Japan bids farewell to emperor with a common touch as divisions over monarchy deepen

For many Japanese, the sense of responsibility the emperor has for his subjects and others who have felt the tragedy of natural disasters and conflicts can best be summed up in two images.

The first was taken amid hastily assembled cardboard partitions in a school gymnasium in Tohoku after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated much of northeast Japan. Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko were both on their knees talking face-to-face with a survivor whose home, livelihood and neighbours had been swept away. Never before had an emperor been seen on his knees speaking with one of his subjects.

Less than four years later, the emperor and empress were pictured with their heads bowed, this time in front of a memorial to the Japanese and US troops who died on the island of Koror 70 years earlier. Some 16,000 Japanese and more than 2,000 US troops died in the fighting, one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific war.

As the nation counts down to the emperor’s abdication early next year – the first in Japan since 1817 – there is a growing recognition he has been a firm hand on the tiller of an institution that endured some difficult decades after the end of the second world war. He has done what was possible within his ceremonial role to express regret for imperial Japan’s abuses in Asia.

“It was a very difficult time, immediately after the end of the war, and I believe the emperor’s sense of responsibility and even guilt is rooted in that time,” said Mieko Nakabayashi, a social sciences professor at Waseda University in Tokyo.

“I believe the emperor to be a fairly liberal individual, in part because of the regret he feels for those who died in the war, and that he has tried hard throughout his reign to heal some of the differences.