The Prince & Death

Prince Fumimaro Konoye, thrice Premier of Japan, offered to write a new democratic constitution for his country. General MacArthur turned him down, and the Prince knew that the Chinese motto he had hung on his walls ("Kindness of heart and always willing to help--the whole world will be pleased") was no longer enough. When the order came for him to report to prison as a war criminal, he turned to the wayward mind of Oscar Wilde for new truths. In red pencil he underlined passages in De Profundis:

I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand . . . terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.

Morality does not help me. ... I am one of those who are made for exceptions not for laws.

Religion does not help me. . . . Reason does not help me.

People used to say of me that I was too individualistic. . . . My ruin came not from too great individualism of life but from too little.

Then Prince Konoye did what many Japanese, remembering the nervous sicknesses that seized him at every crisis in his career, had expected him to do. He invited his friends to visit him for an evening of talk. Then he retired to his bedroom and wrote: "I have been most gravely concerned with the fact I have committed certain errors in the handling of state affairs since the outbreak of the China incident. I cannot, however, stand the humiliation of being apprehended and tried by an American court. . . . Public opinion of the world, which is at present full of the overexcitement, the passions of war . . . will in time restore its calmness and balance. . . . Only then a just verdict will be given at the court of God."

When Allied officers came to his bedroom next morning, they found Prince Konoye dead of poison. The marked copy of De Profundis was on a couch. On the "Godshelf" over his bed sat a serene ivory statue of Kwannon, Goddess of Mercy.

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