Emperor of Japan

Origins through the 8th century ce

According to Japanese tradition, the imperial line descends from Amaterasu, the sun goddess. Japan’s earliest surviving chronicles, the Kojiki (“Records of Ancient Matters”) and the Nihon shoki (“Chronicles of Japan”), dating to 712 and 720 ce, respectively, relate that Amaterasu sent her descendant Ninigi from heaven to rule the earthly realm and that Ninigi’s great-grandson Jimmu became Japan’s first emperor. The traditional chronology of the Nihon shoki places Jimmu’s accession in 660 bce.

The historical imperial institution developed from the rulers of the Yamato polity, which emerged as the dominant political power across much of the Japanese archipelago between the 3rd and 5th centuries ce. Early Yamato rulers exercised authority within a political order built around powerful clans.

During the 7th and 8th centuries, the Yamato kingship developed into a more centralized imperial institution influenced by Chinese models of monarchy and government. Japanese rulers adopted titles and concepts from the Chinese imperial tradition, including tenshi (“son of heaven”). By the late 7th century, the title tennō, conventionally translated as “emperor,” had come into use in place of earlier titles such as ōkimi (“great king”). The emerging imperial state also adopted Chinese-inspired law codes, bureaucratic offices, court ranks, and administrative institutions, with the emperor formally at its head.

A permanent capital was established at Nara in 710, and in 794 the imperial court moved to Heian-kyō, the city later known as Kyoto. Buddhism, introduced to Japan from the Korean peninsula in the 6th century, became increasingly embedded in the religious and political life of the court. Emperors became important patrons of Buddhism while continuing to perform rites associated with indigenous traditions later collectively known as Shintō.

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Emperors and shoguns

During the Heian period (794–1185), political authority increasingly came to be exercised by powerful aristocratic families at court. Foremost among them was the Fujiwara family, whose members married into the imperial house and frequently served as regents. Emperors sometimes sought to circumvent Fujiwara influence by abdicating and exercising authority from retirement, a system that came to be known as cloistered government.

A more fundamental shift followed the rise of the warrior, or samurai, class. In the late 12th century Minamoto Yoritomo established a military government, or bakufu, at Kamakura, and in 1192 he received the title of shogun. For most of the next seven centuries, military governments exercised effective political control over Japan.

The military governance of the shoguns did not abolish the monarchy. The imperial court remained in Kyoto, and the emperor retained considerable religious, cultural, and symbolic prestige. Shoguns received their titles from the imperial court, creating a political order in which the hereditary monarchy continued alongside military governments that exercised most governing authority.

There were periodic attempts to reassert direct imperial rule. In 1333 Emperor Go-Daigo helped overthrow the Kamakura shogunate and sought to return political authority to the imperial court. His government soon collapsed, and the ensuing conflict produced rival imperial courts at Kyoto and Yoshino, south of Nara. The two lines were reunited in 1392 under the Ashikaga shogunate.

Imperial political influence declined further as Ashikaga authority disintegrated in the 15th and 16th centuries. During the Sengoku (“Warring States”) period, Japan fragmented among competing regional warlords, while the imperial court exercised little direct political power. The emperor nevertheless remained an important source of legitimacy. Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi cultivated relations with the court as they worked to reunify Japan, and in 1603 Tokugawa Ieyasu received the title of shogun from Emperor Go-Yōzei. The Tokugawa shogunate governed Japan until 1867, while the imperial court remained in Kyoto.

Meiji Restoration and the imperial state

In the mid-19th century, growing pressure from Western powers destabilized the Tokugawa political order. The arrival of Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s U.S. naval expedition in 1853–54 helped force the shogunate to open Japan to foreign trade, contributing to a political crisis that strengthened opposition to Tokugawa rule. Some opponents rallied around the slogan “Sonnō jōi” (“Revere the emperor, expel the barbarians”), making the emperor an increasingly powerful focus of political loyalty.

The emperor Meiji, born Mutsuhito, ascended the throne in 1867. The following year, forces opposed to the Tokugawa shogunate proclaimed the restoration of imperial rule. The Meiji Restoration ended shogunal government, and the imperial court moved from Kyoto to Edo, which was renamed Tokyo.

The restoration did not simply recreate an earlier form of imperial government. Instead, the emperor became the central institution of a new nation-state whose leaders pursued rapid political, military, economic, and social transformation. The government abolished the feudal domains, established national military and education systems, and constructed political institutions around the authority of the imperial state.

The emperor’s position was formalized in the Meiji Constitution, promulgated in 1889 and put into effect in 1890. The constitution declared the emperor “sacred and inviolable” and vested him with extensive formal powers. In practice, government was conducted by ministers, senior statesmen, military leaders, bureaucrats, and other institutions acting in the emperor’s name. The monarchy also became central to Japanese nationalism, and loyalty to the emperor was promoted through education, military service, public ritual, and state ideology.

The imperial institution retained this central position during the reign of Hirohito, or Emperor Shōwa, who ascended the throne in 1926. Japan’s military expansion during the 1930s and World War II was carried out in the emperor’s name, although the nature and extent of Hirohito’s responsibility for wartime policy and military decisions remain subject to historical debate.

The postwar emperors

Japan’s defeat in World War II fundamentally transformed the imperial institution. The U.S.-led Allied occupation retained Hirohito as emperor but dismantled the constitutional system that had vested sovereignty in him. Japan’s 1947 constitution instead vested sovereignty in the Japanese people and established the emperor’s present constitutional role.

Hirohito remained emperor until his death in 1989. His son Akihito, or Emperor Heisei, cultivated a more publicly accessible conception of the monarchy, traveling extensively within Japan, visiting communities affected by natural disasters, and emphasizing remembrance of World War II. In 2019 he became the first Japanese emperor in more than two centuries to abdicate.

Akihito was succeeded by his son Naruhito on May 1, 2019, beginning the Reiwa era. Naruhito has continued many of his father’s public and ceremonial practices.