[1] His family home housed both Shinto and Buddhist shrines, but his widowed mother converted to Catholicism in 1942, and he and his brother Minoru were baptised in 1946.
He was named Bishop of Yokohama on 30 October 1979, a post he held for almost 20 years until he resigned on 15 June 1998 to become President of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerants.
He resigned from the Pontifical Council in March 2006, a month after the Congregation for the Causes of Saints approved the beatification of 188 Japanese martyrs from the 17th century.
Cardinal Hamao instructed Akihito in Latin, but he criticised a perceived "excessively Westernised" bias and "over-intellectualised" theology in the Roman Catholic Church.
Shortly after he urged Pope Benedict XVI to appoint more Asians to positions of power in the Roman Curia, Cardinal Ivan Dias became prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.