Not a perfect translation, perhaps, but it opens:

‘Raise the nation as one and humbly welcome him,
how radiant the sacred carriage.
Cherry blossoms have crossed over, how fair (or bright) this day.
So it should be, right and proper:
Japan-Manchukuo amity grows ever deeper.’

Congratulations Hannah!!! So looking forward to reading it!!

I look forward to writing on her more.

This life beside Hirohito, rendered in the official chronicle, is valuable not merely as biography but as a lens on the shifting ideal of imperial womanhood in modern Japan - restoring depth to a figure long confined to silence and revealing quiet forms of agency where convention saw passivity.

I look forward to the book!

Fascinating. Thank you for sharing these finds - I miss the kind of academic community we once had on Twitter, and your posts keep that spirit alive. I have been following with real appreciation.

Across 11 notebooks (Dec 1941–Mar 1946), Tsuboshima recorded the information reaching the throne and the Emperor’s questions in wartime - another invaluable source piling up for my next project.

www.iwanami.co.jp/news/n114334...

(34 pages, dated 15 June–19 August 1945) are written from the back, detailing deliberations of the Supreme War Council and other high-level meetings.

Hirohito’s remark on 8 August 1945, two days after the Hiroshima bombing:

「三百年も経てば再起可能なるが如き条件も致し方なし」

To sit here now - where he lived - matcha in hand, light falling just so - and reflect not to solve Konoe, but to sit with the contradictions: charisma and drift, ambition and regret. The house does not explain him. But it lets him linger.

Here is the dining room, where I was allowed to sit - on the very chairs where guests once gathered and were entertained. You can picture Konoe - distant but focused, speaking softly while power reorganised itself around him. He governed by tone as much as by vision.

Not a monument, but a space where ideals, contradictions, and history quietly reside. Less grandeur - more shadow and memory.

Designed by Itō Chūta, a leading architect, the villa fuses Japanese and Western forms - Taishō refinement with Shōwa shadows. Originally built in 1927 for Irisawa Tatsukichi, court physician to Emperor Taishō, it became a political crucible before turning into memory.

After his death, Yoshida Shigeru briefly stayed here. One dreamed aloud, the other managed what remained. Tekigai-sō held both.

He no longer recognised what he had helped create. Bureaucracy, ideology, mobilisation - forces once meant to stabilise Japan - now felt like they were closing in. His political imagination had outrun its grasp. The man of reform had become a man of retreat.