The hallowed mirror, sword, and jewel appear to have obsessed Hirohito not merely as symbols of legitimacy and majesty, but as sacred objects that dated back, as the national foundation myths maintained, to the divine origins of the imperial line. The regalia exemplified the spirit of Japan in the most rarefied sense, and it must be assumed that mention of them, along with the awkwardly phrased reference to the “seeds of our people,” was the emperor’s way of conveying his sense of being the inheritor of a sacred kingship. Never, not even in his heralded “declaration of humanity” four months
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