Emperor Ninkō

Ninkō took the throne in 1817 at seventeen and spent twenty-nine years watching the Tokugawa system corrode. Famines swept the islands, corruption festered in the bakufu, and foreign powers pressed at the coasts — none of which an emperor could command the shogun to fix. He revived old court rituals at his father's urging, a gesture toward ancient legitimacy while real power sat elsewhere. Of his fifteen children by various concubines, only three survived to adulthood; his fourth son, Osahito, inherited the throne when Ninkō died in 1846. The shogunate still ruled, but the ground had begun to…