Emperor of Japan

The Emperor of Japan occupies what is often called the Chrysanthemum Throne, an institution Japanese tradition holds to be the oldest continuous hereditary monarchy in the world. Traditional accounts trace the imperial line to the legendary Emperor Jimmu, said to be a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu and to have founded the imperial line in 660 BCE, a date modern historians regard as a later mythological construction rather than a historical event; the historically attested imperial institution is generally dated to at least the Kofun period, several centuries CE, with a continuous documented succession from around the sixth century.

For most of Japanese history the Emperor held largely ceremonial and religious authority while real political and military power rested with regents, court nobility, or, from the twelfth century onward for extended periods, with shoguns, military rulers who governed in the emperor's name while the imperial court retained symbolic and religious primacy. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 formally returned political power to the throne and, under the Meiji Constitution of 1889, declared the Emperor sacred and inviolable, combining religious veneration within State Shinto with a modern constitutional monarchy modeled partly on European examples.

Japan's defeat in the Second World War brought a fundamental change to the imperial office. On January 1, 1946, Emperor Hirohito issued the Ningen-sengen, commonly translated as the Humanity Declaration, in which he renounced the concept that the emperor is a living god, akitsumikami, a claim that had underpinned State Shinto's fusion of religious veneration and political authority under the Meiji Constitution. This renunciation followed the Allied occupation authority's December 1945 Shinto Directive, which had already ordered the disestablishment of State Shinto as an arm of government and ended official state sponsorship of Shinto institutions and doctrine.

The 1947 constitution, adopted under the postwar occupation, reconstituted the Emperor's role entirely: sovereignty was transferred explicitly to the Japanese people, and the Emperor was defined as the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people, performing only ceremonial acts of state on the advice and approval of the Cabinet, with no powers related to government. Succession remains hereditary and patrilineal under the Imperial House Law, restricted to male descendants in the male line; a rare exception to the modern norm of life tenure occurred in 2019, when Emperor Akihito abdicated under special one-time legislation passed in 2017, the first abdication in roughly two centuries.