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  • Enigma of the Emperors: Sacred Subservience in Japanese History
  • Stephen S. Large
Enigma of the Emperors: Sacred Subservience in Japanese History. By Ben-Ami Shillony. Folkestone, Kent, UK: Global Oriental, 2005. 312 pages. Hardcover £40.00.

With the publication of this book, we now have an authoritative survey of the Japanese emperors from antiquity to the present. The "enigma" at hand is how best to explain the continuous existence of the imperial institution and the same dynastic family for fifteen centuries, by Ben-Ami Shillony's reckoning. (By a somewhat different calculation, starting from the mythical Jinmu, the present emperor, Akihito, is the 125th occupant of the throne.)

It is often claimed that the monarchy has survived so long because the emperors were considered sacred or divine. Another common explanation is that it survived because the emperors were too weak politically to threaten other elites in the struggle for power. If neither of these explanations by itself is verycompelling, the combination of imperial sanctity and political weakness may well explain the striking continuity of the imperial house. Shillony concludes, near the end of his book: "The reason for this strange survival, like the reason for the extraordinary longevity of the dynasty, is that unlike other monarchs, the Japanese emperors combined sanctity with passivity to such an extent, that they were too subservient to rule, but too sacred to be deposed" (p. 273).

Shillony develops this theme of "sacred subservience" in twenty-eight concise chapters grouped into nine sections. Throughout, his lively narrative is packed with detailed information about the emperors; for instance, "From [Empress] Kōgyoku's resignation in 645 until the last abdication of Emperor Kōkaku in 1817, three-quarters of all emperors resigned the throne" (p. 49). Along the way Shillony carefully explains the origins and meanings of key terms relating to the imperial institution and draws useful comparisons with the Chinese monarchy and monarchies in the Middle East and Europe. But what makes this book especially valuable is the author's perspectives on the Japanese emperors as viewed through the prisms of authority, gender, and sanctity.

To illustrate, concerning the nature of imperial sanctity, Shillony argues that the Japanese have not typically regarded the reigning emperors as gods. Like the pharaohs, the emperors were held to be descendants of the sun deity, but the emperors

were neither omnipotent nor omniscient, and they were not worshipped. In Japan there were no shrines dedicated to living emperors. The emperors prayed to the gods on behalf of the people but the people did not pray to them. The souls of dead emperors were worshipped, but so were the souls of other persons.

(p. 17) [End Page 105]

Even in the Nara and Heian periods, "the classical age of imperial rule," the emperors were not believed to be divine, and ancient imperial titles such as akitsu mikami (manifest god) remained merely "poetic honorifics rather than religious statements" (p. 19). It was probably only in the nineteenth century that the idea arose, in nationalist political thought, of the emperor as a "living god." It seems unlikely, though, that many Japanese actually came to believe this, even during World War II when the emperor cult reached its zenith. For the Japanese, Emperor Hirohito's public renunciation of his divinity, at MacArthur's behest in 1946, was a nonevent.

But while the emperors were not widely seen as "living gods" down through the ages, they were generally believed to be sacred, by virtue of the divine mythological origins of the imperial family and the Shinto rites that the emperors performed at court as intermediaries between their subjects and the gods. Hirohito continued to offer these prayers for a good harvest and for the security of the realm after the war-as does the reigning emperor today-although under the postwar separation of church and state, these are considered strictly private rites of the imperial family.

Concerning the extent of the emperors' authority, the few emperors and empresses earlier on who exercised significant political power or military leadership were exceptions which prove the rule that the great majority of sovereigns were politically passive. Many emperors were best known for their artistic pursuits...

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