A tall American visits a Japanese man and his wife, both shorter than him, for dinner. They receive him on the steps of their home, and the guest greets his host by shaking his hands and bowing low at the same time. Then they all go in and have dinner. This, rather unremarkable, display of good manners would have been quite forgotten by now had the guest not been the American president and his hosts the Japanese emperor and his wife. The world watches such people in a different way. In an instant, press photos, TV footage and YouTube videos become texts open to endless readings and judgments. The American conservative media, together with some members of its political counterpart like Dick Cheney (George W. Bush’s vice president), are outraged. How could a democratically elected president bow to a symbol of hereditary power? How could an American president bow to the son of the emperor who had made Pearl Harbor happen (never mind what followed)? Does bowing not signify an archaic form of subjection?

Multiple histories open out behind a gesture like this, for nothing that the mighty do can be simply itself, devoid of symbolism. So, Michelle Obama and the British queen briefly putting their hands on each other’s backs, an Australian prime minister putting his arm around the queen, or, on a more burlesque scale, Mr Bush fainting after vomiting on the lap of a Japanese prime minister — all such fleeting, banal or harmlessly comic incidents become moments in history. Besides, gestures and customs often have regressive or unpleasant histories. Think of touching the feet of elders or women putting on sindoor. But there are ways of doing these things naturally, politely, ritually or even unthinkingly that need not endorse their original significance. They become part of a different language or context, and wilfully harking back to their origins is taking literalism too far. President Obama bowed to Emperor Akihito. That was sweet of the president. He may not have done so, which too would have been fine, and the emperor would not have minded. In a civilized and sensible world, that should have been the end of the story, if there was a story at all.

Perhaps the mystique of power — and hence the origins of protocol and etiquette — lies in a grand, but anxious, denial of the human body and its levelling, mortal, embarrassing commonness. Imagine watching the scene on the emperor’s doorstep or in Buckingham Palace, or Mr Bush throwing up on the Japanese prime minister’s lap, with X-ray or endoscopic eyes — innards, skin and bone encountering innards, skin and bone, body touching body, divested of temporal aura. It is when symbolic presences suddenly do things that are not in the public script that the body, in all its disconcerting ordinariness, irrupts into the plane of the extraordinary. For many, a very tall man bending low to hold with both his hands a short man’s hand is too human in its slightly awkward graciousness to befit the persons of a president and an emperor.