances a jig.

“Maybe this part is not true, but it is also possible,” Ogata says. “It is my favorite scene. This is the moment Sokurov was trying to explore. He is trying to look for life.

“People can take away what they want,” the actor says. “I don’t tell them what kind of Hirohito he was. In the end, it is up to the audience to decide.”

Hisako Ueno of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.