During the first half of this year, revision of the Imperial House Law became a major issue in the Diet. The Imperial House Law is a statute, separate from the Constitution, that lays down various rules governing the Imperial Family.

The main purpose of the proposed revision was to address the shrinking size of the Imperial Family, now down to just 14 members, which has placed an increasingly heavy burden of official duties on those who remain.

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Under Japan’s present Constitution, the Emperor has no political powers. Therefore, a minor change in the status could not evoke large interests. Yet the question of whether Princess Aiko, the only child of the current Emperor Naruhito, should eventually be allowed to inherit the throne had itself become a highly political issue. Many opposition parties, as well as a substantial part of Japanese society, are open to the idea of a female emperor.

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Prime Minister Takaichi, on the other hand, draws much of her support from conservatives within the Liberal Democratic Party. She thus finds herself in the delicate position of being Japan’s first female prime minister while being politically unable to push for a woman to ascend the Chrysanthemum Throne.

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What Are the Emperor and the Imperial Family?

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The Constitution, which establishes the political framework of post-war Japan, begins with a chapter on the Emperor. Its basic provisions are as follows:

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Article 1. The Emperor shall be the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people, deriving his position from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power.

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Article 2. The Imperial Throne shall be dynastic and succeeded to in accordance with the Imperial House Law passed by the Diet.

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Article 3. The advice and approval of the Cabinet (Government) shall be required for all acts of the Emperor in matters of state, and the Cabinet shall be responsible therefor.

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Article 4. The Emperor shall perform only such acts in matters of state as are provided for in this Constitution and he shall not have powers related to government.

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Under Articles 6 and 7, these “acts in matters of state” include:

appointing the prime minister as designated by the Diet and the chief judge of the Supreme Court as designated by the Cabinet;

promulgating amendments to the Constitution, laws, cabinet orders and treaties;

convoking the Diet;

dissolving the House of Representatives;

proclaiming general elections;

attesting instruments of ratification and other diplomatic documents as provided for by law;

and performing ceremonial functions.

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The actual decisions hereby are made by the Cabinet—the government. The Emperor possesses no governing power with his authority drastically curtailed following Japan’s defeat in World War II.

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The Imperial House Law

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The Imperial House Law governs succession to the throne, the establishment of a regency, membership in the Imperial Family, imperial mausoleums and tombs, and the Imperial House Council.

Article 1 provides:“The Imperial Throne shall be succeeded to by a male offspring in the male line belonging to the Imperial Lineage.”

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The main purpose of the current effort to revise the law is to deal with the decline in the number of members of the Imperial Family; until now, female members of the Imperial Family have been required to leave the Imperial Family upon marrying commoners.

One amendment, therefore, would allow them to retain imperial status after marriage.

Another would allow male descendants of the former collateral branches of the Imperial Family—branches whose members lost imperial status after World War II—to be adopted into the present Imperial Family. And If that adopted male gets a son, that son will have the right to succeed to the throne.

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In sum the number of imperial family members may slightly grow, whereas Imperial succession is left to male line. The question of whether Japan should permit a female emperor has for now been put aside. The present Emperor is still in good health, and perhaps the thinking is that there is no need to divide the country now over the question of succession.

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A More Rational Debate

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I personally have no particular attachment to the imperial institution, nor do I have a fixed position on what form it should take. But in the twenty-first century, I would like to see the many “myths” surrounding it carefully examined, the facts separated from assumptions, and the subject discussed rationally and openly. Otherwise, we will never know the true nature of early Japanese history.

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Such a discussion should also take account of the rights and feelings of the members of the Imperial Family as human beings. The Emperor and members of the Imperial Family do not enjoy many of the constitutional freedoms ordinary Japanese take for granted—freedom of speech, freedom in choosing where and how to live, and freedom of occupation, among others.

Under the present Constitution, sovereignty resides with the people. The Emperor is neither a sovereign ruler nor, constitutionally speaking, explicitly designated as head of state. He is a mere “symbol.”

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But what does it mean for a living human being to be a symbol? One can easily imagine the difficulty of constantly having to ask oneself: What am I supposed to do? What am I not supposed to do?

With that in mind, I would like to examine several of the “myths”—in the sense of deeply rooted assumptions—that surround the Japanese monarchy.

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Has the Imperial Line Really Been Unbroken for All Time?

Emperor Jimmu

According to legends, Emperor Jimmu founded Japan at Kashihara in Nara in 660 BC. At that time China was in the Spring and Autumn period and had no unified empire. Qin would not unify China until 221 BC.

The Nihon Shoki (an official history), or Chronicles of Japan, was finally completed in AD 720, more than a century after the founding of China’s Tang dynasty. This must have been presented to the Tang court in an attempt to have Japan’s status ranked higher than that of the various kingdoms on the neighboring Korean Peninsula. With this in mind the Japanese authority may have introduced the figure of Emperor Jimmu. They pushed the origins of the imperial line far back into antiquity. Emperor Jimmu’s supposed reign begins in 660 BC, giving Japan an extraordinarily ancient dynastic pedigree. But neither written evidence nor archaeology has established Jimmu as a historical individual.

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The chronology presented in Nihon Shoki itself gives reason for skepticism. Jimmu is said to have lived to the age of 127, while the eleventh emperor, Suinin, supposedly lived to 140. The sixth emperor, Kōan, is said to have occupied the throne for 102 years. The reign lengths assigned to the early emperors are plainly incompatible with normal human lifespans.

It is only with the tenth emperor, Sujin, that we begin to approach a ruler for whom some historians see a possible historical basis.

Jimmu’s tomb is mentioned in some old sources, but references disappear in later centuries and its location was eventually lost. The present mausoleum of Emperor Jimmu beside Kashihara Shrine (built in 1890 in memory of the late Jimmu) was identified as such only in the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate, after consideration of several possible sites.

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Emperor Sujin

With the tenth emperor, Sujin, the references in the Nihon Shoki and other sources become much more substantial. Some features of these accounts have led to speculation that Sujin may have represented a new political force that entered the Yamato region (the central part of Japan) from outside.

One striking episode is his removal of Amaterasu—the supposed ancestral deity of the Imperial Family—from the palace. Worship of the local deity Ōmononushi then assumed great importance, with the local Miwa clan playing a central ritual role.

The Miwa clan has in turn been associated in various theories with Izumo, in present-day Shimane Prefecture on the Sea of Japan coast, while Ōmononushi has sometimes been identified or closely associated with Ōkuninushi, the great deity of Izumo.

This has prompted some writers to speculate that Sujin, rather than Jimmu, may preserve a distant memory of a conquering group that entered Yamato, perhaps from the direction of Kyushu via Izumo. On this interpretation, the story of Jimmu projected such an event more than nine centuries backward into a mythical past.

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An “Ōjin Dynasty”?

A possible break in the line descending from Sujin is sometimes associated with the fifteenth emperor, Ōjin.

According to the traditional account, the fourteenth emperor, Chūai—a son of the legendary hero Yamato Takeru—went to Kyushu to campaign against the Kumaso and died there suddenly.

His consort, Empress Jingū, then supposedly assumed power as regent and launched the famous expedition against the “Three Kingdoms of Korea.” She returned and subsequently gave birth to a son who would become Emperor Ōjin.

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Neither Jingū’s historicity nor the traditional account of her Korean expedition can be established as historical fact. Korean chronicles contain records of military encounters with forces from Japan(Wa), but they do not corroborate the Nihon Shoki story of Jingū’s conquest of the peninsula.

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The chronology surrounding Jingū and Ōjin is also extraordinarily difficult to reconcile with normal lifespans. The traditional dates and reign lengths clearly contain legendary or artificial elements. Immediately upon her return, Empress Jingū gave birth to Prince Hondawake. She continued to serve as regent for the next 69 years, and in 390, Prince Hondawake—later known as Emperor Ōjin—is said to have ascended the throne. Since Emperor Ōjin would have been 70 years old at that time, and he reigned for a full 41 years thereafter, this means he passed away at the age of 111.

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This discrepancy raises an intriguing possibility. Perhaps Japan in this period experienced serious internal conflict, and a new political force that had risen in Kyushu—or possibly in areas connected with southern Korea—advanced to the central part of Japan and eventually established the political order associated with Emperor Ōjin.

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Significantly, the enormous tombs traditionally attributed to Ōjin and his successor Nintoku are not in the heart of the Yamato Basin but in the Kawachi region of present-day Osaka. This concentration of giant tombs suggests that Kawachi was one of the principal centers of political power in this period.

Whether that amounted to a separate “Ōjin dynasty,” however, remains a matter of historical interpretation rather than established fact.

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A “Keitai Dynasty”?

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If we provisionally call this the “Ōjin dynasty,” its direct male line is traditionally considered to have ended with the twenty-fifth emperor, Buretsu, who died without an heir.

The surviving political elite then selected a distant imperial relative, Prince Ōdo, from the Hokuriku region (facing the Sea of Japan)—traditionally associated with present-day Fukui, though his precise origins and political base remain debated.

Yet although he had supposedly been invited to assume the throne, he did not immediately establish himself in the Yamato Basin. He was proclaimed Emperor Keitai in 507 and spent many years at a succession of palaces before finally entering Yamato.

This peculiar sequence has long attracted historians’ attention. Some have interpreted Keitai as the founder of a new ruling line, while others emphasize continuity with the preceding Yamato monarchy.

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Anyway, it is from Keitai that the genealogy leading to the present Imperial Family becomes substantially more secure. The Japanese imperial institution therefore unquestionably has an extraordinarily long history and is probably the world’s oldest surviving hereditary monarchy.

But the claim of an absolutely unbroken line stretching literally back to Emperor Jimmu is another matter. The earliest genealogy contains unmistakably legendary elements, and there may have been major dynastic or political discontinuities during the formative centuries of the Yamato state.

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Japan Within Eurasia

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Discussions of the Imperial Family often become strangely heated as soon as terms such as bansei ikkei—“an imperial line unbroken for all ages”—or male-line versus female-line succession enter the conversation.

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But the Imperial Family consists of living human beings. Like other Japanese, their remote ancestors ultimately came from populations that migrated into the Japanese archipelago from various parts of continental Eurasia and maritime Asia. There is no historical reason to regard them as beings fundamentally separate from the rest of humanity.

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The Yamato Basin itself was home to powerful clans such as the Miwa, Aya, and Katsuragi. The region contains the Takamatsuzuka and Kitora tombs, whose chambers are decorated with magnificent paintings reflecting continental East Asian cosmology: courtly figures and the four directional guardian deities—the Black Tortoise, Azure Dragon, White Tiger, and Vermilion Bird. They testify to the extraordinary intensity of cultural connections between ancient Japan, the Korean Peninsula, and China.

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About 25 kilometers to the northwest, at Ikaruga, the Fujinoki Tomb yielded a spectacular collection of gold and silver grave goods, many of which are now displayed locally. Their workmanship evokes the cosmopolitan artistic world of Eurasia. Some decorative motifs have parallels stretching far across the continent, illustrating how far artistic ideas and techniques could travel in antiquity.

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The Nihon Shoki itself contains numerous references to Ōjin’s relations with the Korean Peninsula, particularly with Baekje. It was during Ōjin’s reign, according to the traditional account familiar to generations of Japanese schoolchildren, that the scholar Wani came from the peninsula bringing Chinese learning, including the Analects and the Thousand Character Classic.

Horse equipment also begins to appear much more prominently in Japanese archaeological sites during the Ōjin period, another indication of the intensification of connections with the Korean Peninsula and the Eurasian continent.

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The ancestors of the Japanese people came to the archipelago over many thousands of years from different parts of continental and maritime Asia. There is no reason to imagine that the ancestors of Japan’s ruling families existed outside these larger movements of people and culture.

And what would be wrong with that?

Nothing.

Even if some ancestors of Japan’s Imperial Family came to the archipelago through the Korean Peninsula, that obviously does not mean that modern Japan owes political allegiance to South or North Korea. Ancient population movements have nothing to do with the sovereignty of modern states.

What matters today is that the Constitution and the law clearly define the Emperor’s role and powers, while society also recognizes that the Emperor and the members of the Imperial Family are human beings with dignity, feelings, and rights of their own.

We should be able to deal with the imperial institution pragmatically, judging each question on its merits. There is no need to fanatically impose one’s own assumptions on everyone else.