power, which co-exists with cultural patterns which in many respects have remained unchanged for centuries. The same nation which rampaged through East Asia and the Pacific region in the 30s and 40s, instigating wars of expansion, committing war crimes and atrocities and defending its conquests with ferocious and fatalistic fanaticism, all the while trumpeting its xenophobic slogans of racist superiority to other peoples, has since 1945 been a model of responsible international conduct. Domestic terror and authoritarian rule have been replaced by a viable if imperfect democracy. As Allinson puts it, "Japan is always changing, often in contradictory directions."
The most enduring of all Japanese institutions has been its emperorship, which nevertheless has undergone significant changes since the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and especially since the end of World War II. Its origins lie deeply veiled in the mists of prehistoric times. According to legends, first written down by the Yamato clan in the 7th century AD, the first emperor Jimmu (660 BC) was directly descended from the Sun Goddess Amaterasu Omikami. Seishisai said "our Divine Land is where the sun rises and where the primordial energy originates. The heirs of the Great Sun have occupied the Imperial Throne from generation to generation without change from time immemorial." According to Behr, Jimmu "was in all probability the first in a series of tribal chiefs to leave their mark on one of the islands of the Japanese archipelago," and the legends of Jimmu and his successors were appropriated by the later centralizing Yamatos to give their reign legitimacy.
Until the age of the first shoguns or pre-feudal military dictators which began about 1192, the heads of the Imperial clans were known as emperors and were endowed with an aura of religious authority which centered around a primitive form of worship of nature, fertility and ancestral deities known as Shinto. There were so...