The hint by Emperor Akihito of Japan that he would like to abdicatechallenges something bigger than the laws requiring him to serve until his death and questions over succession. Emperor Akihito was also grappling, as he has since his reign began in 1989, with a problem that has defined his office throughout Japan’s post-World War II era. The emperor is meant to bridge, and yet often embodies, the contradiction between two national identities: a pacifist democracy that officially rejects the imperial past, and a lingering sense of identity that is tied to that past. Read more
