Hello and welcome to the History of Japan Podcast, episode 458, The Empty Throne, Part 1.

Is it possible to be invisible if everyone knows who you are?

That might seem like a Zen koan or something similar, but consider this.

Probably the single most well-known member of Japan's most well-known family is the Emperor Meiji, personal name Mutsihito, who ruled over the country from 1867 until his death in 1912.

His name is literally synonymous with one of the most important turning points in Japanese history,

a time of radical transformation for the country.

And his image is a pretty well-known one.

Most of us have probably seen one or another of the various photos of him or woodblock prints where he is depicted.

He's a very visible figure of his time.

Yet in a certain sense,

he's also one of the least well-known central figures of his age. He kept no diaries, at least

none that we know of, if one is out there it's locked deep in the archives of the Imperial

household agency. He wrote few letters, and none of the policy proclamations ascribed to him the various Imperial rescripts,

were actually written by the man himself.

We do have a large collection of his poetry, over 100,000 poems in total, but they are mostly Waka and Tonka that are marked more by allusions

to literary classics than anything that conveys the emperor's actual mindset.

Compared to the other titanic figures of the Meiji era, the Ito Hirobumis, the Saigotakamori's,

the Okobotoshi-Michis, and the like, the mind and views of the

man in whose name, theoretically at least, all of the changes of the era were done, remains an

enigma to us.

Nor is that situation unique to Meiji.

Japan's emperors are, in a sense, some of the most heavily historically documented

...