Akira Kurosawa once told me that if he were to make a film about the Emperor, "I would probably be killed. ... Even if the film were highly positive, just the fact that I was using the Emperor as a character would be enough to make (the rightists) mad."
Kurosawa may have been exaggerating — by 1991, when I interviewed him for The Japan Times Weekly, assassinations for lese-majeste were rare indeed, but he also had a point: Even after the end of World War II and the famous declaration by Emperor Hirohito (posthumously known as Emperor Showa) that he was not a living god, but human like the rest of us, Japanese filmmakers still had to tread carefully around the subject of the Emperor.
Mitsugu Okura, president of the struggling Shintoho studio, violated the taboo against depicting the Emperor on screen in the 1958 epic, "Meiji Tenno to Nichiro Daisenso (Emperor Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War)." But former silent-era action star Kanjuro Arashi proved a huge hit in the title role. It helped that the film's depiction of Emperor Meiji, dead nearly half a century by the film's release, was flattering rather than critical.