Celebrating Hirohito’s enthronement in Yamagata

On 10 November 1928, while living in Yamagata, Japan, Ernest Pickering and his family took the opportunity to join in the celebrations for Emperor Hirohito’s official enthronement, which were taking place that day in Kyoto.

This newspaper piece, published in the Manchester Guardian on 10 December 1928, describes three different experiences of the occasion: the writer’s attendance at the wholly formal ceremony at the high school where he taught; his wife Eleanor’s presence at the huge gathering in the city centre, where the formal shout of ‘Banzai!’ was followed by a flag-waving procession through the streets; and their son Denis’s visit to a Japanese friend’s house, where the latter’s mother knelt and prayed in front of a photograph of the emperor.