With no political function, the office works by what its holder is seen to do, and this reign is usually described in terms of a sequence of visits. Akihito and Empress Michiko went to Okinawa, where the wartime battle and the postwar occupation had left a difficult relationship with the mainland, and to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later to Saipan, the Philippines and Palau, at each place attending to the war dead of more than one nation. On state visits abroad he expressed regret for the suffering caused during the war in terms that were noted closely both by the countries he was visiting and at home.
Two broadcasts stand out. After the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 he recorded a video address to the country, which no emperor had done in that way before in a domestic crisis. In August 2016 he recorded a second, describing his age and his difficulty in continuing to carry out his duties fully, without directly asking for anything, since the constitution allows him no political role. Parliament responded with a law applying to his case alone, and he abdicated in April 2019, the first Japanese emperor to do so in about two centuries. The era name Heisei ended with him.
The abdication forced a question the modern law had not addressed. The imperial house law made no provision for a reign ending in any way except death, so the measure passed in 2017 had to open a route and close it again behind him. It left untouched the older difficulty the same law contains, that succession is restricted to males in the male line while the family has produced very few of them, a matter still under public discussion and not one an emperor with no political role was in a position to raise.