Stiff opposition from the Socialist and Communist parties in Japan has forced the Japanese Government to cancel the visit to the United States of a marine biologist, author of Some Hydriods of the Amakusa Islands and ten other works. Censorship ? Persecution of intellectuals ? No, nothing so sinister. The distinguished scientist in question also happens to have another role, and is known, outside the pages of biology periodicals, as the Emperor of Japan. This gives the postponement this week of his visit to America planned for the autumn an importance of a different kind. The Socialists and Communists claim that the Liberal-Democratic party is misusing the person of the Emperor by making him a factor in relationships with the US. It is, they say, giving him a political role, and this is in direct contradiction with the Japanese Constitution of 1947. Indeed, that constitution does state quite clearly in Article 1 that the Emperor ‘shall be the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people, deriving his position from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power’. It doesn’t matter now that this new constitution was largely American- inspired, in ideas and language; what matters is that a totally new concept of the Emperor’s function was forcibly introduced into Japanese life by it. The Meiji Constitution of 1889 had stated categorically that the Emperor was sacred and inviolable, the heir of a ‘line of emperors unbroken for ages eternal’.