The Mikado of the title character as a disrespectful representation of the revered Meiji Emperor; Japanese theatre was prohibited from depicting the emperor on stage. Japanese Prince Komatsu Akihito, who saw an 1886 production in London, took no offence. When Prince Fushimi Sadanaru made a state visit in 1907, the British government banned performances of "The Mikado" from London for six weeks, fearing that the play might offend him – a manoeuvre that backfired when the prince complained that he had hoped to see "The Mikado" during his stay. A Japanese journalist covering the prince's stay attended a proscribed performance and confessed
The Mikado and Sullivan Festival in England. Since the 1990s, the opera, and productions of it, have sometimes drawn criticism from the Asian-American community as promoting "simplistic orientalist stereotypes". In 2014, after a production in Seattle, Washington, drew national attention to such criticism, the Gilbert biographer Andrew Crowther wrote that "The Mikado" "does not portray any of the characters as being "racially inferior" or indeed fundamentally any different from British people. The point of the opera is to reflect British culture through the lens of an invented "other", a fantasy Japan that has only the most superficial resemblance to reality." For example,