Shin-Nippon kensetsu ni kan suru shōsho (新日本建設に関する詔書, lit. "Imperial Rescript on the Construction of a New Japan") was a 1946Japan national radio broadcast in which Hirohito renounced his divinity and declared that Japan's sovereignty rested with the people. The edict is thus popularly known as Ningen-sengen (人間宣言), lit. "human declaration".
Delivery of this speech was to be one of Hirohito's last acts as the imperial sovereign. The speech challenged the centuries-old claim that he and those before him were descendants of the sun goddess Amaterasu, although the meaning of the exact contents — delivered in convoluted and archaic court Japanese nearly incomprehensible to the common man — have been the subject of much debate. In particular, the key phrase akitsumikami (現御神), usually glossed as "divinity" in English but literally "manifest kami", is unclear. It should, however, be noted that immediately after this repudiation of divinity, he implicitly reaffirmed it by asking the occupation authorities for permission to worship an ancestress and then worshipping the Sun Goddess; this reaffirmation would have been comprehensible to all Japanese though not necessarily by the occupation authorities.
His script was drafted by Reginald Horace Blyth, who also contributed to the popularization of Zen and Haiku outside Japan.
External links
Full text of the rescript (http://www.chukai.ne.jp/~masago/ningen.html) (in Japanese and English)
Publications: Mishima publishes the poem "The Song of the Fallen Leaves" in the inaugural issue of Koyo, issued by Fujima Hayashi, Toshio Shimao and Junzo Shono, under the supervision of Shizuo Ito.
After this, many of his works having received the advice of its chief editor, Tokuzo Kimura, are published in Ningen.
Mishima is one of the founding members of the Kumono-kai (Kumo Troupe), which advocated a movement of literary cubism, along with some 30 prominent figures in the literary and theatre worlds, including Kokushi Kishida, Tsuneari Fukuda, Hideo Kobayashi and Koreya Senda.
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