“The text of the first proposed new constitution (above) for a democratic Japan was first made public on March 6 [1946]. Although retaining the emperor as a symbol of the state, the document strips him of his vast powers and specifies that that his possession is derived from the ‘sovereign will of the people’. The Emperor himself had prepared for this revolutionary change in the Japanese governmental system by issuing an Imperial rescript on January 1, stating that ‘the ties between us and our people … are not predicated on the false conception that the Emperor is divine and that the Japanese people are superior to other races and fated to rule the world.”
