Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to reconsider the relationship between the emperor system and “women” through an analysis of women's views of the imperial family in modern Japan. This paper especially considers women's mentalities demonstrated in their great interests and yearnings for the imperial family as “stars, ” which appeared widely since the 1900s and the 1910s. Through researching these mentalities, this paper elucidates two points. Firstly, we try to argue that these mentalities changed the characteristics of the modern Japanese emperor system radically. Secondly, we seek to present the relationship between the emergence of the “popular emperor system” in modern Japan and Japanese modernization from the perspective of gender studies.
