There was, of course, an implausible aura to all this, as if the antidemocratic rhetoric of “The Way of the Subject” that the emperor’s loyal servants had been spouting only yesterday had been no more than a slip of the tongue. Had Shigemitsu been so foolhardy as to openly declare that the national polity was compatible with Western-style democracy one month earlier, in all likelihood he would have been jailed (or committed to a mental institution); and in all likelihood the emperor would have observed his disappearance in silence, just as he had the repression of other critics of the policies
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