Tenno

 

EMPERORS of JAPAN

 

'Emperor' is the traditional English tranlation of the Japanese title Tennō, which literally translates as Heavenly Monarch. Originally his realm, called Yamato, was only one among several in Japan, but by historical times it was clearly dominant and the Emperor has been the official ruler of Japan ever since. The Tennō appears to have originated as some sort of priest-king; even in the historical period the Imperial family claimed divine descent and the Emperor's duties consisted mostly of endless rites to maintain his own purity and ensure the fertility of the country. The importance of maintaining purity and the amount of time taken up by ritual encouraged them to hand the actual tasks of governance over to others.

 

In the earliest period this seems to have been members of the Imperial family, such as the famous Prince Shōtoku, who presided over the introduction of Chinese culture, but later other clans took the secular power. The first was the Soga, who were ultimatly eliminated by the Imperial family, who set up a Chinese style government, with themselves as the centre of a vast symmetrical bureaucracy, called the ritsuryō. This was accompanied by the relocation of the capital to Heian-kyō (now Kyōtō) and the peak of Imperial power under Kanmu (781-806).

 

The Emperors intermarried with the Fujiwara clan, who had helped eliminate the Soga and, like the imperial family, claimed descent from a deity. The Fujiwara used their inevitable status as maternal grandfathers, a deep cultural respect for elders and a succession of child-Emperors (beginning with Seiwa (858-876)) to dominate the Emperors, governing as regents even when the Emperors reached adulthood. In 884 they were powerful enough to force Emperor Yōzei to abdicate. The Emperors were basically figureheads, a position which they continued to hold under the bakufu (military governments), which succeeded the Fujiwara.

 

From the ninth century, Emperors tended to be young children, who were easier for theFujiwara to control and would resign after a few years to become monks. This backfired when the retired Go-Sanjo realised that as a paternal ancestor he could trump the influence of the Fujiwara as maternal ancestors. Thereafter Retired or Cloistered Emperors came to control the Imperial Court and led its slow resurgence under the Kamakura Bakufu. Several of the later Kamakura Shoguns were themselves members of the Imperial family. Finally, under Go-Daigō, the Emperor managed to overthrow the Kamakura and take secular power. His triumph was shortlived, within three years the military clans set up a new bakufu, the Ashikaga, with a collateral prince as figurehead Emperor. Go-Daigō's descendants maintained their own Southern Court in opposition to the Ashikaga-backed Northern Court. Eventually the Northern Court line was firmly established, but as the country dissolved into civil war they had even less power than the Shoguns who supposedly ruled on their behalf.

 

Towards the end of the civil war, Kyoto itself was conquered in turn by each of the warlords, who were legitimated by imperial appointments. The final warlord to do this, Tokugawa Ieyasu succeeded in establishing his own bakufu in 1603. He and his successors always showed deference to the Imperial person, and provided his impoverished court with money and luxuries, but he carefully prevented them from having any actual influence. From the 1600s until the 1840s, no Emperor, ever, left the palace grounds. 

 

However, after the Tokugawa proved unable to protect Japan from foreign pressure, their primary rationale, as a military government, was called into question. In 1868 they were overthrown in the Boshin War and the Meiji Emperor was restored to secular power and set about modernising and westernising the country. Because the expansionist policies persued by the resurgent Japanese Empire were exceptionally horrific and led to World War II, the degree of control that the Meiji Emperor and his successors actually exercised is disputed. Since 1945, and the imposition of democracy on Japan, it has been extremely minimal; unlike the monarchs of other constitutional monarchies, the Emperor retains no reserve powers whatsoever.

 

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