{"text":[[{"start":6.7,"text":"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. "}],[{"start":25.3,"text":"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. "}],[{"start":39.9,"text":"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."}],[{"start":83.1,"text":"That opportunity was calculatedly missed. Before the ceremony began the audience — a mixture of politicians, military top brass, students, foreign diplomats, corporate chieftains and senior civil servants — was treated to a montage cataloguing the Shōwa era. Well, just the good bits. The selected footage dwelt heavily on the hard work, optimism and cautious licence to enjoy itself that defined Japan’s revival through the 1950s, 60s and beyond. Mention of how it got there, however, was infinitesimal. Even the ruinous peacetime madness of the 1980s bubble era was clipped in favour of a wholesome video of a steam engine racing a bullet train."}],[{"start":122.94999999999999,"text":"Once that was done, the emperor and empress arrived on stage and were seated before a gold screen: their role, as ever, being to say nothing and maintain impeccable poise whatever is going on in their vicinity. This cannot have been easy. As many have pointed out, the bowdlerisation of the Shōwa era was comprehensive but to deny the emperor the chance to say a few words about his grandfather was just plain odd. "}],[{"start":148.45,"text":"Why is it that Japan, for all its lavish celebration of history, has such a very hard time calibrating its relationship with the past?"}],[{"start":157,"text":"Even those who should have been delighted seemed uncomfortable. An old friend of mine — an unimpeachably nationalist hardliner sitting near the front — was somehow able to spend two hours with a uniformed naval band in crescendo, the emperor on stage, the Scout Association of Japan’s finest ranked nearby and a giant Japanese flag looming over proceedings yet described himself as “very disappointed” that a more complete picture was not painted. "}],[{"start":185.8,"text":"The keynote speech by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi deployed the sort of weaponised nostalgia for which a lot of people in Japan above the age of 60 (so a third of the country) are increasingly guilty. "}],[{"start":199.55,"text":"After reciting a white-knuckle list of current-day woes from demographic oblivion to collapsing global order, the PM’s solution to the young ’uns in the room was that “now more than ever we must learn from our predecessors who lived through the turbulent Shōwa era . . . and spun a tale of hope”. "}],[{"start":215.9,"text":"To rub this message in, Takaichi then gave way to the band of the Maritime Self Defence Forces — a brass-buttoned ensemble led by two crooners belting out a medley of classics from the relatively jolly post-1960s bits of Shōwa, rather than more problematic decades."}],[{"start":233.25,"text":"The songs were all hits but the apex was “Get Wild”, a song of magisterial 1987 machismo that caused Takaichi to lead large swaths of the audience in clapping along. One MP leapt to his feet in what turned out to be a solitary bid to escalate the euphoria."}],[{"start":253,"text":"The emperor and empress’s smiles remained admirably neutral. But behind them, captured perfectly by TV cameras just as the singer reached the line “get wild and tough, get chance and luck”, sat an unnamed lady in waiting wearing the grimace of someone who suspects that Japan has run out of all four. "}],[{"start":280.1,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1780151437_1753.mp3"}