[comment on the incredible wealth of information on matters of state in antebellum Japan gleaned from personal diaries]

Statesmen in Japan must have nothing in the way of personal lives, be incredibly sleep-deprived, and think upon their daily actions and conversations with such hubris as to believe their every conversation worthy of memorialization. How could they have gotten any sleep or relaxation if they spend every minute running back to their rooms and scribbling down conversations verbatim, every day. Holy crap! No wonder they went to war--how are you expected to make rational decisions when you spent all night carefully annotating and analyzing and scribing the actions, conversations, menus, circumstances, and demeanors of the day before?

And historians must have absolutely no experience in diary-writing themselves, to take at face value for historical evidence everything said statesmen pen in their diaries. Good lord, there is no one to whom it is more important to appear reasonable, grand and just that to one's self--diaries are notoriously generous to the authors. Of course you think Hirohito was a kind, helpless, doddering old gentleman who fought hard for peace but was surrounded and railroaded by corrupt and evil army politicians into starting World War II in the Pacific--all that we know about him comes from diaries from his most loyal, devoted servants, people who loved him. Geeesh!

Well...anyone want to talk Japanese politics, 1848-1945? Anyone?

ps--the following piece of poetry, written by Japan's Meiji Emperor, was read by his grandson, Hirohito, and the Showa Emperor, in one of the final Imperial Councils in the last tense days of summer, 1941 (if devotedly loyal and tragically sad diarists writing to memorialize the Showa Emperor to posterity can be believed...)

"Yomo no uni
Mina harakara to
Omou yo ni
Nado namikaze no
Tachisawagaruramu"

("The seas surround all quarters of the globe
And my heart cries out to the nations of the world.
"Why then do the winds and waves of strife
Disrupt the peace between us?)

Robert Mosley, Hirohito: Emperor of Japan.