Emperor of Japan

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 1st of May 2019, Naruhito became the Emperor of Japan. His father, Akihito, had abdicated the day before because of health problems, ending the Heisei era and opening the Reiwa era. Naruhito now sits on the Chrysanthemum Throne, and he is the only monarch left anywhere in the world who holds the title of Emperor.

  That single fact raises questions. What does an emperor actually do in a modern democracy? Who held real power during the long centuries when the office existed but the person rarely ruled? And how did one hereditary title survive wars, civil strife, foreign fleets and a total military defeat? This documentary follows those questions through a role that has swung between sacred ruler and quiet symbol.

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• 2. A Symbol Without Power

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  Article 65 of the Constitution of Japan gives executive authority to the Cabinet, led by the prime minister, and not to the emperor. Among the world's monarchies, that is unusual. Only Sweden makes the same choice. Most constitutional monarchies still vest executive power in the crown on paper, then bind the monarch to follow ministerial advice. Japan skips even that formality.

  The Japan Self-Defense Forces Act of 1954 places supreme command in the prime minister as well, so the emperor is not commander-in-chief. He is nonetheless the internationally recognized head of state. The constitution calls him the symbol of the State and of the unity of the People, and it says his position comes from the will of the people, in whom sovereignty resides.

  His powers are narrow by design. He may perform only the acts in matters of state that the constitution lists, and only on the binding advice and consent of the Cabinet. To protect his neutrality, he is also barred from making political statements.

  His weightiest duty is appointing the prime minister whom the Diet has designated, and the chief justice whom the Cabinet has designated. He has no authority to decline either one. Article 7 adds a longer list. He promulgates amendments, laws, cabinet orders and treaties, and he convokes the Diet. He dissolves the House of Representatives and proclaims general elections. He attests to the appointment and dismissal of ministers, to amnesties and reprieves, and to ratification documents. He also awards state honors and receives the credentials of foreign diplomats.

  Inside that frame he keeps three modest rights. He may be consulted before he acts on ministerial advice, he may encourage a policy, and he may warn the Cabinet against one. Two regular ceremonies carry a constitutional basis. The Imperial Investitures take place in the Tokyo Imperial Palace. The Speech from the Throne is delivered in the House of Councillors and opens Diet sessions, ordinary ones each January and after new elections to the House of Representatives, extra ones usually in autumn.

  One duty sits outside every article of that constitution. It involves newly harvested rice.

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• 3. Priest and Treasures

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  The Nihonshoki, written in the year 720, contains the earliest mention of Niiname-sai, the tasting of new rice. In this imperial harvest festival, the emperor presents freshly gathered rice to the gods. In the first year after an accession, the same ritual is celebrated as the Daijōsai, the Great Tasting. Its beginnings are believed to reach back even before 720. Today the festival lives on as the national holiday called the Day of Thanksgiving for Labour.

  This is why the Tennō is regarded as the foremost priest of Shintō. The religion holds that the emperor descends directly from the sun goddess Amaterasu. The office also carries the work of a cultural steward. Each year the emperor convenes the Utakai Hajime, a poetry reading competition. The empress and other members of the family hold honorary patronages of many associations, and they travel widely through the country to keep those ties alive.

  The imperial name also appears on the sporting calendar. The Emperor's Cup, called the Tennō shihai in Japanese, goes to competitions in football, judo and volleyball. It is also awarded to the top division winner of a sumo tournament. The Emperor's Birthday, currently the 23rd of February, is a national holiday.

  Myth supplies the emperor's strongest credentials. In the Nihon Shoki, Amaterasu sends her grandson Ninigi-no-Mikoto down to pacify Japan, carrying three celestial gifts. They are the mirror Yata no Kagami, the jewel Yasakani no Magatama and the sword Kusanagi. The mirror is kept at the Ise Grand Shrine, with a replica at the central shrine of the Three Palace Sanctuaries. The jewel is held at that central shrine, and the sword is kept at the Atsuta Shrine. At the succession rite called senso, possession of all three is the sign of a legitimate emperor.

  The Nihon Shoki that records Ninigi's descent also supplies the traditional founding date for the whole imperial line.

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• 4. Myth, Evidence, and Names

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  According to the Nihon Shoki, Emperor Jimmu founded Japan in 660 BC. The year was not an accident. It was chosen to line up with the start of a 1260-year span, which is 21 turns of the 60-year sexagenary cycle. Most modern scholars treat Jimmu and at least the first nine emperors as mythical.

  Solid evidence comes later. Yūryaku, who reigned from 456 to 479 as the 21st emperor, is named in the Inariyama and Eta Funayama swords, which are dated to either 471 or 534 AD. By one argument, the reign of Kinmei, the 29th emperor, who ruled around 509-571, is the first that historians can date with confidence. Chinese sources add that the unification of Japan happened in the 2nd or 3rd century, led by the rulers of Yamatai, who probably correspond to the Japanese kingdom of Yamato.

  The best physical clues may lie in the kofun, the ancient tombs built between the early 3rd century and the early 7th century. Since the Meiji period, the Imperial Household Agency has kept archaeologists and the public out, saying it did not want to disturb the spirits of past emperors. The Meiji government also used kofun-period artefacts to strengthen its own authority. In 2016 the agency reversed course and let researchers into some tombs, with limits on time and methods.

  The title itself arrived late. Before the 7th century, rulers appear in Japanese and Chinese sources as Yamato-ōkimi, the Grand King of Yamato, or as Wa-ō, the King of Wa, a name used abroad. In the year 607, Empress Suiko introduced herself to Emperor Yang of Sui as the heavenly son of the land where the sun rises. That is the oldest diplomatic use of the term Tenshi. The oldest known use of the word Tennō appears on a wooden tablet, a mokkan, unearthed in Asuka-mura, Nara Prefecture, in 1998. It dates to the reigns of Emperor Tenmu and Empress Jitō. The word was borrowed from China and then applied backward to earlier legendary rulers.

  Japanese keeps two words for emperor. Tennō refers only to the emperor of Japan, while kōtei mostly names foreign emperors. An emperor once referred to himself as chin, a royal we that traces to China's Qin Shi Huang. That usage faded after 1945 in favour of the ordinary pronoun watakushi. English speakers once said mikado, literally the honorable gate of the palace, as in the 19th-century operetta The Mikado, but the word is now obsolete.

  Since Emperor Meiji, each emperor has taken one era name, and after death he is renamed with that name. Akihito is therefore expected to become Heisei Tennō.

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• 5. Power Behind the Throne

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  Seven non-imperial families are recorded as having controlled Japanese emperors. The Soga held sway from the 530s to 645, and the Fujiwara from the 850s to 1070. The Taira followed in 1159-1180s, then the Minamoto, the Hōjō, the Ashikaga and, from 1603 to 1867, the Tokugawa. Even so, every shogun from the Minamoto, Ashikaga and Tokugawa lines needed the emperor's formal recognition.

  The growth of the samurai class from the 10th century steadily loosened the court's grip on the realm. Two attempts to reverse that drift stand out. In 1221, Emperor Go-Toba rebelled against the Kamakura shogunate. In 1333, Emperor Go-Daigo overthrew it, with help from Ashikaga Takauji, a general who had defected from the shogunate. The result was the Kenmu Restoration, three years of direct imperial rule. It proved inefficient and failed, and Takauji seized political power himself.

  Portuguese visitors of the Nanban period made sense of this strange arrangement by analogy. They compared the emperor, rich in symbolic authority and poor in political power, to the pope. They compared the shogun to a secular European ruler such as the Holy Roman emperor. Missionaries went further and called Toyotomi Hideyoshi "Emperor Taico-sama". A Dutch embassy report used similar terms in 1691. From 1603 to 1868, the Sakoku period, trade with foreigners was very limited, and the Dutch were the only westerners with any access.

  Strikingly, no shogun tried to seize the throne. The emperor was considered a direct descendant of Amaterasu, and a shogun's own legitimacy came from the emperor's appointment. So shoguns kept emperors under control and away from politics rather than replacing them. Ambitious feudal lords, the daimyo, found it more effective to hold real power under the throne. Even then, emperors kept one lever. Through the Japanese nengō, era names on the calendar, they could still control time.

  That bargain lasted until a fleet arrived in Edo Bay.

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• 6. Black Ships to Surrender

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  In July 1853, Commodore Perry's Black Ships of the US Navy made their first visit to Edo Bay, and Japan lacked the military and industrial strength to stop them. Unequal treaties followed, and the shogunate could not keep out the people it called barbarians. Emperor Kōmei began to assert himself. Rōnin and disaffected domains rallied to the cry of sonnō jōi, "revere the emperor, expel the barbarians". Satsuma and Chōshū, historic enemies of the Tokugawa, united their forces and won an important victory outside Kyoto.

  On the 9th of November 1867, the shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu formally stepped down, restoring Emperor Meiji to nominal full power. The Meiji Constitution was adopted on the 11th of February 1889. Article 4 called the emperor "the head of the Empire, combining in Himself the rights of sovereignty". It gave him supreme command of the Army and the Navy. A liaison conference created in 1893 also made him leader of the Imperial General Headquarters. After Meiji's death in 1912, his son Taishō was in poor health, and the Imperial Diet took on many of those powers in the era called the Taishō Democracy. How much real power emperors held between the Restoration and 1945 is still debated, apart from a period of parliamentary monarchy from about 1905 to 1932.

  Emperor Shōwa, known as Hirohito, was on the throne during the Pacific War. His role as head of State Shinto was exploited to build an imperial cult that fed the kamikaze bombers and other fanaticism. The Potsdam Declaration answered by demanding the elimination of the authority and influence of those who had misled the Japanese people into embarking on world conquest. After the surrender, the Allies issued the Shinto Directive, separating church and state.

  In 1946, Shōwa was forced to proclaim the Humanity Declaration. It left out the word arahitogami, meaning a manifest kami, and used the unusual word akitsumikami instead. Some experts therefore doubt that he renounced his divinity. Jean Herbert said it would be inadmissible to deny his divine origin. Shōwa was excluded from the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, and scholars still dispute how much power he held. His reign ran from 1926 until his death in 1989.

  The postwar Constitution, assented to by the emperor on the 3rd of November 1946, took effect as the 1947 constitution. Drawn up under the Allied occupation, it replaced the Prussian-style Meiji Constitution, which had granted theoretically unlimited powers. It is now the oldest constitution in the world that has never been amended.

  Since 1978, no emperor has visited Yasukuni Shrine. Hirohito began the boycott after learning that Class-A war criminals had been secretly enshrined there, and his son Akihito and grandson Naruhito kept it. By 1979, Shōwa was the only monarch with the title emperor. In July 2008, King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand surpassed him as the world's longest-reigning contemporary monarch.

  Journalist Makoto Inoue of The Nikkei wrote that Akihito wanted to be close to the people, and not treated like a god or a robot. In March 2019, the Mainichi reported that 87% thought he had fulfilled his role as symbol of the state.

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• 7. Brides and Heirs

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  Emperor Ichijō, who reigned from 986 to 1011, issued a decree that let emperors have two empresses at once, titled kōgō and chūgū. Official polygamy in the imperial dynasty lasted until the Taishō period, 1912-1926. Besides his empress, an emperor nearly always took several secondary consorts, and their sons could become heir if the empress bore none. Children of the empress, though, were preferred.

  Marriage was a tool of alliance. In the 6th century the main outside partners were the Soga lords. From the 7th and 8th centuries, emperors took Fujiwara women as their highest-ranking wives. The tradition was dressed up as the union of two kami lines, the descendants of Amaterasu and the Fujiwara family deity. In reality, a prince gained a powerful father-in-law who backed him to the throne and often ran the government. This produced the offices of the regents, Sesshō and Kampaku, held only by Fujiwara lords.

  Five Fujiwara houses, Ichijō, Kujō, Nijō, Konoe and Takatsukasa, supplied imperial brides from the 8th century to the 19th. The Imperial House Law of 1889 wrote this restriction down, and it was repealed after World War II. In 1959, the future Emperor Akihito became the first crown prince in over a thousand years to marry outside the eligible circle.

  The oldest tradition included marriages within the dynasty, even between half-siblings. Prince Shōtoku, who lived from 574 to 622, was the child of such a couple.

  Succession rules were just as unusual. For centuries there was no primogeniture. Brothers or sisters often followed one another, and the throne rotated between branches. Emperor Go-Saga even decreed an alternation between the heirs of his two sons. That system lasted a couple of centuries and ended in strife between the "southern" and "northern" emperors, as the shoguns used it to their advantage.

  Abdication was routine, because the emperor's chief task was priestly, with so many repetitive rituals that about ten years of service was thought enough. Emperors ascended as young as 6 or 8, since a walking child could perform the high-priestly duties. Over the reign of one hundred monarchs, nine women held the throne on eleven occasions. None of the eight historical empresses married or gave birth after ascending. Emperor Kōkaku's abdication in 1817 was the last one before Akihito's.

  The Imperial Household Law of 1889 restricted the succession to male descendants of the imperial line, and the 1947 law, hastily put together under Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, kept that exclusion. It also stripped imperial princesses of their status if they married outside the family and barred adoption.

  After Princess Aiko was born on the 1st of December 2001, public debate began about letting women succeed. In January 2005, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi appointed a panel, which recommended the change on the 25th of October 2005. Then Prince Hisahito was born on the 6th of September 2006, the first male child born into the family since 1965. Koizumi suspended his plans, and on the 3rd of January 2007, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe dropped the proposal.

  Crown Prince Akishino was formally declared first in line on the 8th of November 2020.

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• 8. Land and Fortune

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  Until the end of World War II, the Japanese monarchy was thought to be among the wealthiest in the world. The Imperial Property Law of January 1911 split holdings into two kinds: the hereditary crown estates and the personal property of the imperial family. Before that, no distinction had been made between the two.

  Then the family began to shed land. In 1921, because of poor economic conditions, 289,259.25 acres of crown lands, about 26% of the total, were sold or transferred. In 1930, Nagoya Castle was donated to the city of Nagoya, along with six other imperial villas that were sold or donated. In 1939, Nijō Castle, the former Kyoto residence of the Tokugawa shoguns, was donated to the city of Kyoto.

  By the end of 1935, official figures showed the Imperial Court owning roughly 3,111,965 acres. Of that, 2,599,548 acres were the emperor's private lands, and about 512,161 acres were crown estates. The total value of the properties was estimated at ¥650 million, or roughly US$195 million at the time. The emperor's personal fortune, worth hundreds of millions of yen, included heirlooms, purebred livestock and investments in firms such as the Bank of Japan, the Imperial Hotel and Nippon Yusen.

  Defeat brought a sweeping breakup. The Allied occupation abolished the collateral branches of the imperial family, which then had to sell their assets. Household staff fell from a peak of roughly 6,000 to about 1,000. The emperor's personal fortune, estimated then at US$17.15 million, or roughly US$800 million in 2024 terms, passed to state or private hands. All but 6,810 acres of land went the same way, including the Kiso and Amagi forests, grazing lands in Hokkaido and a stock farm in the Chiba region. Since 1947, the family has lived on an official civil list approved by the government.

  Secrecy surrounded the finances until 2003. Then Mori Yohei, a former royal correspondent for the Mainichi Shimbun, used a new public information law to obtain 200 documents. His book revealed a civil list of US$240 million in 2003 values and a staff of over 1,000. As of 2017, Akihito's net worth was estimated at US$40 million.

  The cost of the events surrounding Naruhito's enthronement in 2019 was approximately 16.6 billion yen, or $150 million. That figure is 30% higher than the cost of Akihito's accession in 1990.

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