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The Japanese executive is one of the oldest political structures now in existence. Fred Riggs has observed that once established, structures have a tendency to survive despite changes in their functions.l The imperial institution of Japan has survived for nearly two thousand years while the social, economic, and political infrastructures have undergone evolutionary and revolutionary change. Japan's imperial throne has done more than survive modernization: it has played a positive role in political modernizationthat is, in the establishment of a stable and effective government. During the sixteenth century, notwithstanding the existence of the ancient imperial court in Kyoto, Japan appeared to be divided into a number of monarchical systems, each headed by a military baron (who was sometimes referred to as a king by Jesuit observers). The Tokugawa shogunate (16031867), in which one hereditary line among these barons ruled over the rest with a strong hand, is sometimes described as a quasi-monarchy, rather than as a feudal system. Certainly the sixteenth-century monarchies and the Tokugawa monarchy contributed, in their distinctive ways, to Japan's modernization.2 However, this article is not concerned with monarchy as a system of government, but with the ancient hereditary executive, the imperial institution, in the political modernization of Japan.
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