PERSPECTIVE ON JAPAN : The Emperor of My Children : As a symbol of the nation as a single family, the imperial family is both ‘above the clouds’ and ‘of the people.’

The Japanese Embassy in Washington strikes an American as either achingly elegant or mall-like in its vast emptiness. Whatever entrance is chosen, the visitor is sure it must be the wrong one and, once inside, is apt to be further disoriented when told she is actually in the private residence of the ambassador. My first invitation there was to a rocking Christmas party that the ambassador and his wife, both passionate dancers, threw for the Japanese press corps last year.

I returned again last week with my Japanese husband who, together with some compatriots in Washington from the worlds of art, science, commerce and journalism, was honored by an invitation to meet Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko. Unlike the other receptions for the royal couple on their visit to the United States, this one was conducted for imperial subjects in the extraterritorial sanctuary of their embassy and had a distinct flavor.

At the appointed minute, the guests were admitted through various entrances into the cool filtered light of the embassy and directed to pin on name tags. All were then moved to a large room from which every piece of furniture had been removed. There we were arranged by officials consulting detailed charts in a U-shaped kickline formation, with wives positioned to peer over our husbands’ shoulders, and then left standing at attention to await the arrival of their majesties. Hushed voices dropped to total silence.

There was a briefing on etiquette: The only conversation permitted would be a brief introduction of oneself and one’s wife. Silence precluded any private words in any case. Suddenly the emperor and empress were in the room, making their way along the line. Each man, bowing, gave his name and affiliation and presented his wife. The emperor raised his eyebrows in an expression of sublime humility at making each acquaintance, murmured an acknowledgment and bowed before moving on to the next, in identical repetition of the motion.

The empress followed two steps behind, her performance perhaps more remarkable for the accomplished footwork with which she maintained constant sideways motion and a hat that kept its severe angle through gravity-defying bows. The round concluded, the emperor delivered some remarks in a low voice, recognizing the sacrifice his countrymen were making by living in a foreign land to do work of such importance to the relationship of our two countries. And then he was gone, followed by his wife, as silently as he had entered and as the fish he is known to love.

An official of the embassy then announced the reception. The doors were opened onto an adjoining room with a banquet table where I beheld cups of green tea and the daintiest of Japanese offerings--tiny pastel wafer candies artfully arranged on a plate. Except for the few that disappeared into pockets as souvenirs of the occasion, none were touched. Thirty-five minutes after arriving, the guests were spilled out onto American soil and dispersed in the bright sunlight of the hot city.

The experience left an American appetite unsated.

“I think you need drums rolling, or bugles tooting, a ‘Hail to the Chief’ or even soft background music,” said my husband later. “It was just too bare for you.” For him, it was precisely the ritual of restraint, the utter vacuousness of the occasion, that had created its solemnity.

The American reflex is to suspect the aesthetic purity of the restraint. One American scholar even argues that the “chrysanthemum taboo” on free speech regarding the Japanese royal family is the unintended legacy of the American-imposed constitution of 1947. In the January issue of the literary journal of the Modern Language Assn., John Treat, an associate professor of Japanese literature at the University of Washington, wrote that by elevating the emperor to a national symbol while stripping him of all power as sovereign, the United States handed Japan’s elected rulers an instrument of unassailable political power.

The Japanese public, especially the press, seems to fully accept the terms of the protocol set by the Imperial Household Agency in reporting on the emperor or discussing the imperial system, backing off whenever it has come too close. Treat dates this apparent acquiescence to an incident in 1960 in which a major publishing house, Chuo Koron, was forced to recant an editorial decision to publish a short story that parodied the postwar imperial system by describing a dream in which a robotic Crown Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko are beheaded. The wife of the president of Chuo Koron was stabbed by a right-wing terrorist and the author forced into hiding for the next five years. Chuo Koron backed down in the face of an enraged public and also, according to Treat, the threat of legal actions by the Imperial Household Agency.

The metaphor of the imperial family as a transcendental symbol of the Japanese nation as a single family, all linked by blood, is reinforced by a cooperative press that alternates images of the family as “above the clouds” and “of the people.” Empress Michiko and her daughter-in-law Masako, both commoners, strengthen the symbolic unity of the nation and its citizenry.

It was the very mortal and familial image that my children encountered and the press delivered later in the week when the royal couple visited their elementary school in Great Falls, Va., to observe its Japanese immersion program. Emperor Akihito patted Saya on the head and called her “daughter, daughter” when he learned she has the same name as his own daughter. As emperor of my children, who hold dual citizenship, he has included them in the social contract that binds not only the people to the emperor but the Japanese people to each other.

There are possibilities one is granted once, the meanings of which are not understood or felt until the moment is past. If I could meet the emperor again, I wouldn’t let judgment crowd meaning. In my American eye, Japanese society is supremely hierarchical, held down from the top. In the rare moments when I have experienced a breaking through to “feeling Japanese,” it is more akin to being suspended in a state of emulsion rather than compressed by an external force.

I used to find it awkward to entertain Japanese guests, judging the lapses in conversation to be my failure as a hostess to keep the conversation rolling. I was applying the standard measure of success for an American dinner party--where the more people talk at once, the better. Exactly the kind of party that gives my husband a headache, he finally confessed. Not only should people not interrupt each other, he said, they should allow pauses in between to allow for digestion of the last thought. Likewise for food. How better to experience something than with nothing? How better to hear than to be quiet?

The faces of the emperor and empress I saw were devoid of ego: expressionless and flawless masks of living symbols whose purpose is to manifest tradition and convention. In a society that honors sacrifice, theirs is the ultimate. And hers no more so than his. In a society that asks all of its members to fulfill roles on behalf of their families and more, the emperor offers himself as an utterly powerless monarch, breathing life into a tremendously powerful system.

Words to Live By

The following prescription of moral imperatives known as the Imperial Rescript on Education was issued in 1890 by Emperor Meiji, the grandfather of Japan’s Emperor Akihito . It was memorized by Japanese children on both sides of the Pacific for decades until it was abolished by the occupying forces after Japan’s defeat in World War II.

Be filial to your parents, affectionate to your brothers and sisters; as husbands and wives be harmonious, as friends true; bear yourselves in modesty and moderation; extend your benevolence to all; pursue learning and cultivate arts and thereby develop intellectual faculties and perfect moral powers; furthermore advance public good and promote common interests; always respect the constitution and observe the laws; should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and Earth.