The role of Japan’s emperors has changed dramatically over time. Traditionally, the emperor is the high priest of Shinto, Japan’s indigenous religion. According to Shinto mythology, all Japanese emperors are directly descended from Amaterasu-omikami (the Sun Goddess) through the male line. For over 200 years during the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), Japan’s emperors were confined to live and pray in the Imperial Palace in the old capital of Kyoto, lest they interfere in Shogun government politics in Edo (Tokyo). When the Tokugawa Shogunate was overthrown, the new government that emerged in its place derived its authority from the Meiji Emperor through the concept of kokutai (national polity) under which all government agencies were agencies of the emperor. Thus, it was in the names of emperors Mutsuhito (Meiji), Yoshihito (Taisho) and Hirohito (Showa) that Japan fought its modern wars.
After defeat in World War II, Hirohito was forced by the US Allied powers to renounce his status as a living god, though they let him keep his position as emperor. Japan’s post-war Constitution democratised the nation and strictly limited the role of the emperor to ‘the symbol of the State and of the unity of the People’.
As Noriko Kawamura explains in our lead essay this week, when Emperor Akihito ascended the throne in 1989 he set about modernising the monarchy and ‘broke with archaic Imperial House tradition’. Akihito was the first emperor to marry a commoner, Michiko. And Michiko was the first empress to raise her children herself rather than relying exclusively on courtiers to do the job.
In contrast to previous emperors, who were considered to be above the clouds, Akihito deliberately put himself close to the Japanese people. ‘Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko … promoted the welfare of the Japanese people … tirelessly engaging in compassionate work for social causes … They comforted and encouraged survivors of natural disasters. After the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the couple visited thousands of survivors in shelters. Images of the Emperor and the Empress getting on their knees on shelter floors won over the hearts of the Japanese people’.
Akihito also took on the role of Japan’s chief emissary of regional reconciliation. ‘Expressing his remorse and regret to peoples across the region, including in Okinawa, Hiroshima, the Korean peninsula, China and the Philippines among others, Emperor Akihito represented Japan’s commitment to pacifism’.
Emperor Akihito’s apparent liberal leanings means he has ‘found himself an inadvertent dissident and symbol of reproach to the nation’s conservative elite’, Jeff Kingston suggests.
Japan’s nationalists conveniently ignored Emperor Akihito’s remarks on his birthday in 2001 when he said that he feels a kinship with the Korean people, as the mother of his ancestor, Emperor Kanmu, was Korean.
In 2004, when shogi (Japanese chess) player Kunio Yonenaga, formerly a member of the education committee of Tokyo’s metropolitan government, boasted at an annual imperial garden party that it was his job to make sure teachers and students sing the national anthem (Kimigayo) while standing in front of the national flag (Hinomaru), Emperor Akihito responded that ‘It is desirable not to force [them]’.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s speech in August 2015 marking the 70th anniversary of Japan’s World War II surrender, which blurred the lines on aggression and defence and the causes of Japan’s wars, appears to have prompted Emperor Akihito to deviate from his usual script, make his own statement of ‘deep remorse’ and remind Japan that it bore responsibility for the war.
Japanese nationalists are also ‘unhappy that Akihito has maintained the boycott on visits to Yasukuni Shrine’, which enshrines Japan’s war dead. This boycott was started by Emperor Hirohito in 1978 after it emerged that 14 Class-A war criminals were secretly enshrined there. The head priest at Yasukuni Shrine was forced to resign in June 2018 after a recording emerged in which he criticised Emperor Akihito for ‘trying to crush Yasukuni Shrine’.
Kawamura writes that Akihito’s televised speech in August 2016, in which he indirectly conveyed his desire to abdicate explaining that ‘he had lost confidence in his capacity to serve as a symbol of national unity due to illness and age’, represents a 200-year break with tradition. Since abdication is not permitted under the Imperial Household Law, the Abe government, swayed by public sentiment, reluctantly accommodated a one-time abdication. It has even been speculated that Akihito timed his abdication appeal, just after the Abe government won enough seats in the Diet along with its coalition partner to theoretically enact a constitutional revision. This could be a kind of coded pushback on tampering with the Article 9 peace clause and the Emperor’s modern-day role as a symbol.
The gap between the liberal Akihito, who has endorsed Japan’s post-war Constitution, and the conservative Abe government, which has energetically sought to expand the roles and missions of the Japan Self-Defense Forces, revise the Constitution and ‘escape the post-war regime’, has caused much speculation about what sort of emperor Naruhito will be.
Japan’s nationalists may hope that the new emperor sticks to praying, but the signs are that Naruhito will follow in his father’s footsteps. Naruhito, who was educated at Oxford, and his wife Masako, a former diplomat educated at Harvard and Oxford, are positioned to continue the process of modernising Japan’s monarchy and promoting a more internationally-minded Japan open to the world.
Naruhito also has a long-standing interest in water-related environmental issues and sustainable development, stemming from his time at Oxford where he studied medieval water-based transport. One line of thinking is that Naruhito might make addressing climate change one of his key issues of concern.
Beyond Naruhito, the monarchy is on less than stable ground however, as only the male line can succeed the throne. Naruhito and Masako have only a daughter, Princess Aiko, which means the only successor to the throne in the next generation is Naruhito’s nephew, the 12 year old Prince Hisahito. As international society is increasingly concerned with gender equality, it is possible that Naruhito and Masako may harbour hopes of breaking this male-only tradition too, a notion that would be anathema to Japan’s nationalists.
‘In contrast to its moniker of “beautiful harmony”’, Kawamura concludes, ‘the Reiwa era may begin with some less than harmonious dialogue between the Imperial House and the Abe cabinet’.
The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.