Emperor of the Empire of Japan
The big difference between Japan and the US is existence of the emperor in Japan.
The big difference between Japan and China is existence of the emperor in Japan.
But how have the Japanese people regraded the emperor?
Today generally speaking the existence of the emperor has no influence on Japanese individuals when they think of their life and death or their life styles or jobs. But they think that showing respect for the emperor and imperial family members mean acting as respectable members of society.
But this attitude toward the emperor was only established after WWII and after enactment of the new Japanese Constitution in 1947. However during the samurai era which continued till 1867 since the late 12th century, the emperor was deprived of real political power by samurai leaders. Farmers in local villages paid customs or tax, namely mostly rice, not to officials sent by the emperor who lived in Kyoto but to samurai lords who governed or administered regions including their villages. The emperor had no military forces in the 700-year-long Samurai Age. Or essentially the samurai class had grown from soldiers who had once belonged to the emperor or noblemen.
Accordingly villagers and townsmen in the samurai era had neither enough knowledge about the emperor nor appropriate chances to show respect for the emperor.
Then a big change happened in the history of Japan as western powers started to request by force opening of the nation Japan in the middle of the 19th century though the samurai regime had closed the country for almost 250 years.
But in the Empire of Japan, the political system that existed from 1868 to 1945, the emperor was a almost nominally autocratic ruler of Japan. It is because politicians, military leaders and elite bureaucrats of the Empire needed such a super monarch in Japan so as to govern the Japanese people under the name of the emperor peremptorily. As most of those elites in the Empire were ex-samurais or descendants of samurais, they thought they belonged to a class higher than ordinary people of the Empire who had belonged to the farmer class or the townsman class during the samurai era. So, it is fit for them to set the emperor as a despot who presided at the highest position in the Japanese social stratum.
Nonetheless, there was a serious dispute about characteristics of the emperor as a (mostly nominal) despot. Was he above the legal system of Japan like a kind of god, or was he just one function under the Imperial Constitution?
Dispute over "Emperor as an Organ of Government Theory"
The theory of the Emperor as an organ of government (the theory of the nation state as a juridical body) that the Emperor is an organ of the state possessing no authority over and above the state, who exercised power only as the highest organ of the state was widely accepted as an academic construct legally underpinning the Meiji Constitution system. At a plenary session of the House of Peers on 18 February 1935 (Showa 10), however, KIKUCHI Takeo vehemently attacked the theory, criticizing the works of constitutional scholar MINOBE Tatsukichi and others. In response, MINOBE, who was also a member of the House of Peers, made a strong "personal defense" of the theory at the plenary session one week later, on 25 February 1935. Sensing opportunity, nationalist groups and others pounced on the issue and started a campaign to discredit the "Emperor as an Organ of Government Theory". The movement to denounce the theory grew in intensity when the Seiyukai, which wanted to overturn the Cabinet, was joined by large segments of the military and local government groups.
http://www.ndl.go.jp/modern/e/cha4/description04.html
In 1912, Minobe published a work on constitutional interpretation, which came to be known as the “emperor organ theory”. Per Minobe, the “State”, or kokutai was supreme, and even the emperor was only an “organ of the State” as defined through the constitutional structure, rather than a sacred power beyond the state itself....Nonetheless, Showa Emperor who presided over Japan through WWII once said that he did not think any part of his status had changed before and after WWII. The father of the present emperor stressed that he always acted in the same manner even despite the change of the Constitution after the defeat of the Empire in 1945.
Minobe’s interpretation of the constitution was generally accepted by bureaucrats and even imperial household until the 1930s, although it had been challenged from the beginning by imperial absolutists such as Yatsuka Hoizumi and Shinkichi Uesugi, who held that the emperor was, by definition, the personification of the State itself, and therefore politically unaccountable for his actions, however arbitrary, as defined in Article 3 the Meiji Constitution.
In the increasingly militant environment of the 1930s, Minobe’s liberal interpretation of the role of the emperor came under attack from military officers and ultranationalists increasingly disillusioned by liberal democracy and corruption in government, which they felt could only be addressed through a Shōwa Restoration in which the emperor would take personal totalitarian control. On February 18, 1935, Baron Takeo Kikuchi, a retired general and member of the House of Peers, launched a public campaign to demand that Prime Minister Keisuke Okada ban Minobe’s works, which he termed to be “traitorous thoughts”.[3] Minobe addressed the Diet of Japan a week later in his own defense, while right-wing groups and Kōdōha officers held a demonstration in downtown Tokyo denouncing him. In early March, Major General Genkuro Eto charged in the lower house of the Diet of Japan that Minobe’s books, specifically Kenpo Satsuyo (Compendium of the Constitution) and Tsuiho kenpo seigi (Additional Commentaries on the Constitution) were works of lese-majeste, and that Minobe should be arrested.[4] Bowing to severe political pressure, Okada asked Minobe to resign from his posts later that month, banned some of his works, and initiated a government-sponsored campaign to discredit his works in favor of the tenets supporting the concept of the divine right of the emperor, which quickly merged with emperor worship and national chauvinism.[5]
Following the surrender of Japan after World War II, Minobe was active as an advisor in the creation of the post-war Constitution of Japan, as well as an advisor to the Privy Council.[6] He died in 1948.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatsukichi_Minobe
Imperial Family of Showa Emperor in 1941
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