It is now almost four weeks since the Nippon Budokan arena in Tokyo throbbed with the political oratory, military cabaret and epochal heft of the Shōwa Era 100th Anniversary Ceremony. My exhaustive personal quest has yet to find a single person who thinks the formula worked.
The event managed, in the view of many of the public who watched it online, to come off as offensively inoffensive, consciously forgetful and turgidly trivial. As someone who experienced it live, that analysis is spot on.
Yet the set-up had real promise. A full century has passed since Hirohito ascended to the Japanese throne, starting the 1926-1989 imperial era known as Shōwa. His reign began in oppressively dark times, which became crueler and more anguished before evolving, through wartime defeat and foreign occupation, into the modern Japan of salarymen and Dragon Ball. If there has been a national squeamishness about acknowledging Shōwa’s full timeline of tumult, horror, hubris, guilt, tragedy and rebirth as an unbroken continuum — and there has — a government-organised 100th anniversary might have been the opportunity for a courageously holistic embrace.