Why Has Japan's Imperial Line Endured? A Symbol Others Have Always Used

Look back across that long history, and you find that the emperors almost never held direct political power in their own hands. Rather, their authority was continually used by whichever strongmen held real power in a given age; for those in command, the emperor functioned as an exceedingly convenient screen behind which to exercise rule. From antiquity onward, the emperor was valued less as an active ruler wielding military or political power than as a figure of religious ritual and cultural symbolism, and his right to rule remained almost always nominal.

After the ritsuryo system of centralized law modeled on Tang China was established in ancient Japan, the emperor was indeed the ruler in form, yet in practice the bulk of state affairs came to be entrusted to aristocrats and powerful clans.

Seen across the sweep of history, the emperor has almost always stood at a remove from the seat of power, his authority alone used by one political force after another.

In the Heian period especially, as the nobility grew in power, the Fujiwara clan bound itself to the throne through marriage and served as regents and chancellors (sessho (摂政) and kanpaku (関白)) to young emperors, taking control of government in what is known as sekkan seiji (摂関政治), or regency rule. Under this regency system, the emperors themselves were stripped of real political power and placed in a position where only their authority was used. On the surface, supreme authority stood in the name of the emperor, while in reality the emperor had no political power at all and the Fujiwara held power behind the curtain.

Looking further ahead, Fuhito deployed an astute matrimonial strategy, marrying his daughters into the imperial family—a tactical instinct reminiscent of Soga no Umako before him.

The Fujiwara wove themselves into the marrow of the imperial line, retaining actual political control behind the scenes.

From the late eleventh century onward, retired emperors instituted cloistered rule—insei (院政)—and for a time figures such as the Retired Emperors Shirakawa and Go-Shirakawa took state affairs into their own hands; before long, however, the rise of warrior governments such as the Kamakura shogunate pushed the influence of the imperial court into retreat once more.

For those unfamiliar with early Japanese history, the transition from ancient clans to court nobility can be difficult to follow, so it helps to begin with one essential fact: the Fujiwara descended from an ancient clan known as the Nakatomi. Keep in mind as we proceed that the Nakatomi and the Fujiwara are a single continuous lineage. With roots reaching back into the age of myth, the Nakatomi were one of the great clans of antiquity, long bound to the imperial house and entrusted above all with presiding over the sacred rites of the sovereign.

Just before Kamatari died, the sovereign granted him the new surname Fujiwara in place of Nakatomi — and at that moment, with Fujiwara no Kamatari, the Fujiwara clan was born. When Kamatari passed away, his second son was a boy of only eleven.

The clan split in two. Fuhito’s descendants monopolized political power as the Fujiwara, while the Nakatomi line was relegated to religious ceremony through the Jingikan (Department of Divinities).

Their definitive breakthrough came in 729 with the Prince Nagaya Incident. Prince Nagaya, a grandson of Emperor Tenmu, commanded formidable authority at court. Fearing he would undermine their standing, the four brothers conspired to frame him for treason, driving him to suicide.

In 737, smallpox swept through the political capital of Nara. In rapid succession, Muchimaro, Fusasaki, Umakai, and Maro all fell ill and died, dealing the Fujiwara a staggering blow.

But because no rival clan had arisen to match the Fujiwara's institutional depth, the Northern house (Hokke, descended from Fusasaki) spearheaded a resurgence in the latter half of the eighth century. When the capital was moved to Heian-kyo (Kyoto) in 794, the Fujiwara returned to the undisputed center of political power.

When the forces of the retired emperor were defeated by the warriors in the disturbance of 1221, the shogunate established by the samurai came to control the imperial court, and the emperor lost all initiative in the conduct of government. This loss of political power lasted for roughly seven hundred years, from the founding of the Kamakura shogunate in 1185 to the fall of the Edo shogunate. Throughout those centuries, real political power lay in the hands of the shogun and the warrior houses, and the emperor had almost no opportunity to hold the reins of government himself.

In the Edo period especially, the shogunate barred the imperial court from any involvement in politics, establishing a strict division of roles in which the emperor's authority was called upon only when needed for ceremonial occasions and the legitimizing of succession.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, a movement arose in rebellion against nearly seven hundred years of warrior monopoly on power, proclaiming the restoration of the emperor's political authority in order to overthrow Tokugawa rule. As the long-entrenched warrior regime began to totter, the movement to topple the shogunate gathered force under the slogan of sonno joi (尊王攘夷)—"Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians"—and with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, direct imperial rule was proclaimed anew.

Even after Meiji, it was rare for an emperor to lead politics himself. For most of the modern era, the military and the bureaucracy exercised power in the emperor's name, abusing the system for their own ends.

Caught in a tense relationship with a bloated, runaway military, Emperor Showa tried to make his own will felt, yet the fact remains that the military consistently bent the emperor to its own designs and used him.

If anything, the postwar settlement simply gave institutional form, under modern constitutionalism, to the figure of the "emperor as symbol" that had recurred throughout Japanese history; the framework fixed during the Occupation sits squarely on the continuum of that long past. Within that transition, Emperor Showa himself issued the so-called Humanity Declaration in 1946, after the war's end, making clear his stance of keeping his distance from politics.

That is why, when the victorious Allied Powers determined the postwar status of the throne after Japan's defeat and declared that the emperor would be nothing more than a symbol, the Japanese people accepted the decision without great resistance.

Having been born in 1991, I came into the world in the middle of Emperor Akihito's reign and lived the greater part of my life in Heisei. Because he abdicated during his lifetime, we now live in the reign of Emperor Naruhito, yet to my mind, the age of Emperor Akihito may well have been the most tranquil era in the entire long history of the emperors.

At the heart of the symbolic emperorship that Emperor Akihito sought out and embodied was the resolve "always to turn his heart toward the real joys and sufferings of the people, sharing in their empathy and in their pain"—and his actions across the whole of his reign carried that resolve through to the end, earning him the deep reverence of the public as an extraordinary sovereign.

Not only at the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, but after disasters across the country, Emperor Akihito visited stricken communities and memorials, dropping to his knees to speak directly at eye level with survivors and the bereaved, remaining always alongside the people. For an emperor to kneel before ordinary citizens and speak with them had been utterly unthinkable in earlier ages.

Heisei under Emperor Akihito became the most stable era in the history of the throne—an age in which the emperor was never hoisted up as a banner in struggles for political power, and in which, until the era name changed with his abdication, the country knew neither major political upheaval nor civil strife.

In his video message of August 2016, concerned that advancing age would make it difficult to carry out his official duties in full, he took the unprecedented step of speaking publicly about his "duties as a symbol," opening the way to his eventual abdication—and that, too, was a decision taken to stabilize the institution without exercising political power.

Put another way, he was that rare sovereign who won the trust of the people not through power, but through his character and his conduct.

In fact, even during the drafting of the Meiji Imperial House Law, proposals to allow female emperors and succession through the female line were seriously debated.

Looking back across all the reigning emperors in history, including the female emperors of the past, every single one of them belonged to the male line, having a previous emperor on the father's side; there has never been a "female-line emperor" whose imperial blood came solely through the mother.

Thus, from the Meiji era onward, the throne was institutionally locked into the male line, a policy carried straight over into the current Imperial House Law enacted after the Second World War.

Notably, those of us who support Princess Aiko's accession are by no means a minority. Public opinion polls consistently show around eighty percent of the population supporting or welcoming a female emperor—an overwhelming majority. Because the position of the Emperor under the postwar constitution rests on the consensus of the people, the accession of a female emperor is entirely conceivable in the years ahead.