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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This has a cultural base. The Japanese rulers were believed to be mandated emperors of heaven, and while many cultural differences existed between say, an Egyptian Pharaoh and a Japanese emperor, the deific elements of them being sacred and tied to divine will…those were strikingly similar.
Shoguns and perhaps Daimyos were king equivalents, I suppose, and many would vie for the title of emperor at certain points in earlier historical times.
Shogun by James Clavell is a fiction work that portrays it surprisingly well.
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