Imperial Family

The third family to dominate the national government in this period was the Hojo family, whose members ruled from 1203 as shogunal regents (shikken). This initiated a complex and many-tiered delegation of power that has few parallels in world history. The emperor in Kyoto reigned, but the imperial government was controlled by a Fujiwara regent. The effective national government was in Kamakura, nominally headed by a shogun, but also in fact controlled by the Hojo regent. To complicate matters further, from the mid-l3th century the shogunate began to interfere actively in the imperial succession, creating schisms within the imperial house that further decreased its power.

Emperor Go-Daigo undertook a clean sweep of this meaningless institutional complexity (r 1318-1339) in 1333, who made war on the Hojo, destroying the Kamakura shogunate and became head of a reinvigorated imperial government. This revival of imperial authority was, however, pathetically brief. In 1336 Ashikaga Takauji (1305-1358), Go-Daigo's chief military commander, turned against the emperor, deposed him, and set up in his place a puppet from a different branch of the imperial house, the Northern Court. The latter then appointed Takauji shogun, initiating the 240-year Muromachi shogunate.

Go-Daigo established a rival court, the Southern Court, that maintained a precarious existence until 1392, when the rivalry between the two Courts was finally resolved by the third Muromachi shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358-1408). The material circumstances of the imperial house reached their nadir in the course of the Muromachi period (1336-1573) and the Imperial Palace was destroyed in the disastrous Onin War (1467-77).

Early Modern Period (mid-l6th - mid-l9th centuries)

The restoration of the court's fortunes awaited the reunification of Japan, accomplished between 1568 and 1603 by three men, Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598), and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616) - each of whom derived sanction for his rule from the imperial institution. After the collapse of rule by the senior two men, Ieyasu followed long precedent in having himself named shogun in 1603, commencing more than 250 years of rule by the Tokugawa shogunate.

The shogunate devoted great attention to the maintenance and control of the imperial institution. The Imperial Palace was restored to its former grandeur, and residences were provided for the entire court nobility (kuge). Income from designated lands was earmarked for the imperial treasury. Yet at the same time rigorous restraints were imposed on the freedom of the imperial family and court nobility.

The imperial court in Kyoto had little if any influence on practical state affairs, but the emperor continued to perform certain functions important to the shogunate. The public acts of the court consisted wholly of the performance of rituals associated variously with Shinto, with Buddhism, or with Confucianism.

Quite apart from this, however, the imperial institution came to play a new symbolic role in Japanese political thought, constructed in the course of the Edo period (1600-1868) by writers and thinkers known as kinnoka, or "imperial loyalists," who drew their ideas chiefly from various modifications of Confucian theory or from the indigenous intellectual tradition of Kokugaku (National Learning). Their stress on the centrality of the imperial house within the Japanese polity proved to be an explosive concept in the mid-19th century, when it combined with the crisis touched off by Western pressure to "open" Japan to foreign trade and diplomacy. The result was a political movement aimed at fending off the foreign threat, abolishing the shogunate, and replacing it with a new national government under direct imperial rule. Within 15 years of Commodore Matthew C. Perry's arrival in Japan in 1853, this upsurge of imperial loyalism proved a key factor in the toppling of the Tokugawa regime and the initiation of the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

Modern Period (1868-1945)

The leaders of Meiji Japan engaged in 20 years of pragmatic political experimentation to redefine the imperial institution. With the proclamation of the Constitution of the Empire of Japan on 11 February 1889, the emperor became a constitutional monarch in a centralised unitary state that was to exercise greater political power than any previous form of government in Japan's history.