Japan's defeat in the Second World War brought a fundamental change to the imperial office. On January 1, 1946, Emperor Hirohito issued the Ningen-sengen, commonly translated as the Humanity Declaration, in which he renounced the concept that the emperor is a living god, akitsumikami, a claim that had underpinned State Shinto's fusion of religious veneration and political authority under the Meiji Constitution. This renunciation followed the Allied occupation authority's December 1945 Shinto Directive, which had already ordered the disestablishment of State Shinto as an arm of government and ended official state sponsorship of Shinto institutions and doctrine.
The 1947 constitution, adopted under the postwar occupation, reconstituted the Emperor's role entirely: sovereignty was transferred explicitly to the Japanese people, and the Emperor was defined as the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people, performing only ceremonial acts of state on the advice and approval of the Cabinet, with no powers related to government. Succession remains hereditary and patrilineal under the Imperial House Law, restricted to male descendants in the male line; a rare exception to the modern norm of life tenure occurred in 2019, when Emperor Akihito abdicated under special one-time legislation passed in 2017, the first abdication in roughly two centuries.