While these intrigues were unfolding, the conservative elites collaborated with GHQ on a massive public relations campaign designed to transform the emperor into, to coin a phrase, a “manifest human.” The sovereign, it was agreed, should literally descend to the level of his subjects by touring the country and mingling with the poor, hungry, and wretched. These tours, known in plain Japanese as junkō, inevitably carried the special aura of being gyōkō or “august imperial visits.” They also marked the beginning of what became known as the “mass-communications emperor system”—the transformation
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