Chrysanthemum Throne

   Based on the flower that is the official seal of the Japanese imperial family, the term Chrysanthemum Throne is a common English-language reference to the Japanese emperor. Although obscured by the warrior government that ruled Japan from the twelfth through early nineteenth centuries, the Japanese emperor became the ultimate locus of national authority after the toppling of the feudal regime in 1868. The 1889 Meiji constitution placed full sovereignty in the emperor. And although actual policy-making through the early twentieth century rested in the hands of the samurai founders of the modern nation, the emperor remained the ultimate symbol of nation and empire. That symbol would increasingly be imbued with spiritual and cultural, as well as political, significance and would become, by 1940, the focal point of a colossal new conception of a Greater East Asian world order.

   See also <>.

   FURTHER READING:

    Beasley, William G. The Meiji Restoration. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972;

    Jansen, Marius, ed. The Emergence of Meiji Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

   FREDERICK R. DICKINSON