The Emperor says Hello
On the 2nd of January every year, at the Imperial Palace in the middle(ish) of Tokyo, the Emperor and his family spend the day walking onto a balcony every few hours to wave to the crowd and make a short speech. Then the crowds file out and a new crowd files in and the process repeats itself. This would not be particularly impressive if it weren’t for the number of people who turn up to each one; lots.
We set off in the morning and almost immediately from the station we could see a huge queue of people filing out, having just seen the Emperor. For a few horrible moments we thought we had missed it, until we realised quite a lot of people were heading in our direction too. A huge snake of people ran from the station, all the way through one of the entrances to the Imperial gardens and up to the castle. There was quite literally thousands of people, and this was just for one of the many greetings. On the way up to the castle we were all given little Japanese flags too. You’ll see more of those later.
Shuffling along through that crowd was not the most fun I’ve ever had. The crowd of people waiting to see the Emperor constituted of enthusiastic Japanese people, sprinkled with the occasional foreigner. We were in the minority, but for once we weren’t what everyone was staring at.
The crowd eventually all filed into a courtyard overlooked by the annex the Emperor would make his greeting from. I have no idea how many people were there and I don’t really want to estimate because I’m not very good at that sort of thing, so I’ll just say eleven billion people were there so it sounds really impressive.
The crowd looked rather bored, waiting for the Emperor to arrive. I wondered if the crowd would politely stand and listen to his speech, then clap (but not too loudly) before waving him off and then going home and having a jolly nice cup of green tea. Nice and Japanese, right?
What actually happened is from the moment the Emperor was in view, the men of the audience were shouting support and everyone was cheering and waving their flag like they just don’t care. Move over S Club, there’s a new party in town. There were so many flags that it was hard to move. I took a 10 second clip of the flag waving madness, but because posting videos on here makes the image loader angry, I’ve linked to it.
For those of you who don’t want to watch the video here are some photos of Flagmania;
Interestingly, the Emperor’s family didn’t bring out the new baby that everyone has been raving about because now Japan won’t have to accept that a woman could wave at the people just as well as a man could. Prince Hisahito was nowhere to be seen.
Now, because we are not nutty Japanese Emperor Akihito fans, we didn’t get anywhere near the front of the crowd. As a result my photos of the Emperor himself are somewhat poor, but I’ll post them here anyway. If you don’t like them please send a stamped addressed envelope to me expressing your dislike. Attach some money too, Tokyo is really expensive.
The Emperor’s speech lasted for all of about two minutes. Afterwards we all filed out down the hill, through the gardens and away into the sunlight. As the crowds dispersed, all that was left of our memorable trip to the Emperor’s palace was my little Japanese flag, which is now stuck to my wall, lest I forget feeling like a sardine, cheering for someone I don’t know.
I think you’re more lucky than you realise! I wanted to go to see the emperor but I left Japan too early. Dammit!
AJ: We were lucky to catch it when we did. I heard it's on the second because everyone is utterly incapacitated on the first but I can't be sure. There's probably a better reason!
You were very lucky to take a glance at the Emperor of Japan, the world’s oldest royal family. Discoount the myth of the history of the imperial family, still the Japanese imperial family is the oldest lineage of a family world knows. You might want to take an advantage of being there and learn a bit more about the country. Hope you will be able to go down deeper into the multi-layered culture of Japan.