As far as I can tell, no politician has ever stepped up to the microphone on the floor of Parliament to request an explanation for this odd fact. Perhaps the reason is clear. There have been only three emperors since the Meiji Restoration, when the Meiji emperor began making public appearances. Each has dressed in Western clothing to show that his family stands among the world’s great royal families, and ancient Japanese costume, to show that he is descended from the earliest emperors. It appears that the Imperial Household Agency doesn’t allow the emperor to appear in public in a kimono because it would make him seem too ordinary — like a common Japanese citizen.

Of course, these days hardly anyone (with the notable exception of sumo wrestlers) wears a kimono regularly, but it remains a deeply familiar form of clothing. Hotels and inns provide guests with light cotton kimonos known as yukata; during summer fireworks displays the streets of Tokyo fill with people wearing them. More formal kimonos still have a place in weddings and funerals, coming-of-age ceremonies, and other lifetime events. And anyone who has ever seen a film by Yasujiro Ozu will recall that most ordinary of his staple scenes: a salaryman comes home and immediately changes out of his suit into a kimono.

Japan no longer needs its emperor to demonstrate, by his choice of dress, that his family is on a par with other royal families — and by extension, that Japan is a civilized nation. We are long past that point. By the same token, there is no reason the emperor should continue to be presented as anything other than a citizen of Japan like any other. At the conclusion of World War II, when Emperor Hirohito renounced his divinity (along with the doctrine of Japanese racial superiority), something known as the “symbolic emperor system” began to take shape.

What better way to complete this process — and thus to neutralize the power the emperor continues to hold for those who see him as more than just another citizen — than to cloak the emperor in that other, more quotidian symbol of Japaneseness, the kimono?

So at the Olympic opening ceremony, I would like to see Emperor Akihito on television, watching from the stands with the empress at his side, both of them dressed in kimonos. They might turn and chat with the foreign guests around them, and even — why not? — pass around boxes of sushi as a snack.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, this would be a much more radical, transformative gesture than a dance by a non-Japanese sumo wrestler wearing a traditional Japanese costume. It would reveal a much deeper sort of openness to the world, and constitute a deeper engagement with our history.