There is an idea in physics called the holographic principle. It holds that the entire information content of a region of space is inscribed, without remainder, on the boundary surface that encloses it. The interior of a volume is folded, in its entirety, into the thin surface that wraps around it.
Cultural transmission works in a strikingly similar way. A line of scripture, a single gesture, a form handed down through practice—onto the small surface of each such code, the whole worldview of a community is compressed and written. The one who receives it unfolds it through the body, reconstituting it as a three-dimensional whole within their own life. Each time a short sutra is recited, each time a prescribed gesture is repeated, the entire world behind it is restored—without passing through conscious awareness.
If that is so, a hypothesis follows. By inscribing a hierarchy at just one point of the code, might the whole of the restored world be oriented along that hierarchy? Because everything is folded in, the alteration can be local while the solid that rises up is stained to its furthest corners. The encoding at the origin of a religion worked toward the reinforcement of patriarchal society, toward its institutionalization—this reading is, in all likelihood, correct. But as we carefully open up what that correctness contains, it stops being the simple story of patriarchy unilaterally stamping a code. It becomes a story of co-evolution, in which code and social structure write each other.
Let me first walk through four strata to extract the grammar of this co-evolution, and then bring that grammar to bear on the most visceral code lying at our own feet—”an unbroken imperial line” and “male-line succession.”
Mesopotamia: An Ambivalence Pared Away
The Sumerian goddess Inanna, later Ishtar, was an ambivalent divinity who embodied fertility and war, eros and destruction all at once. At the center of the temple economy of the city-states stood female priests, in an age whose code still bound worship, economy, and politics together inseparably.
But as the city-state swelled into the territorial state and then the empire, governing vast lands through standing armies and bureaucracy, the pantheon too was reorganized. A male supreme god rose to the apex, and the goddess’s ambivalence was pared down toward the side of “chaos to be controlled,” of “dangerous sexuality.” What matters here is that no one debased the goddess as a matter of doctrine. When the apparatus of governance centralizes, the hierarchy of the gods centralizes with it. The code mirrors the structure, and that code reproduces the next generation’s structure as something self-evident. The thinning of Inanna’s ambivalence was not an event of ideas but an event of co-evolution, in which structure and code moved together.
Greece: Incorporation by Demotion
The ending of Aeschylus’s tragedy The Oresteia stages the rewriting of a code on stage with almost textbook clarity. At the trial of Orestes, who has killed his mother, the old goddesses of the earth—the Erinyes, avengers of a mother’s blood—confront the new Olympian gods, Apollo and Athena. Apollo absolves the matricide with the argument that the true parent is the father, the mother merely the soil that holds the seed; Athena endorses it, and the patrilineal order prevails.
What deserves attention is that this resolution does not erase the old goddesses. The Erinyes are renamed the Eumenides, the kindly ones, re-enshrined beneath the city, and the story ends. Rather than deleting the old stratum, it is filed into a lower rank and built into the institution. The overwriting here takes the concrete form of “incorporation by demotion rather than disposal.” And this mythic settlement and the actual social process in Athens—the waning of the old power of the clans, citizenship coming to be defined patrilineally—legitimated each other. The drama consecrated the structure; the structure required the drama.
Japan: A Goddess at the Summit, an Institution Made Male
The Japanese archipelago shows co-evolution along two timelines.
One is the ancient stratum. The supreme deity Amaterasu is a goddess, and the traces are thick of female ritual officiants—shrine maidens, the consecrated imperial priestesses—who once carried the core of worship. But during the formation of the ritsuryō state, when a patriarchal model of governance and a bureaucracy of Chinese origin were introduced, the center of ritual gradually shifted to male officials and priests, and female officiants were pushed to the margins, into auxiliary positions. While a goddess was kept enthroned at the summit, the institution that served her was masculinized. This torsion shows well that co-evolution is no monolith. And as we will see, this same torsion trails directly into the modern debate over imperial succession.
The other timeline is the modern. To build the modern emperor system and the nation-state, the Meiji state re-encoded the shrines, rituals, and customs that had until then varied from region to region into a single system: State Shinto. At the same time, the civil code’s “house” (ie) system concentrated headship rights in the father, and the master of the household’s rites too was fixed as the head—the male. Here the re-encoding of religious code and the re-encoding of social institution did not proceed separately and click together afterward. From the outset they were designed as one, the two wheels of a single state project. This is the most deliberate, most artificial instance of co-evolution.
India: The Loop of Text and Custom
The ancient Indian Manusmṛti (Laws of Manu) is a text that finely encodes the order of caste and of gender. Its provision that a woman is to remain her whole life under the protection of father, husband, and son is well known.
What should be read here as co-evolution is that this text neither simply transcribed reality nor unilaterally produced it. A patrilineal custom of inheritance over land and livestock came first; a text was compiled that authorized this as sacred cosmic order; and that text in turn fixed the custom as “sacred necessity,” reproducing any deviation from it as sin. Custom births code, and code projects custom into the future. This loop kept turning for centuries. The text was at once a mirror reflecting the structure and a device dispatching the structure into the future.
The Grammar of Co-evolution, and the Traces Left Behind
Lay the four side by side, and it becomes clear what patriarchal encoding is not. It is not a stamp completed at a single point of origin. It is not a doctrine that some thinker devised and imposed from above. It is not a fate intrinsic to religion. Rather, every time, changes in social structure—the centralization of governance, the rise of the territorial state, the consolidation of patrilineal inheritance—and the re-encoding of myth, scripture, and ritual proceeded simultaneously, each serving as cause and effect of the other. Structure selects code, code consecrates structure, and the consecrated structure demands the next code. This circle is the concrete shape of co-evolution.
Holographic compression has one further property: within a fragment, the trace of the whole remains. An overwritten stratum is never wholly erased. Inanna’s ambivalence; the Erinyes enshrined underground; the shadow of the goddess Amaterasu and the old shrine maidens; the economic power of women that the Laws of Manu sought to suppress—each is a trace that remains written on the boundary surface. That a trace remains is itself proof that a different encoding once existed. Patriarchal encoding was not a necessity of origin but a choice under particular social conditions.
From here we can extract the grammar of co-evolution as three operations. A code that claims to be “ancient tradition” usually conceals these three. First, the fabrication of origin—passing off a layer made later as something continuous from the beginning. Second, the naturalization of choice—insisting that one option among many is the sole, natural form. Third, the concealment of the circle—making a self-reference (“right because it is tradition”) appear to be a groundless ground with no beginning.
There is no need to leave these three operations in the abstract. At our very feet lies a living code in which they have crystallized at their highest purity: the unbroken imperial line, and male-line succession.
The Newest Tradition: The Three Operations Applied to the Unbroken Line
In the Japanese community, perhaps the most highly compressed code of all is bansei ikkei—the unbroken imperial line—and male-line succession. A single bloodline continuing without interruption since the age of myth, and one that can be traced, moreover, from father to father. In the conservative narrative, this single point folds in everything: the national essence, continuity, legitimacy, the self-identity of the Japanese. That is exactly why touching it is experienced as the collapse of the whole, and fiercely refused. The most densely compressed boundary surface most strongly resists alteration. Let us apply the three operations in turn.
The Fabrication of Origin
The unbroken line asserts a continuity “never once severed since Emperor Jimmu.” But this continuity is itself a code constructed retroactively in later ages.
One decisive fact: the very phrase bansei ikkei is not an ancient word handed down from antiquity. It is a coinage of the Meiji statesman Iwakura Tomomi, and only once the term was written into Article 1 of the Meiji Constitution was it cast as a central concept of the state. It is not a word that echoed down from the age of the gods, but a slogan invented to build a modern nation-state. The newest of words, held aloft as the oldest of truths. The fabrication of origin is inscribed in the very provenance of the phrase.
The absolutization of “the male line,” too, was not as self-evident from antiquity as conservatives claim. Across history, ten reigns by eight female emperors actually occurred—Suiko, Kōgyoku (Saimei), Jitō, Genmei, Genshō, Kōken (Shōtoku), Meishō, and Go-Sakuramachi. The imperial-studies scholar Tokoro Isao notes that until the early Meiji period there was almost no argument and no written rule limiting succession to male-line males to the exclusion of the female line. The very opposition of the terms “male line” and “female line” only came into use in the Meiji era. In other words, the norm that “the emperor must be a male-line male” was erected as a principle “consistent from the origin” only after the fact—by erasing countless real exceptions, or by reinterpreting them as “mere stopgaps.” It is the operation of insisting that the newest arrangement is the oldest law.
The Naturalization of Choice
The claim that “if it is not male-line it is not the imperial house” presents one of many forms of succession as the sole, natural form. But there is a counterargument here that cannot be overlooked. Conservatives will say: the female emperors of the past were, every one, “male-line women” who carried the imperial blood on the father’s side; there was never a single “female-line” emperor whose lineage traced through a woman.[^1] This is historically correct. So we must not advance the argument carelessly.
Yet the very existence of this counterargument is what exposes the operation of naturalizing choice. The fact that male-line women did actually ascend the throne, several of them, is precisely the unshakeable proof that the constraint “the emperor must be male” was not a necessity from antiquity. If women could ascend, then the male-only rule is no law of the cosmos but a chosen institution.
When, and modeled on what, was that “choosing” carried out? The drafting process of the Meiji Imperial House Law has left the answer. As the imperial-studies scholar Takamori Akinori points out, the drafters’ working papers noted, as grounds for the “male” limitation, the royal succession systems of European states such as Prussia, Belgium, and Sweden. These belong to the lineage of succession laws that, in Christendom, were extended in the direction of excluding women. The Meiji “male-line male” limitation, then, was no pure crystallization of native Japanese tradition, but a modern choice adopted with nineteenth-century European male-preference succession as its model. That the drafters themselves could cite no real domestic textual grounds is the most eloquent fact of all.
Here the torsion in Japan’s ancient stratum, touched on earlier, comes into play. Amaterasu, the supreme deity whose descendants the imperial line claims to be, is a goddess. A woman is set at the apex of myth, yet the logic of succession is consolidated patrilineally. A goddess is enthroned at the very top, while the institution serving her is restricted to men. This very twist tells us, from within myth itself, that the male line was not an ancient necessity but a later choice. By the possibilities left un-erased—the female emperors, and the goddess herself—the “natural” is refuted.
The Concealment of the Circle
“Because it has continued in the male line, it must continue in the male line.” This reasoning slices out a single lap of the co-evolutionary circle and presents it as a self-evident ground with no beginning. But male-line succession holds authority because power once encoded it so, and that encoding existed to justify and perpetuate the social structure of its time—the patriarchal ie system, patrilineal inheritance.
The decisive moment is, again, Meiji. Until the Edo period, no codified rule for imperial succession existed. There were customs and precedents, and female emperors as exceptions. What cast all this into a single iron rule was the old Imperial House Law of 1889. Its Article 1 prescribed: “The Imperial Throne of the Empire of Japan shall be succeeded to by male descendants of the male line of the imperial ancestors.” The moment when what had contained customs and exceptions became, as the design of a modern state, an explicit absolute rule.
And this re-encoding did not proceed alone. As we already saw in the fourth stratum—the civil code’s ie system concentrated headship in the father, State Shinto reorganized local rites into a single system, and the Imperial House Law restricted the line to the male line. These did not happen separately and coincide by chance; they were designed as one, as so many gears of the single project of building the modern emperor system and the nation-state. The absolutization of the male line is, rather than an inheritance from the age of the gods, exceedingly close to a modern invention.
If so, the content of “we defend it because it is tradition” becomes this: “because Meiji power wrote it so, it is still written so.” The ground is circular. The unbroken line legitimates the present institution, and the present institution requires the unbroken line. Outside that circle there is no independent foundation.
Reading the Boundary Surface
Return to the holographic reading, and this is what we find. What is written on the surface of the bansei ikkei code is not “truth since Jimmu.” It is “the manner of restoring the world that a certain era’s power chose in order to perpetuate itself.” Read the surface carefully, and what shows through is not the ancient gods but the handwriting of two specific authors—the ritsuryō state and the Meiji state. One sees the newness of the brushstroke that calls the newest layer the oldest.
In the same sense that the universe’s entire information is encoded on a boundary, a certain political intention was encoded onto the boundary surface as “sacred continuity.” That is the unbroken line; that is male-line succession. And this is not a matter confined to the imperial succession. “A national essence continuing since the age of myth,” “the ancient Japanese form of the family”—much of what the ultraconservative narrative points to as “from antiquity” shares the same structure. Whichever of the three operations one examines, it does not reach the ground. The bedrock they believe they stand upon is a foothold standing on a picture they themselves drew.
Turning the Blade on Oneself
But this blade comes back on oneself, too. If it does not, it is merely a tool for cutting others down.
The claim that “tradition has no foundation” does not reach the conclusion that “speaking of tradition is therefore void.” It is not only the ultraconservative tradition that lacks a foundation, but every tradition. To see that the unbroken line has no foundation is not a conclusion that ends debate but an entrance that begins it. It is not only the unbroken line that lacks a foundation. Any alternative conception—a female emperor, a female-line emperor, or the maintenance of the present form—equally lacks a natural foundation. Each is a code that someone chooses. The blood of myth no longer guarantees any one of them.
So the blade of critique does not turn toward the nihilism of “tradition has no grounds, therefore anything goes.” It turns here: if the form of succession has no natural foundation, then which code we weave the future from becomes a choice that we, the living, must take up as sovereign—not the authority of the past, not Emperor Jimmu, not the Meiji oligarchs.
This is not speculation. It coincides with the very structure of the Constitution of Japan. The present Constitution defines the emperor as “the symbol of the unity of the People, deriving his position from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power.” It placed the source of succession’s legitimacy not in the blood of myth but in the will of the people. The ultimate ground of the bansei ikkei code lies not in the age of the gods but within our present consent. In the very place where the former constitution raised Iwakura Tomomi’s coinage in its Article 1, the present constitution set “the will of the people.” There is no clearer rewriting of a code than this.
The flaw in the conservative narrative is that it “chooses, while pretending not to choose.” To defend male-line succession as the sovereign’s choice can be a perfectly legitimate political position. But to say “it was naturally so from antiquity, so there is no room for debate” is the operation of passing choice off as necessity—a gesture that quietly strips the sovereign of the right to choose. To expose the absence of a foundation is not to permit irresponsibility. It is to draw the responsibility of choice back from the hand of power into our own hands. The recognition that there is no foundation is not nihilism; it is a synonym for freedom and responsibility.
Co-evolution is not a one-directional fixation. Because it is a circle, given a different input it can begin to turn in a different direction. By consciously rewriting just one point of the code, we can, through the repeated unfolding, quietly re-weave the whole of the world that rises up—in a direction without hierarchy. Wearing the kimono unbound from the norms of gender. Recomposing gesture and language. Opening the designation of ritual’s subject to neutrality. Returning the form of imperial succession from the hand of myth to the hand of our consent. Not destruction, but re-encoding. To rebel is not to scorch tradition to ash. It is, having seen through that tradition has no natural grounds, nonetheless to choose anew—on one’s own responsibility—which stratum to draw upon and which code to restore the future from.
One final line to draw. The grand narrative that there was, in the beginning, a paradise of the goddess faces strong objection from archaeology and anthropology. What I wish to claim here is not “a lost paradise.” It is the limited but sufficiently strong fact that within each tradition the traces of female ritual and of a goddess’s centrality certainly remain, and that the process by which they were later marginalized and demoted can be traced through the sources. There is no need to speak of a lost paradise. Merely showing the traces of overwriting suffices to reach the conclusion that it was a choice and not a necessity—and that it could therefore be otherwise.
[^1]: A note on terminology, since the distinction is central to the debate and easily lost in translation. Japanese discourse separates two questions that English tends to blur under the single word “empress.” The first is the sex of the reigning monarch: a female emperor (女性天皇, josei tennō) is simply a woman who reigns in her own right—not a consort. The second is the line of descent: male-line (男系, dankei) means the throne passes through an unbroken chain of fathers, whereas female-line (女系, jokei) means it passes at some point through a mother. The two axes are independent. All eight female emperors in Japanese history were male-line women: women who reigned, but who were themselves daughters of emperors on their father’s side, so the patrilineal chain was never broken through them. A female-line emperor—a child who inherits the throne through their mother’s line—has never existed. This is why a conservative can, without contradiction, accept that women have reigned while still rejecting reform: permitting a female emperor (a reigning woman) need not break the male line, but permitting a female-line emperor (succession through a mother) would. The essay’s argument turns on this: the historical female emperors prove that the bar on women reigning was never absolute, which is enough to show that the present male-only rule is a chosen institution rather than an ancient necessity.