In the autumn of 2025, Japan appointed its first female Prime Minister.
The world took notice. Headlines declared that Japan had finally changed. A woman had reached the apex of power — and that, by any measure, is a fact worth recording.
And yet, standing before this historic moment, I find myself gripped not by celebration but by a profound and troubling paradox.
What, precisely, is Japan’s first female Prime Minister working to protect?
Male-only imperial succession. Opposition to allowing married couples to use separate surnames. Constitutional revision and the expansion of military capability. She calls these things “Japanese tradition.”
But we must ask the question she does not.
Are they?
The answer is no.
What Japan’s first female Prime Minister is defending under the banner of tradition is, in truth, a patriarchal order artificially constructed roughly 150 years ago — the product of a violent coup carried out by two feudal domains, Satsuma and Chōshū, in what history has sanitized into the name “the Meiji Restoration.”
And what that coup destroyed was something far older and far more authentically Japanese: a female principle woven into the fabric of this civilization since the Jōmon period, embodied most powerfully in Amaterasu — the Sun Goddess, Supreme Deity, and one of the most singular figures in the entire history of world mythology.
That is what this essay is about.
I A Coup, Not a Restoration
The Meiji Restoration is taught, in Japan and abroad, as an awakening — Japan’s leap into modernity, its courageous embrace of civilization and enlightenment.
Examined structurally, however, the conclusion is unavoidable.
It was a seizure of power by two feudal domains, backed by the threat and use of military force.
In 1868, the Declaration of the Restoration of Imperial Rule announced, ostensibly, a return of authority to the Emperor. In reality, it was Satsuma and Chōshū using the Emperor as a political instrument to legitimize their own seizure of power. The Tokugawa shogunate — an existing order — was overthrown not through negotiation but through force.
The Boshin War that followed was a civil war. Behind the romanticized imagery of “restoration,” Japanese people killed Japanese people. The domain of Aizu was devastated. The alliance of northern domains was crushed. The losers were branded “rebel forces” by the victors, and their memory was pushed to the margins of the history that followed. In the Tōhoku region, that unspoken memory persists to this day.
But the deepest violence of any coup is not the military violence. It is the rewriting of history.
Having seized power, the Meiji government narrated its own actions as “restoration” — a return to the ancient, Emperor-centered order of Japan. This was a fundamental lie. What they constructed was not a restoration but something entirely new: a constitutional monarchy modeled on Bismarckian Prussia, a family law system referencing the Napoleonic Code, and a sexual morality imported from Christian Europe and repackaged as “civilization.”
The Meiji state imitated the West while dressing itself in the costume of Japanese tradition.
One hundred and fifty years later, that costume is still being worn.
II What Meiji Destroyed
What did pre-Meiji Japan actually possess? What precisely did the coup dismantle?
The relative autonomy of women.
In the Edo period, women exercised considerably greater autonomy than the Meiji era would permit. In samurai households, the practice of the “three-and-a-half lines” — a form of divorce letter — made the dissolution of marriage a more accessible reality than we might imagine. In merchant families, women were often the practical managers of the business. In agricultural communities, women were economically indispensable, central to farming, sericulture, and textile production.
The Meiji Civil Code of 1898 transformed all of this. Wives were rendered legally incompetent. They could not own property or enter into contracts without their husband’s consent. Under the authority of the male household head, women were enclosed within the institution called the “family.”
This was not the maintenance of Japanese tradition. It was the fresh, deliberate exclusion of women from legal personhood.
Tolerance for sexual diversity.
Edo-period Japan was considerably more tolerant of sexual diversity than the Meiji era that followed. Shudō — love between men — was culturally acknowledged in samurai society. Wakashū kabuki was its aesthetic expression. Sexual diversity was not aberration; it was cultural reality.
The Meiji government imported Christian sexual morality as “civilization” and criminalized these realities as “barbarism and decadence.” The sodomy statute of 1873 marked the beginning of the systematic exclusion of sexual minorities.
This too was not the preservation of tradition. It was the destruction of a Japanese tolerance by imported values.
A layered, non-exclusive spirituality.
Before Meiji, Japanese spiritual life was a complex weaving of Shinto, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and folk belief — characterized by low exclusivity and genuine plurality. Temple grounds held shrines; buddhas were venerated as gods; the ritual capacities of women stood at the center of everyday spiritual practice.
The Meiji government violently dismantled this composite through the Edict Separating Shinto and Buddhism and the subsequent destruction of Buddhist institutions. To construct a “pure” State Shinto, a millennia-old layered spirituality was shattered.
Folk goddess worship, the traditions of female shamans, the enchanted worldview of the people — these were marginalized as “superstition” in the name of modern rationalism.
Taken together, what Meiji destroyed was not the “pre-modern” swept aside by progress. It was the systematic destruction of a cultural inheritance Japan had been accumulating since the Jōmon period.
III Amaterasu — The Source
Here we must return to the mythological center of Japan.
Amaterasu — Amaterasu-Ōmikami, the Great Divinity Illuminating Heaven.
The singularity of this figure in the history of world mythology cannot be overstated.
Goddesses exist in mythologies around the world, in vast numbers. But the great majority are “functional goddesses” — presiding over fertility, love, death, or the moon — or “consort goddesses,” existing as wives or mothers of male supreme deities, or “conquered goddesses,” former supreme figures demoted after the rise of male gods.
Zeus. The God of Abraham. Shiva. Odin. The supreme deities of the world’s major religious and mythological traditions are overwhelmingly male. And the sun gods are equally male — Egypt’s Ra, Greece’s Apollo, India’s Surya — with near-total consistency.
A female sun deity who is also the supreme ruler of the cosmos — this combination is extraordinarily rare in the history of myth.
Amaterasu is none of the above. She presides over the cosmos as its sovereign, without a consort, without having been conquered by any male god, and she remains in the highest position to this day. In the major living religious traditions of the world, this is very nearly unique.
More important still is the structural relationship between Amaterasu and the Emperor.
The common understanding holds that the Emperor, as Amaterasu’s descendant, exercises power in her name. This is incorrect. To read the actual structure of imperial ritual is to find the relationship reversed.
The Emperor functions as one who serves Amaterasu.
The Emperor does not “visit” the Grand Shrine of Ise. When the Emperor travels to Ise, the act is one of hōhei — the offering of tribute. Why? Because the Emperor is himself the officiant, the servant of Amaterasu’s rites. One does not enter the sovereign’s palace as its sovereign.
The Emperor’s most essential function remains, to this day, prayer. The Niiname-sai. The Daijō-sai. These are not the acts of a ruler but of a sacred intermediary. The great folklorist Origuchi Shinobu read the deep structure of these rites as moments in which the Emperor functions as the receiving, receptive party — the one who is entered rather than the one who enters.
This is structurally unlike anything in Western conceptions of kingship. In the divine right of kings, God grants power to the king, and the king becomes the active agent. In Japan’s structure, the deity retains sovereignty while the Emperor functions as servant.
The one who serves occupies the highest position. The one who rules is subordinate to the one who is served.
This is the heart of the Amaterasu conception of power.
And the lineage extends before Amaterasu herself.
Himiko — queen of Yamatai in the third century — is recorded in the Chinese chronicle Weizhi as one who “practiced the way of demons and enchanted the people.” A female ruler whose shamanic authority was the source of political legitimacy; whose brother managed practical governance while she held spiritual sovereignty. This dual structure — female spiritual authority, male administrative function — recurs throughout Japanese history with a consistency that is not coincidental.
From Himiko to Amaterasu. From Amaterasu to the Saigū system — the imperial princesses who served the great shrines of Ise and Kamo as the Emperor’s sacred surrogates, closer to the divine than the Emperor himself. Eight female Emperors in ten reigns before the eighth century. These are not exceptions to a male-dominated pattern. They are expressions of a power conception in which the highest authority was fundamentally sacerdotal — and therefore, structurally, female.
What runs consistently through this lineage is the Japanese conception that supreme authority resides not in political domination but in sacred service.
IV The Greatest Deception Meiji Committed
The Meiji government placed Amaterasu at the apex of State Shinto.
But this was not the revival of the Amaterasu principle.
It was the exploitation of Amaterasu’s name while systematically destroying everything Amaterasu represents.
This is the greatest deception Meiji committed. It may also be its deepest historical crime.
The Emperor was redefined — from sacred servant to sovereign ruler. Article One of the Meiji Constitution: “The Empire of Japan shall be reigned over and governed by a line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal.” To “reign over and govern” — the Emperor becomes the active subject of dominion. The one who served Amaterasu was declared a living god co-equal with Amaterasu. The original relationship was inverted entirely.
The Saigū system — the institution through which women held the highest sacral function at the center of the imperial order — was effectively abolished in the disruptions of the Restoration. The mechanism by which women occupied the ritual heart of the system was severed.
The Imperial Household Law closed the possibility of female Emperors. This was not the preservation of Japanese tradition. It was the betrayal of Japan’s most ancient tradition through the importation of a Prussian monarchical model.
And the most cunning element of all was that these acts of destruction were wrapped in the language of restoration — the recovery of ancient Japanese custom.
Eric Hobsbawm named this phenomenon “the invention of tradition” — the way modern states fabricate traditions to serve political needs, then present those fabrications as ancient and natural. Japan produced one of the most complete examples this process has ever generated.
Through a hundred and fifty years of repetition, Meiji’s inventions came to look like nature.
Male-only imperial succession looks like “ancient Japanese tradition.” Mandatory shared surnames looks like “the Japanese sensibility.” Resistance to women’s political participation looks like “a matter of culture.”
But all of these are artifacts of the Satsuma-Chōshū coup.
In the name of Amaterasu, everything Amaterasu embodied was destroyed. That is the true nature of the Meiji era.
V The Female Prime Minister as Completed Paradox
And then, 2025.
Japan’s first female Prime Minister took office.
I read this moment as the completion of what the Satsuma-Chōshū coup set in motion.
Not merely the perpetuation of an institution. The completion of externalized violence.
No external compulsion is any longer required. The woman who has most deeply internalized the patriarchal order protects that order through her own sovereign will. The power that forms subjects to conform to its norms without surveillance — what Foucault called “disciplinary power” — reaches its terminal expression here.
Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s first female Prime Minister. She dismantled the welfare state and institutionalized competitive individualism — perhaps the most thoroughly masculinized value system imaginable. A woman holding power and the female principle entering power are entirely different events.
To reach the apex of a patriarchal system, one must internalize that system’s values most completely and embody them most faithfully. This is not a personal failing. It is structural logic.
And yet: when a system elevates to its summit a figure who embodies its own contradictions, those contradictions become maximally visible.
A female Prime Minister defending patriarchy makes the question unavoidable. “Is this truly Japanese tradition?” can now be asked with a force it has never before possessed.
This paradox also, and simultaneously, invalidates the existing arguments of both left and right.
The left, which calls for the abolition of the imperial system, critiques it as a symbol of patriarchal nationalism. But that critique lands on the distorted, post-Meiji imperial system — not on the Amaterasu-centered conception of imperial authority that preceded it.
The right, which insists on male-only succession as “Japanese tradition,” is protecting a Meiji invention — and in doing so, betraying the most ancient tradition Japan possesses.
Neither side can see Amaterasu.
That is what makes this the precise moment to speak.
VI Gathering the Remnants
The female principle of Amaterasu has not disappeared. It is in hiding.
Meiji’s overwriting was never complete. Across Japan, the remnants of the female principle are scattered. The work now is to gather them carefully, one by one, and bring them into the light.
In sacred practice.
The miko — the shrine maiden — still exists at shrines across Japan. A woman who mediates between the divine and the human. This is the direct institutional descendant of Himiko. The three goddesses of Munakata, enshrined at Munakata Taisha, guarded the Korea Strait — the most critical maritime passage of the ancient world. The protection of sea routes is an eminently practical, political function. That female deities held it is evidence that the female principle stood not at the decorative margin but at the operational center of society.
In language.
Umu — to give birth. Hagukumu — to nurture. Nagomu — to be at peace, to soften. The foundational verbs of Japanese encode female-principle concepts of life, care, and harmony at the deepest level. “Okage-sama” — the sense of gratitude for being sustained within a web of invisible relationships — is not submission to a dominant male god. It is the linguistic crystallization of an interdependent worldview in which the female principle is structurally primary.
In literature.
The women who shaped the pinnacle of Japanese literary expression in the Heian period — Murasaki Shikibu, Sei Shōnagon, Izumi Shikibu — were not operating at the cultural periphery. While men occupied the official language of Chinese, women opened the deepest literary possibilities of the Japanese language itself. The female principle was preserved inside language.
In performing arts.
The deepest spiritual themes of Noh are carried by female spiritual figures — Hannya, Hashihime, the jo no mai. Resentment, attachment, liberation — these are embodied overwhelmingly by female spirits. This is legible as the female principle taking refuge in the sacred space of art when it was displaced from the space of politics.
In philosophy.
Watsuji Tetsurō’s concept of ma — the interval, the between — holds that existence is not completed in the individual but generated in relationship. This is a relational ontology in which the female principle is structurally foundational. Nishida Kitarō’s “logic of place,” with its concept of absolute nothingness as the containing, receiving ground of being, resonates deeply with a female-principle metaphysics.
These remnants are not isolated points. Connect them and they become a line. Extend the line and it becomes a plane. What emerges is a single deep pattern — the same pattern — surfacing again and again across domains, across centuries.
From the Jōmon through the present, a Japanese worldview of serving authority, relational philosophy, and participatory relationship with nature has continued to breathe — quietly, in the margins, waiting.
VII Return to Amaterasu — A Declaration
This is not nostalgia.
It is not the romantic consumption of myth. It is not a longing for the past.
This is renewal in the most radical sense of the word.
One hundred and fifty years after the Satsuma-Chōshū coup, the structural failures of Meiji patriarchy are reaching their limits. Japan’s demographic collapse is not caused by women refusing to bear children. It is caused by the catastrophic divergence between Meiji-era patriarchal structures and the consciousness and capacities of contemporary women — a divergence that has passed the point of no return. Male loneliness and suicide rates. Female depression and eating disorders. Children’s alienation from school. These are not individual pathologies. They are structural symptoms produced by the gap between Meiji-era norms and the natural shape of human life.
Those who cry “protect Japanese tradition” are, in the great majority of cases, protecting values imported from the West during the Meiji period.
To recover the actual Japanese tradition — the Jōmon relationship with nature, the sovereignty of Amaterasu, the authority of the female shaman in the line of Himiko, the acceptance of the eight million diversities — is an act of return incomparably more fundamental than anything the self-described conservatives are proposing.
Those who call themselves conservative are doing the least conservative thing imaginable. Those who seek transformation are standing on the deepest ground of tradition.
This inversion must now be named, in clear language, without apology.
And Amaterasu is not Japan’s goddess alone.
Many of the world’s civilizations — across the agricultural revolution, sedentarization, and the establishment of private property — cleverly overwrote the female principle that had stood at their centers. Japan holds what may be the last living institutional memory of what was lost. Amaterasu can be offered to the world not as Japan’s claim to superiority but as an entry point to something humanity possessed before the overwriting began.
Japan’s first female Prime Minister is, at this very moment, moving to reinforce the Meiji patriarchal order as “Japanese tradition.”
We ask the question she will not ask.
Amaterasu still sits in Takamagahara — the Plain of High Heaven.
There is only one question that remains.
When will we finally be honest with Amaterasu?
The time is now.