ABSTRACT
From the standpoint of government structures and political power, the imperial court of medieval Japan is a historiographic dead end. Japan's new modern state, and the ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that supported it, allowed little room for critical interpretations of emperor and court of any age, including the medieval era. As the symbol, indeed the essence, of both the Japanese state and people, the emperor was sacrosanct, something that was expected to be reflected in scholarship. Another possibility for scholars inclined to follow the chauvinistic tendencies of the era was to consider the positive historical influences of the emperors. With the conclusion of World War II, historians of Japan were at last freed from ideologies that had shaped the historiography of emperor and court over the centuries. Writing from the viewpoint of the Mandate of Heaven, Hakuseki's interest, as seen above, was in individual rulers, first the emperors, then the shoguns or other military heads.
