BD. Edmund Blunden

52. [Blunden]. ‘The Japanese Emperor’. Review of Son of Heaven, by Willard Price. TLS, 29 September 1945, p. 459.

Blunden’s first post-war publication about Japan includes kind words for Price, but disagrees that the Allies should depose the Showa Emperor. Surely it is time to ‘clear’ Japan of the ‘artificial sublimity round the palace’ and ‘those grim, crude patriots who have worked it up’, Blunden believes, but the Emperor and ‘his people’ are ‘united by a finer discipline than the myth of deity’, and ‘regeneration’ is more likely if the Imperial system is untouched.