The Imperial Line

Hereditary lines are important in Shinto, and none more so than the line of the Tennō. As far as the Shinto establishment is concerned, it is absolutely vital that there be a Tennō, and that he (not she) be a descendant in the male line of Jinmu Tennō, or possibly Tenji Tennō if we want to restrict attention to Tennō who certainly existed. A few articles in the June 24^th issue of Jinja Shinpō touched on this in an interesting way, taken collectively. Two were about the annual meeting of Shintō Seiji Renmei, at which it reiterated the importance of making sure that Imperial status was not hereditary in the female line.

The other, on the back page, was an article marking the 600^th anniversary of the death of the 99^th Tennō, Gokamëyama. In the fourteenth century, there was a period when there were two rival Tennō, known as the north and south courts. This was the after-effect of civil war — the Tennō who led the south court, Godaigo, fell out with the Ashikaga Shoguns, who had won the civil war, and they supported the Tennō of the north court, who were based in the capital, Kyoto. The south court was hiding in the mountains of Yoshino, south of the capital — hence the designations. Gokamëyama was the south court Tennō. He agreed to end the split on condition that a ceremony be held acknowledging that he had transferred the imperial dignity, and that the Tennō thereafter alternate between the north and south lines. Neither of those things happened — the north line simply remained in power.

However, in the nineteenth century, for reasons I am not entirely clear about, it was decided that the south line was the legitimate one, and five of the northern line Tennō were simply removed from the count of the succession. They are still, it seems, acknowledged as Tennō, but they are not counted when determining how many Tennō there have been.

This illustrates why it is important to take an early Tennō as the source when calculating descent — I counted a few years ago, and only about half of the historical Tennō are male-line ancestors of the current one. There is no problem with jumping across to another branch of the Imperial family.

Indeed, the favoured plan of the right wing for solving the current succession crisis is to bring male-line descendants of the “Former Imperial Family” back into the Imperial Family. These are always described as having been made into commoners by the Occupation authorities in 1947, which is true, but plays down the fact that the most recent Tennō in their male-line ancestry appears to have lived in the fifteenth century. (Some of them have female-line connections to Meiji Tennō or later.) This is, apparently, enough.

Still, it does not mean that anyone in the male line from a Tennō in a family that was once Imperial will do. Ashikaga Yoshimitsu is often held up as an example of someone who tried to illegitimately become Tennō (he was the Shogun, and there is decent evidence that he wanted the top job), but as a member of the Genji clan, he was a male-line descendant of Seiwa Tennō. Seiwa Tennō lived about five centuries before Yoshimitsu, so Yoshimitsu was a century closer to his ancestral Tennō than the people the conservatives are currently promoting as candidates. If he didn’t qualify, why do they?

I have seen attempts to link the importance of the male lineage to the Tennō’s status as a priest but, as we saw recently, priestly lineages often pass through the female line. This, and the fact that there have been numerous female Tennō, albeit mostly in the distant past, makes an insistence on male descendants in the male line an innovation.

In the end, I am really not sure what the conservatives are committed to here, other than excluding all the living Imperial Princesses from the succession.