Introduction
Parts 1 and 2 examined how the story of “126 generations of unbroken male-line succession” was never something that sustained itself autonomously — it was a political construction of a specific era, the Meiji period. This piece turns to the politicians currently driving that story through the Diet, and to their own personal histories. What emerges is not a mere coincidence, but the repetition of a structure first laid down 150 years ago.
“Restoration”: A Gesture That Was Doubled from the Start
It is worth recalling how the Meiji Restoration itself came about. The 1868 “Imperial Restoration Proclamation” (王政復古の大号令) was issued in the name of restoring direct imperial rule dating back to antiquity, and on that basis, the Tokugawa shogunate was overthrown. But what was actually established was not a restoration at all — it was an entirely new modern state, built by a new political elite centered on the Satsuma and Chōshū domains. The gesture of “restoration” masking the creation of a new regime was built into the starting point of Japan’s modernity from the outset.
This reading is not merely metaphorical. Japanese historiography includes serious scholarship analyzing the Imperial Restoration itself as a coup d’état. Kyoto University historian Takahashi Hidenao has published a paper titled “The ‘Advocates of Public Deliberation’ and the Satsuma Anti-Shogunate Faction: Reconsidering the Imperial Restoration Coup,” and some textbooks for “Integrated History,” a new subject introduced in Japanese high schools starting in the 2022 academic year, explicitly describe the Imperial Restoration as a coup.
The focal point is the “Kogosho Conference,” held immediately after the proclamation. At this meeting, troops from domains including Satsuma occupied the imperial palace grounds, and Nijō Nariyuki, the regent who had actually led the court up to that point, was barred from even entering. The proclamation abolished not only the shogunate, but also the offices of regent (sesshō) and chief advisor (kanpaku) — an institution that had persisted since Fujiwara no Mototsune in the Heian period, roughly a thousand years earlier. The decision to strip Tokugawa Yoshinobu of his offices and lands was pushed through under intense pressure from Iwakura Tomomi and the Satsuma domain, who did not rule out armed confrontation. The Sekkanke — the court nobility that had supported the Emperor for a thousand years — was forcibly removed by a new armed faction centered on Satsuma and Chōshū.
Of course, there is room for disagreement about whether “the Meiji Restoration” as a whole should be uniformly labeled a coup. While this particular episode carries strong coup-like characteristics, the Boshin War that followed was an armed conflict between former shogunate forces and the new government — a different character from a narrowly defined coup, in which the transfer of power is accomplished through the act of force itself. The scale of casualties was also far smaller than in civil wars like the French or Russian Revolutions. This is part of why Japanese settled on the distinct term “Ishin” (維新), rather than calling it either a “coup” or a “revolution.”
Still, at minimum, the starting point itself — the Imperial Restoration Proclamation and the Kogosho Conference that followed it — has real historiographical grounding as a coup that removed an existing elite by force. And it is an established sequence of events that, immediately following this starting point, the new male-line-only succession rule was created by the rising faction that had just seized power.
As established in Part 1, the rule of male-line-only succession was itself a relatively recent invention, created by this new regime — the Meiji government led by the Satsuma-Chōshū elite — to give the appearance of “an indigenous Japanese tradition” in service of the goal of revising the unequal treaties. In other words, the story of the “male line” was, from the very start, a product of the new regime that had proclaimed a “restoration.”
Who Is Advancing This Story Today
With this in mind, consider the backgrounds of the politicians who have led today’s debate over reforming the Imperial House Law.
LDP Vice President Asō Tarō is a great-great-grandson of Ōkubo Toshimichi, a Satsuma-domain figure and one of the three great leaders of the Restoration. Tracing the genealogy: Ōkubo’s second son, Makino Nobuaki (a diplomat and Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal), had a daughter, Yukiko, who married Yoshida Shigeru; their daughter Kazuko married Asō Takakichi, and Asō Tarō was born from that marriage. Asō has consistently led party discussions on this issue as chairman of the “Council for Ensuring Stable Imperial Succession.”
One further fact deserves mention. Asō’s sister, Nobuko, married Prince Tomohito of the Mikasa branch of the imperial family and became an imperial family member herself. While the proposal to draw on the former collateral branches seeks to root its bloodline legitimacy in a common ancestor with the Emperor dating back to the Muromachi period, the Asō family itself already possesses a far more recent tie to the imperial family — established in a single generation, through a single marriage. Set against this contrast, the very standard of how much “closeness” of bloodline should matter starts to look rather arbitrarily applied.
LDP Policy Research Council Chairman Kobayashi Takayuki, and Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae, are not connected to the Satsuma-Chōshū clique by blood. Takaichi, however, has been positioned as the political heir to Abe Shinzō’s line — Abe himself being a grandson of Kishi Nobusuke, and connected, through Kishi, to Satō Eisaku and, tracing the genealogy further, to the same marriage network linking Yoshida Shigeru and Ōkubo Toshimichi. In other words, through two distinct paths — one of blood, one of political lineage — the coalition pushing today’s reform bill connects, repeatedly, back to the very faction that carried out the Meiji Restoration.
A Nested Structure: Restoring the Restoration
This brings into view the strongest single thread running through this whole inquiry. A hundred and fifty years ago, a faction that seized power in the name of “restoration” created a new story — male-line-only succession — to secure that new regime. And today, the blood and political descendants of that very faction are trying to complete the story they created 150 years ago, this time as a genuinely unshakeable “tradition.”
This might be called “restoring the restoration.” A fiction created once is being re-performed by the descendants of its own makers, who seem to have forgotten it was ever a fiction — now staged, this time, as “an ancient and unbroken tradition.”
This is not an accusation about any individual politician’s hidden intentions. It should instead be understood as a repeating pattern embedded in the very formation of the modern Japanese state. No one’s inner motives can be definitively established. But the fact remains: the way these figures’ own political legitimacy has been constructed (through blood and political lineage) and the logic of the institution they are advancing (bloodline-based imperial succession) share a strikingly similar structure.
Another Contradiction: The Conservative Idealization of Meiji
One more point deserves attention here. A segment of conservative opinion holds up the Meiji era itself as an ideal to which Japan should return. Calls to reappraise the spirit of the Imperial Rescript on Education, nostalgia for the kokutai ideology embedded in the Meiji Constitution, and the phrase “return to the spirit of Meiji” have recurred throughout conservative discourse.
But this contains a significant internal contradiction. If one genuinely wished to preserve “a tradition passed down unbroken since antiquity,” the ideal to look to would be the age of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki myths, or perhaps the flexible pre-modern practices that included the concubine system — not a specific period of modern state-building like Meiji. As shown in Part 1, Meiji was precisely the era in which tradition was substantially re-edited and reinvented. To idealize Meiji regardless is, in effect, to say that the imperial institution as re-edited for a modern nation-state is itself the ideal — a claim that sits in direct tension with the premise of preserving “an unbroken tradition since time immemorial.”
What is actually being idealized is not Japan’s ancient past, but that specific moment when the Satsuma-Chōshū elite seized power and built a new nation by borrowing the Emperor’s authority. The structure of the Meiji Restoration — a “restoration” that was in fact the founding of a new regime — is, in this present Reiwa-era conservative idealization of Meiji, being repeated once again, in much the same form.
Conclusion
The doctrine of absolute preservation of male-line succession claims to defend an ancient tradition, while in practice locating its ideal in Meiji. But Meiji was precisely the era in which tradition was re-edited for the purpose of building a modern state. Once one admits that the idealized era is itself a modern invention, the premise of “tradition since time immemorial” can no longer hold.
And yet this contradiction is almost never confronted directly — perhaps because confronting it would be deeply inconvenient for the very descendants of the faction that created the story of Meiji in the first place. A hundred and fifty years ago, a new story was created in the name of “restoration.” Today, the descendants of that story’s makers are repeating the same gesture of “restoration,” attempting to finally complete it. Recognizing this repetition may be the point at which the debate over imperial succession can finally move beyond questions of bloodline requirements, and become a genuine inquiry into Japanese modernity itself.