The Erased Queen, the Grafted Queen
The name Himiko appears nowhere in Japan’s own historical sources. This queen, said to have ruled the land of Wa in the third century, survives only in an external record: the Wei Zhi, compiled in third-century China. She is absent entirely from both the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki.
In her place, the Nihon Shoki offers a graft: Empress Jingū. In an annotation to the chronicle of her reign, the compilers deliberately quote passages from the Wei Zhi‘s account of Wa, guiding readers to infer that Empress Jingū and Himiko were one and the same. To make this connection work, the compilers went so far as to shift the chronology of what appear to be genuinely historical events forward by two sexagenary cycles—120 years—a striking act of deliberate manipulation.
In other words, the equation “Himiko = Empress Jingū” is not an ancient inheritance. It is a graft constructed for a specific political need at the moment of eighth-century compilation. By borrowing the internationally attested reality of a “Queen of Wa,” confirmed in official Chinese history, and transplanting it onto a figure internal to the chronicles, the compilers sought to lend the Yamato court’s own narrative a legitimacy validated from outside.
Present-day positivist historiography does not support this identification. Himiko is recorded as a ruler of Wa in Chinese sources; Empress Jingū is understood as part of the mythology of royal authority as depicted in Japanese sources. The two belong to different bodies of material, with different roles and different historical contexts. Empress Jingū’s own historicity cannot be confirmed, and the prevailing scholarly view today treats her as a figure assembled from the memory of multiple female chieftains and matrilineal elements that once supported royal authority—narrativized into a single character.
The Reading: “There Were Multiple Female Chieftains”
What deserves pause here is that phrase—”assembled from the memory of multiple female chieftains.” Rather than passing over it as a mere caveat in source criticism, it is worth developing as an active hypothesis.
To begin with, the Wei Zhi itself already records more than one female ruler. After Himiko’s death, a king was briefly installed, but the realm fell into disorder, and civil war claimed over a thousand lives. Order was restored only when Himiko’s kinswoman, a thirteen-year-old named Iyo (or Toyo), was installed as the new queen. This was not a one-off exception confined to Himiko’s reign; the practice of restoring order by installing a woman as ruler was independently repeated.
Himiko herself, moreover, had been “jointly established” by the leaders of multiple regional polities in the aftermath of the Wa civil war. For such a joint installation to succeed, female rulership must already have been an acceptable option within Wa society at the time.
Archaeology corroborates this. At the Shimanoyama Tumulus in Nara Prefecture, the rear circular mound contains a chieftain’s burial with a large vertical stone chamber, while the front square section holds a clay-lined burial accompanied by a large number of bracelet-shaped stone ornaments—objects descended from the shell bracelets worn by women in the Yayoi period. This appears to be the grave of someone charged with ritual duties, likely a female religious specialist. Similar female chieftain burials, accompanied by mirrors and ritual implements, have been confirmed across the archipelago, from Ehime to Hyōgo. Himiko and Iyo, the two names that happened to survive in Chinese records, are likely only the visible tip of a far broader pattern of female chieftaincy scattered across the islands.
The Bilateral Substrate
This is not merely an accumulation of individual cases; it can be reframed as a question of social structure. In current historiography, there is near-consensus that ancient Japan’s underlying society was neither strictly patrilineal nor matrilineal but “bilateral” (sōkei)—a system in which descent through both the father’s and mother’s lines carried equal weight, reflected in marriage practices and kinship terminology alike.
The turning point away from this bilateral structure can even be dated with some precision. The rule that children born of free men and free women should belong to the father’s lineage is recorded as originating in 645, and is thought to have actually been implemented from around the reign of Emperor Tenji in the latter half of the seventh century, with society gradually shifting toward patriliny through the eighth century. Even the Taihō Code, promulgated in 701, retained a provision granting the children of a reigning empress the same status—imperial prince or princess—as the children of a reigning emperor. This is a vestige of the older bilateral order persisting within a legal framework otherwise structured around Chinese-derived patrilineal principles.
To speak of a “matrilineal tradition” is, strictly speaking, slightly off the mark. More precisely, there existed a bilateral substrate, which was gradually overwritten from the latter half of the seventh century through the eighth century by the importation of Chinese-style patrilineal principles.
Rereading Not as a Single Lineage, but as a Regional Network
Across the Yayoi and Kofun periods, multiple regional polities—Izumo, Kibi, Tsukushi, Yamato—coexisted on the archipelago, each apparently structured around a bilateral form of chieftaincy: male chieftains paired with female ritual specialists, or in some cases female chieftains themselves. Before Yamato established its dominant position over the archipelago, these regions maintained their own distinct funerary cultures and ritual systems. The distinctive ritual pottery excavated from the Hashihaka Tumulus in Nara, for instance, has been traced not to Nara but to the Kibi region—evidence that Yamato’s central ritual apparatus was itself assembled by absorbing multiple regional traditions.
The female ritual specialists of these various regions likely existed along a spectrum, ranging from externally documented figures like Himiko and Iyo to anonymous individuals buried locally, like the occupant of the Shimanoyama Tumulus—a network of varying visibility. As Yamato’s power expanded, these regional networks were absorbed and subordinated, leaving traces in the consolidation of ritual practice recorded in tumuli and shrine traditions.
Then, in the eighth century, at the moment of chronicle compilation, the memory of this once-dispersed network of female ritual specialists was compressed and rearranged into a single line of succession—Empress Jingū, Yamatototohimomosohime, Toyosukiirihime, Yamatohime—figures arrayed as points along one genealogy. The institution of the Saiō, the imperial priestess at Ise, can further be read as the transformation of this dispersed regional ritual function into a single office, monopolized and administered by the court. The shift from numerous regional female ritual specialists to one centrally managed Saiō was, one might argue, itself a process of consolidation and simplification running in parallel with the transition from a bilateral order to a patrilineal, ritsuryō-based state.
The Household: Another Stage Where the Same Narrowing Repeated
So far, this has all concerned the level of the imperial line. But the same pattern of narrowing recurs, on a different timeline, at the level of the ordinary household—among commoners and the warrior class alike.
Women’s inheritance rights themselves were progressively curtailed from the Heian through the Sengoku period. Under the Yōrō Code of the Nara-Heian era, both men and women held inheritance rights, partition inheritance was practiced, and a wife’s share was equal to that of the legitimate heir. Under the Kamakura-period Goseibai Shikimoku, daughters still held real rights to inherit shōen land. By the late Kamakura period, however, documents from local warrior families show daughters’ land inheritance reduced to a “life interest”—a right that lasted only for her own lifetime, not permanently transmissible, reverting to the main house upon her death. In deeds from the Nanboku-chō period, partition inheritance was abandoned altogether in favor of single-heir succession chosen on merit, with a daughter’s inheritance reduced to a fallback option used only in the absence of a son. By the Sengoku period, in documents such as the Chōsokabe Motochika Hyakkajō, the decision over a vassal’s land inheritance had been absorbed entirely into the lord’s authority, and women were no longer treated as independent legal persons at all.
In parallel, women’s political power was also channeled into an increasingly narrow conduit. In the Heian period, a woman who had borne an emperor’s heir gained political voice as kokumo (“mother of the state”) once her son ascended the throne, and regency government by the maternal in-laws (sekkan seiji) arose on the strength of this maternal authority. Compared to an earlier era in which an empress might exercise political skill directly alongside the emperor, this represents a narrowing of the channel through which a woman’s advancement could occur—now tied exclusively to bearing a son and becoming his mother.
The internal structure of the “household” (ie) itself was changing too. From the ninth through the tenth century, a household oriented toward permanence through an unbroken father-son chain took shape, and from the eleventh century onward, under the shōen estate system, the representative authority of the household head was strengthened. Early household-head authority could be inherited or exercised by a widow (goke) when her husband died young—a custom known as goke-ken, “widow’s authority,” which persisted through the early medieval period. But by the fourteenth century, with the establishment of the sōryō system of single-heir succession to the main line, widows were excluded from household-head authority altogether, and goke-ken shrank into a much narrower “housewife’s authority” (shufu-ken) confined to domestic management.
Upon this narrowing came the developments of the early modern period. Sengoku-era domain law sometimes actually constrained parental authority through the power of the daimyo, but in the latter half of the Edo period, Confucian patriarchal principles were reasserted with new force, and the primacy of the eldest son, along with the devaluation of women, became entrenched across society. And this consciousness of preserving the household was no longer confined to the warrior class. Among prosperous farming and merchant families too, strong authority concentrated in the household head, while other family members and women were treated as lesser—a structure closely resembling that of the samurai household, now shared broadly across status lines. It was this cross-class consciousness of household preservation as a paramount value that would later provide the Meiji government with the social soil on which to legislate it as “Japanese tradition.”
Meiji: Two Architects, Two Levels
The decisive rupture came with the Meiji era. But it was not so much the culmination of a gradual tradition as the product of an extraordinarily specific—and remarkably contingent—political process. And interestingly, though different architects designed the imperial-line level and the household level respectively, the two shared the very same institutional footing within the Meiji bureaucracy.
The architect at the imperial level was Inoue Kowashi (1844–1895), a legal bureaucrat from Kumamoto domain. Inoue substantially led the drafting of the Meiji Constitution, finalized the text of the Imperial Rescript on Education, and compiled the Imperial House Law—having a hand in all three of the foundational documents underpinning the modern emperor-centered state, earning him the title of the “designer” of the Meiji state.
It was this same Inoue who, during the drafting of the Imperial House Law, strongly argued for the exclusion of women from succession. What is striking is that this was by no means a foregone conclusion. Itō Hirobumi, Japan’s first prime minister, initially favored allowing female succession, citing historical precedents of reigning empresses in Japan as well as reigning queens in Europe, and reasoning that as Japan modernized, the presence of female sovereigns would become the world’s norm. An earlier draft of the Imperial House Law had even included a provision permitting succession through the female line should the male line die out.
It was Inoue who blocked this. His concern was that if a woman became tennō, the public would perceive her husband as socially superior, creating a risk that the husband would seize real power and involve himself in politics. He raised a further concern, touching on the very continuity of the dynasty: were a female tennō to take a husband from a particular clan, the imperial house itself might effectively be absorbed into that clan’s lineage. Despite Itō—then the most powerful figure in the government—favoring the opposite position, Inoue’s reasoning prevailed. Inoue further recast the historical female sovereigns as merely “provisional” or “stopgap” rulers, an interpretation that would later become the substantive starting point for the “stopgap theory” eventually codified as academic consensus.
The architects at the household level were two brothers, Hozumi Nobushige and Hozumi Yatsuka. The elder, Nobushige, led the drafting of the Civil Code and the Family Registration Law as chief examiner of the Code Investigation Committee, and is known as the “father of the Civil Code.” He stood in the historical-evolutionary school of jurisprudence and, during the great civil-code debate, actually sided with the faction favoring postponement—a careful comparative jurist wary of hasty implementation, rather than a rigid conservative. Nobushige also wrote a commentary titled Lectures on the Imperial House Law, making him, remarkably, both the practical architect of the Civil Code’s household system and the official commentator on the Imperial House Law—a single figure connecting the two domains of design.
The younger brother, Yatsuka, was a constitutional scholar who held to absolute monarchism and championed the doctrine of “loyalty and filial piety as one.” He held offices—Cabinet Legislation Bureau councillor, Privy Council secretary, Imperially-appointed member of the House of Peers, palace advisor—that placed him in exactly the same corridors of power as Inoue. When Boissonade’s French-modeled draft civil code was presented, Yatsuka published his famous essay “When the Civil Code Emerges, Loyalty and Filial Piety Perish,” arguing that this individualistic code, if enacted, would destroy Japan’s traditional morality of loyalty and filial devotion. This single essay is credited as a major factor in forcing the postponement of the old civil code’s implementation.
The “road not taken” was thus not merely hypothetical. Boissonade’s old civil code had already been promulgated as a concrete, existing body of law. It was overturned by Yatsuka’s moral offensive, and replaced by the household-head-centered Meiji Civil Code of 1898, which drew far more heavily on German legal models.
The National Survey of Customs: A Diversity Already Known, and the Customs Left Behind
What matters further is that the Meiji government, in drafting the Civil Code, actually conducted a nationwide survey of customs. The Ministry of Justice’s compilation, A Compendium of Civil Customs Nationwide, published in 1880, systematically gathered civil customs from across the country regarding inheritance, the succession of ritual property, marriage, and adoption. The government, in other words, was fully aware that family practices varied enormously by region.
The survey’s records on Tōhoku’s villages are especially striking. In Isawa District, Rikuchū Province (present-day Iwate Prefecture): “In farming households, if there is an eldest daughter, it is customary to take a husband and have her inherit, in accordance with the practical needs of labor.” In Tagawa District, Uzen Province (present-day Yamagata Prefecture): “In farming households, even where there is a son, if there is an eldest daughter, an adopted son-in-law is taken and she is made to inherit, in order to divide the burden of labor.” Even where a male heir existed, an eldest daughter was deliberately given a husband and made the heir—for reasons of straightforward agricultural practicality. This is the practice known as ane-katoku, “elder-sister headship,” and it appears to have been a widespread, unexceptional inheritance pattern across Tōhoku’s rice-farming villages. Similar records from Izu and Hitachi describe inheritance passing, regardless of gender, to whichever child was oldest or born first.
Meanwhile, the merchant houses of Ōmi and Osaka operated on yet another logic entirely. Ōmi merchants, in taking on apprentices, chose sharp, capable children from among those with regional or family ties, promoting them through the ranks of clerk, senior clerk, and eventually branch-house partner; a system known as zaisho-nobori, in which promotion depended on periodic performance reviews back home, closely resembled today’s meritocracy. Where the samurai or farming household treated the continuity of bloodline itself as the point of the “house,” the merchant household treated its “house” as a vessel for a trade name and its accumulated credit—a purpose for which an heir’s blood relation mattered far less. Capability, not kinship, was the guiding logic.
Further south still, a society operating on an entirely different logic survived, alive and functioning, into the nineteenth century. In the Ryūkyūs, women’s spiritual power was traditionally held to be strong, and the religious offices of noro and yuta were held by women. A belief known as onari-gami held that sisters (onari) possessed greater spiritual power than their brothers (ekeri) and protected them; this belief was extended to the level of the state itself, and under the Ryūkyū Kingdom, a Kikoe-Ōgimi—the kingdom’s chief priestess—was selected from among the king’s sisters, forming an institutionalized dual sovereignty in which the king governed and the Kikoe-Ōgimi presided over ritual. This is precisely the same pattern seen in Himiko paired with her brother, or in the male chieftain and female ritual specialist buried together at Shimanoyama—except that here it survived, functioning as an actual state institution, all the way into the latter half of the nineteenth century.
This institution was then dismantled by political force, through the 1879 annexation of the Ryūkyū Kingdom—the very same decade in which Inoue Kowashi began his work on the Imperial House Law, and the Hozumi brothers were shaping the Civil Code at the Code Investigation Committee. In the very years when mainland Japan was legally fixing a single model—male-line succession for the throne, household-head authority for the family—into law, the newly annexed Ryūkyūs saw their own bilateral system of dual sovereignty dismantled outright. Designing a new, singular model at the center; dismantling an existing, bilateral model at the periphery—two faces of the same project of national consolidation.
And a further irony compounds this. On the mainland, postwar democratic reform brought a major revision of the Civil Code in 1948, abolishing the household system and establishing gender equality in family law. Okinawa, however, remained under American administration at the time, and the old law—the Meiji Civil Code, household system included—was preserved unchanged there, only being brought into line with mainland reform in 1957, through the efforts of women’s organizations. Okinawa had its own bilateral order of governance and ritual stripped away first; it was then made to carry, for nearly a decade longer than the mainland, the very patriarchal system that had been transplanted onto it in the first place.
Okinawa (a religious logic), Tōhoku (an economic logic), and the merchant houses of Ōmi and Osaka (a managerial logic)—three regions, each for its own independent reasons, actually living out forms of succession different from single-heir male inheritance. The Meiji government, having surveyed at least the customs of Tōhoku and the country at large and thus aware of this diversity, ultimately extended only a single model—rooted in warrior-class practice, centered on household-head authority and eldest-son succession—across the nation as “Japanese tradition.”
Doubting the Narrative of “Ancient, Unbroken Tradition”—Though It Is Not a Single, Seamless Story
The implications of this reading extend beyond the interpretation of ancient history. In current debates over imperial succession, the claim that “succession through the male line alone is Japan’s ancient tradition” is often treated as a given premise for discussion.
Here, however, in asserting the constructed nature of this claim, a caution is in order. To narrate it as a single continuous story—that a singularization began at some point and has simply continued unbroken to the present—would itself be inaccurate. Several events of a genuinely different character need to be distinguished.
The first is the narrative singularization and gradual patrilineal drift that proceeded from the latter half of the seventh century through the eighth. Chronicle compilation compressed the memory of multiple female rulers and ritual specialists into the single genealogical point of Empress Jingū, while marriage and kinship practices shifted gradually from bilateral toward patrilineal norms. Yet at this stage, the institutional possibility of a woman becoming tennō was not foreclosed; female sovereigns continued to reign afterward, and, well into the Edo period, Empress Meishō and Empress Go-Sakuramachi also ascended the throne.
The second is the gradual curtailment of women’s inheritance and household authority that unfolded, outside the imperial line entirely, from the Heian through the Sengoku period: the narrowing of political influence to the maternal channel of kokumo, the exclusion of widow’s authority in the fourteenth century, the reduction of daughters’ inheritance to a mere life interest, and the eventual shift to single-heir succession. This is a separate track from the imperial narrative, yet it repeats the same pattern—narrowing multiple channels into one—over a span of nearly five hundred years.
The third is the decisive rupture: the complete legal exclusion of women from imperial succession under the old Imperial House Law of 1889, occurring almost simultaneously with the nationwide legal codification of household-head authority and eldest-son succession under the Meiji Civil Code of 1898. Both decisions were the product of extraordinarily specific and contingent political judgments made by particular individuals—Inoue Kowashi, Hozumi Nobushige, and Hozumi Yatsuka—who shared the very same institutional footing within the Meiji bureaucracy. Only at this stage was the possibility of a woman becoming either tennō or household head finally closed off in law, completely and simultaneously at both levels.
The fourth is the postwar mythologization. The current Imperial House Law inherits this Meiji-era provision unchanged, while explaining it as “history and tradition” reaching back to the legendary first emperor, Jinmu. A specific political judgment made in a specific, datable year by specific, identifiable officials is thereby retold as though it were an unchanging essence stretching back before the common era.
The claim that “male-line, male-only succession is Japan’s ancient tradition” holds together only by flattening these several distinct events into a single, continuous story, declining to distinguish among them. It erases the traces of a bilateral substrate atop which a network of female rulers and ritual specialists once existed across the regions; it erases the five-hundred-year process by which household authority was narrowed at the level of the family; and it erases the fact that the final foreclosure of these possibilities was itself a concrete event, decided within the process of modern state-building by the specific judgments of particular officials. What remains is a single, male-line genealogy, projected retroactively as though it had always been so.
Not a Single Thread, but a Lost Mesh Worth Remembering
It is worth returning, once more, to the erased side of the picture. What existed across the archipelago was probably not a single emblem of the “shamaness-empress,” but something messier and more concrete: a plurality of women—and figures selected on account of women—overlapping in specific and varied ways.
There was Himiko, jointly installed by the leaders of multiple polities after the great disorder of Wa. There was Iyo, installed at just thirteen on the strength of her kinship to Himiko, to quell the chaos that followed her death. There was Empress Jingū, remembered not only as a conduit for divine oracles but as a figure said to have personally led troops into battle. There was whoever lies in the front section of the Shimanoyama Tumulus, nameless now, buried with bracelet-shaped stone ornaments, likely someone who had once carried the full weight of a region’s ritual life. There were the Kikoe-Ōgimi of the Ryūkyūs, who stood at the summit of state ritual, protecting their brother-kings through spiritual power. There were the nameless eldest daughters of Tōhoku’s villages, who inherited the household despite the presence of a son, on grounds of pure agricultural practicality. There were the adopted sons-in-law of the merchant houses of Ōmi and Osaka, entrusted with a family’s trade name not through blood but through recognized ability.
These are not points arrayed along a single genealogy. They are far better understood as a mesh of women—and figures chosen through women—overlapping in age, region, era, the source of their authority, and the functions they carried, than as a single empress-lineage could ever capture.
Some stood at the front of diplomacy and warfare. Some served as the channel through which oracles passed. Some carried, single-handedly, the ritual life of an entire region. Some inherited a household on the practical logic of labor. Some were chosen to preserve a house as a going concern. Governance and succession in premodern Japan were, in all likelihood, not first and foremost a binary question of male or female, but an undertaking in which multiple functions—who communed with the gods, who commanded the troops, who carried on the family trade—were distributed among different people according to different logics. And within that distribution, a domain carried by women existed, plainly, and not as anything marginal or exceptional.
This richness was not lost all at once. It was worn down through interventions of a different character each, spread across different eras: the compression into a single genealogy at the hands of the eighth-century chroniclers; the gradual, centuries-long narrowing of household authority from the Heian through the Sengoku period; the consolidation into a single office under the Saiō system; the complete legal exclusion enacted by Inoue Kowashi and the Hozumi brothers; and the dismantling of the Ryūkyūs’ own bilateral system through annexation. With each further compression, the overlapping functions and presences once carried by many different women were pared away, thinning into a single genealogy, a single office, a single legal provision. What remains in our hands today is only the last surviving thread of a once-rich mesh that had spread across the archipelago.
Tradition, more often than not, is constructed backward from present necessity. The graft from Himiko to Empress Jingū; the consolidation of a regional network into a single Saiō office; the gradual shift from bilateral to patrilineal norms; the centuries-long narrowing of household authority; and the legal exclusion enacted by Inoue Kowashi and the Hozumi brothers, later mythologized—these are all repetitions of a single pattern, even as each belongs to a different era, a different agent, and a different intensity of intervention.
But the value of tracing and disentangling these interventions, one by one, does not lie only in exposing the constructed nature of the narrative we call “tradition.” Beyond that exposure lies something more worth reaching for: the chance to remember, once more, the mesh of overlapping functions and authority once carried by a plurality of women—the rich, concrete texture of history that stood behind the simplified genealogy, before compression ever thinned it down.
In that sense, this excavation does not end with correcting the past. The bilateral order that genuinely existed across the archipelago, and the mesh of female authority once distributed across its regions, are not merely matters of historical fact. They are a pattern the present can draw on. In debates over imperial succession, the options of a female or female-line tennō are often framed defensively—as a question of how far one can tolerate a deviation from an original, male-line tradition. But once the historical picture shifts to recognize bilaterality as the true substrate, that framing itself is inverted. Succession and governance through women were not exceptions requiring special dispensation; they were another legitimate channel that Japanese society had already put into practice—at least before the eighth century, and in various regions, well into the modern era.
Extending the reach further, this mesh-like model carries implications beyond the question of imperial succession alone. Ritual authority, diplomacy, military command, and household or regional governance were not concentrated in a single person or a single lineage, but distributed among whoever was best suited to each function, according to different local logics. This pattern of governance illustrates, at once, the fragility of concentrating authority at a single point and the resilience of authority distributed across functions. In thinking through leadership within organizations and communities today, this ancient pattern—multiple roles held by multiple people, with a central, unifying figure jointly installed only when the situation called for one—is hardly a matter confined to the past.
The rich bilaterality that once existed, and the diverse network of women who lived within it, are at once an afterimage of a lost past and a concrete point of reference—evidence that a form of governance other than singularization and monopoly is something the present, and the future, can still choose to build again.