by Tom Pantera
Columnist

I’m not sure that Americans will ever really understand monarchies. We got rid of our own more than 230 years ago and at this point, it’s not likely to come back.

I’ve talked to English people and I lived under the Japanese monarchy for a year, but I still don’t quite get it. I suppose monarchies serve a role in the 21st century, but I’m not entirely sure I get what that role is, nor how seriously some take it.

I was a bit flummoxed by the news this week out of England, where a nurse killed herself after she inadvertently connected two Australian disk jockeys to Kate Middleton’s nurse for a joke interview. It’s not like the dj’s got any hot information. But apparently, the dead nurse found the humiliation of being one of two people who were bamboozled in a minor way a bit more than she could take.

The current media circus over the British royals is particularly interesting to me because of a recent conversation. While we were in Las Vegas, we met a lovely young British couple, Ollie and Lianne. He’s a cop and she’s a hairdresser and they have two adorable kids, a 10-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl. Their trip to Vegas was a birthday present for Ollie, who had recently turned 40.

They were very sweet people. Karon particularly bonded with Lianne (they’re both serious moms, even though Karon’s kids are adults) and as an old police reporter, I was fascinated talking to Ollie about the differences between police work in England and the U.S.

But of course, the talk turned to Prince William and his new wife. I didn’t hear Karon and Lianne’s conversation, but she told me later Lianne seemed fond of the royals, although she wasn’t all that starry-eyed about it. Ollie was a bit more jaundiced; he confirmed to me that Prince Philip is every bit as dumb as he appears and he said the queen’s bored demeanor during the Olympics made her look like “an old bag,” which cracked me up. And he did make a point that I’d always wondered about, that the English royal family costs a lot of money at a time when the British economy isn’t exactly thriving.

Still, that people of a relatively young age were even slightly interested in the British monarchy was a bit of a surprise to me. As I said, the only real experience I’ve had with a monarchy was during my time as an undergraduate in Japan. And when I would ask people my age about the Japanese royal family, they generally said they couldn’t have been less interested. For many, the royal family wasn’t even on their radar.

Still, the Japanese royals provided me with one of the more profound experiences I had in Japan.

It was on the emperor’s birthday, one of two times a year he makes a public appearance at the palace (the other is New Year’s Day). I went over to the palace – this was when the World War II emperor, Hirohito, was still alive – and watched him and his family stand on a glassed-in balcony and wave to the crowd for 15 minutes.

Needless to say, it was an older crowd. Most were from the World War II generation, who had grown up thinking the emperor a god. I was standing near a group of World War II veterans, all wearing their fatigue caps except for one guy who wore an officer’s hat. While the emperor stood and waved, for that 15 minutes those guys were boys again, reveling in the glory that briefly was Japan before the atom bomb laid the country low and Hirohito renounced his divinity. They yelled “banzai,” the ancient war cry that has no direct translation, and threw their arms in the air.

And then, when the emperor toddled back inside and the crowd began to break up, I saw the guy in the officer’s cap walk over to a pop machine and buy … a can of Coca Cola.

It was then I realized that no country had ever been more defeated in a war. The guy had just spent a quarter hour lustily cheering a man he once thought a god, and for whom he would have willingly run into a machine gun. And then he wetted his cheer-parched throat with a product made by the very country he had sworn to defeat. Life’s irony is seldom so evident.

Still, despite that irony, I saw the look in the old soldiers’ eyes when they beheld their emperor. It was as though in the mere act of seeing him, they reconnected with their own warrior past and that of their nation.

Now, the respective roles played by English and Japanese monarchs are vastly different. The Japanese, for example, don’t seem to pant after private details like the English (and, truth to tell, we Americans) do. The incident of a few months ago, when somebody took a picture of Kate sunbathing topless, would be inconceivable in Japan. For one thing, the Japanese, who live on a densely packed island, have much more respect for personal privacy than we Westerners do. And while the English monarchy isn’t a huge part of the governmental system there, it plays a larger role than the Japanese monarchy does.

Put it this way: The suicide rate in Japan is relatively gruesome, but people don’t generally kill themselves because they might have offended a member of the royal family.

I’m sure the nurse’s suicide was unusual. But you have to admit, it’s an odd thing that a woman would choose to end her own life because she played a tiny role in possibly irritating people she had never met and probably never would. There might have been something else going on with her; the English press would have made her life hell. But the apparent tipping point was a spot most of the world will never understand.