Akihito

The throne Akihito came to in 1989 had been redefined twice within living memory. The 1947 constitution makes the emperor the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people, with no powers of government, and its twentieth article forbids the state from engaging in religious activity or granting privileges to any religious organisation. His father had renounced the claim to divine descent in a statement issued at the beginning of 1946, and the occupation directive of the previous year had already separated Shinto shrines from state support.

The rites of the throne are Shinto rites, which puts them in direct tension with that settlement, and the accession made the tension concrete. The Daijosai, the great thanksgiving festival performed once in a reign, in which the new emperor makes an offering of the first rice and shares it, was carried out in 1990 and funded from the imperial household private allowance rather than from public money, precisely so that it could be characterised as a private religious act of the family rather than an act of the state. Lawsuits argued that public involvement in the associated ceremonies breached the constitution anyway. The atlas records the arrangement as an unresolved accommodation rather than a settled position, because that is what it is.

With no political function, the office works by what its holder is seen to do, and this reign is usually described in terms of a sequence of visits. Akihito and Empress Michiko went to Okinawa, where the wartime battle and the postwar occupation had left a difficult relationship with the mainland, and to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later to Saipan, the Philippines and Palau, at each place attending to the war dead of more than one nation. On state visits abroad he expressed regret for the suffering caused during the war in terms that were noted closely both by the countries he was visiting and at home.

Two broadcasts stand out. After the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 he recorded a video address to the country, which no emperor had done in that way before in a domestic crisis. In August 2016 he recorded a second, describing his age and his difficulty in continuing to carry out his duties fully, without directly asking for anything, since the constitution allows him no political role. Parliament responded with a law applying to his case alone, and he abdicated in April 2019, the first Japanese emperor to do so in about two centuries. The era name Heisei ended with him.

The abdication forced a question the modern law had not addressed. The imperial house law made no provision for a reign ending in any way except death, so the measure passed in 2017 had to open a route and close it again behind him. It left untouched the older difficulty the same law contains, that succession is restricted to males in the male line while the family has produced very few of them, a matter still under public discussion and not one an emperor with no political role was in a position to raise.