Akihito and the Sorrows of Japan
Richard Lloyd Parry, 28 June 2021
In his 2020 LRB Winter Lecture, Richard Lloyd Parry considers the paradoxical figure of Akihito, who abdicated in April 2019: a hereditary monarch, the son of the wartime emperor, Hirohito, strictly barred from political utterance, who even so stood out against the historical revisionism of the nationalist right.