Japan — Samurai & Shogunate

For most of its history, Japan had a perfectly functional emperor seated on the Chrysanthemum Throne. He performed rituals, legitimized decisions, issued edicts, and traced his divine lineage back to the sun goddess Amaterasu. He did almost none of the actual governing.

This was not a coup or a failure. It was a deliberate arrangement that persisted, in various forms, for roughly seven centuries. Real political and military authority in Japan rested not with the emperor in Kyoto but with a succession of military governments headquartered elsewhere — Kamakura, Muromachi, Edo — led by warlords who borrowed the emperor's legitimacy while keeping his power at arm's length. The institution that made this possible was the The military government of Japan, ruled by a shogun (from sei-i taishōgun, "barbarian-subduing generalissimo"). The shogunate operated in parallel with the imperial court but held real executive, military, and judicial authority. Three major shogunates dominated Japanese history: the Kamakura (1185–1333), the Muromachi (1336–1573), and the Tokugawa (1603–1868)..

How Japan arrived at this arrangement — and what it meant for the people living inside it — is a story about what happens when a court culture delegates military functions to a professional warrior class.