August, 2015. This is a month of great testimonials: outpourings of guilt, grief, consternation, remorse, atonement and, for those whose ends are not served by an honest reckoning of the past, evasion.
It was, arguably, Emperor Hirohito, who is posthumously called Emperor Showa, who first practiced the appropriation of grief and tragedy to deflect responsibility when he made his surrender speech to the Japanese public at the end of World War II.
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