At first Tam thought the porter must just be playing some kind of local prank. Arcade high jinks.
Then she remembered the speculation in the papers. Could it be true? She glanced at her watch; it was a couple of minutes before twelve.
The girls immediately dropped everything and clicked on the big Toshiba digital set suspended over the mirror. Service halted in midstream, just as in a soba noodle shop when the sumo wrestlers on the corner tube had finished glaring, thrown salt three times, and were ready to lunge. Then one of the hairdressers remembered Tam and—maybe still believing no gaijin could understand her language—reached down to snap on the small black-and-white Sony attached to the chair arm, tuned to CNN's Tokyo service. It was currently scrolling temperatures in the U.S.
Now on the big Toshiba overhead, NHK (the government channel) was announcing they were about to switch to a remote broadcast, live, from the sacred Yasukuni Shrine.
Uh, oh, she thought. Yasukuni! Has everybody here gone crazy?
Back before 1945, Yasukuni had been a memorial to the "master race," official home of the new "State Shinto." Japan's militarists had revised traditional Shinto, a simple nature- reverence, to include violent nationalism, emperor worship, "the Yamato spirit," the "way of the samurai": every warlike aspect of national character. These days Yasukuni enshrined the names of Japan's two million heroic war dead, a roll call recently enlarged to include Tojo and others the U.S. later executed as criminals—which had turned the place into a political hot potato, resulting in an enormous flap when the prime minister tried to appear there in his official capacity. So, for the Emperor to show up suddenly, with heavy press coverage, was almost unthinkable. Besides, she'd just been by the place and hadn't noticed anything. This was very sudden.
Then the remote came on. The front of the shrine was roped off, right across the bronze torii gate, with only cameras and press allowed inside. On screen was a shot of an elaborate new dais where an official from the Imperial Household Agency, the government bureau that kept His Majesty under its care and schedules his appearances, was just finishing up a long-winded introduction. Then it was the prime minister's turn. After what seemed half an hour of absolutely content-less oratory (a Japanese politician's most respected skill) on the subject of the country's majestic Imperial past, the PM finally stepped aside to allow a tall, strikingly handsome Japanese man to approach the speaker's podium. Since the occasion had official significance, his walk was ceremonial, with his feet wide apart in the jerky samurai swagger necessitated in days of old by the two swords at the waist. Meanwhile, everybody around him was bowing low.
His Imperial Majesty, wearing a formal male kimono, equivalent to morning dress at Ascot, looked truly august. He was also carrying a long silver box, filigreed.
When he finally started to speak, the girls around Tam gasped in astonishment. She noticed immediately that he wasn't using modern Japanese. Instead, his language was an archaic, highly ornate dialect: the court speech of long ago.
After his brief, almost unintelligible prologue, one of the Household officials opened the box for him and took out a long, scrolled document. The cameras did a quick close-up, showing a page of antique, flowered paper inscribed with brush and sumi ink.