The Once-In-A-Reign Accession Rite

The Daijosai, the great thanksgiving, is the most solemn accession rite of a Japanese emperor, performed once in a reign after enthronement. It is an enlarged and unrepeatable form of the annual harvest thanksgiving (Niiname-sai): the newly enthroned emperor offers the season's new rice to the sun goddess Amaterasu and the other kami and shares the meal with them, in specially built halls that are dismantled afterward. The rite is conducted at night and in seclusion, and its innermost acts are not publicly witnessed, which has made their interpretation a matter of long scholarly debate.

Its modern practice is politically freighted. Because the ceremony expresses the emperor's ritual relationship to the kami, its performance under Japan's postwar constitution, which separates religion from the state, has drawn legal challenge and public argument each time it has been held, most recently in 1990 and 2019. Historians also stress that the elaborate continuous antiquity often claimed for it is partly a construction: the rite lapsed for centuries and was revived and reshaped in the early modern and modern periods, so its present form carries a good deal of comparatively recent design.