Eli5: Why is the Japanese emperor an emperor if Japan is not an empire and doesn’t have a king or multiple Kings below him?
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The title of the Japanese monarch is “天皇”, which is a translation of the title that the Chinese monarchs used before being overthrown in the twentieth century: “皇帝”. The question is how to translate this title into English.
The most direct translation would probably be “Lord God”: the rulers of China and Japan wanted to be treated not as peers of Cyrus or Caesar but rather as peers of Allah or Zeus. [edit: u/runfromdusk rightly objects below that while this may have been the attitude of the Japanese monarchs, it wasn’t really the attitude of the Chinese ones; there’s a profound difference between a ruler *of* Heaven and a ruler *chosen by* Heaven.] However, to Western ears a human demanding to be thought of as a God sounds (a) blasphemous and idolatrous and (b) ridiculously puffed up. So that translation was unacceptable.
At the time the translation question was being decided, Japan wasn’t really known to the West yet, so the question was what to call the ruler of China. And China plausibly *was* an empire, ruling over many subject peoples with different cultures from one another. It was more reasonable to think of China as a peer of Persia or Rome than to think of it as a peer of Andorra or Scotland. So we decided to translate the title as “Emperor”. When we later discovered that the Japanese monarchs used the same title, we went ahead and started calling them “Emperor”s too.
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