In 1997, German author and filmmaker Werner Herzog was in Japan to direct composer Shigeaki Saegusa’s opera “Chushingura.” One evening, while Herzog was having supper with collaborators on this project, Saegusa broke the exciting news that the emperor had offered Herzog a private audience. “My goodness,” Herzog replied without regard to consequences, “I have no idea what I would talk about with the Emperor; it would be nothing but banalities.”
“It was a major faux pas,” Herzog later wrote in his novel “The Twilight World,” “so awful, so catastrophic that I wish to this day that the earth had swallowed me up. Around the table everyone present froze. No one breathed. All eyes were fixed on their plates, no one looked at me, a protracted silence made the room shudder. It felt to me as though the whole of Japan had stopped breathing. Just then, into the silence, a voice inquired, ‘Well, if not the Emperor, whom would you like to meet?’ I instantly replied: ‘Onoda.’
