The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away - pg. 98

August fifteenth, 1945, the Emperor swiftly descended to earth to announce the surrender in the voice of a mortal man. August sixteenth, his Majesty was circling upward in a swift ascent again. Though it was inevitable that he die in a bombing once, now truly he would revive as the national essence itself, and more certainly than before, more divinely, as a ubiquitous chrysanthemum, would cover Japan and all her people. As a golden chrysanthemum illuminated from behind by a vast purple light and himself. Who is to say that the many gods who have figured in the history of our land did not on that day require of the Emperor who had descended to speak in a mortal voice, in order that the dignity of our national essence be elevated once again, the ritual purification of death by bombing at the hands of martyrs in a plane?

Gyokuon-hōsō

The adults sat around their radios and cried. The children gathered outside in the dusty road and whispered their bewilderment. We were most surprised and disappointed by the fact that Emperor had spoken in a human voice. One of my friend could even imitate it cleverly. We surrounded him, a twelve-year-old in grimy shorts who spoke in the Emperor's voice, and laughed. Our laughter echoed in the summer morning stillness and disappeared into the clear, high sky. An instant later, anxiety tumbled out of the heavens and seized us impious children. We looked at one another in silence. ... How could we believe that an august presence of such awful power had become an ordinary human being on a designated summer day?

-- A Portrait of the Postwar Generation