The relation of the Shogunate to the Emperor at Kyoto was on the whole but a continuation of the same status as in the time of Hideyoshi. Since the Fujiwara period state affairs had ceased to be conducted personally by the Emperor himself. The regent, who was at first, and ought to have been ever after, appointed during the minority or the illness of an Emperor, became identical with the highest ministerial post, and lost its extra-ordinary character. It is true that some of the able emperors, dissatisfied with such a state of things, tried to take the reins of government into their own hands again, and some succeeded for a while in the recovery of their political power, so far as their relations with the Fujiwara family were concerned. What they could recover, however, was not all of the prestige which had slipped out of the hands of their predecessors. For on account of the lassitude of the Fujiwara court-nobles, the power which they had once arrogated to themselves passed into the possession of the newly arisen warrior class, and what those emperors could recover was only a part of what still remained in the hands of the Fujiwara. The Emperor Go-Daigo was the last who tried desperately to resume the imperial prerogative once wrested from the Kamakura Shogunate, and he succeeded in his endeavour. He could not, however, prevent the advent to power of the new Shogunate of the Ashikaga. After that, through the most turbulent age in the history of Japan, which continued to the time of Hideyoshi, the imperial household could sustain itself only meagrely on the scanty income from a few estates. But however lacking in power and material resource the Emperor might have been, he still continued to be the source and fountain of honour as ever, and everybody clearly knew that he was, being held divine, indisputably higher than the Shogun, who was obliged to obey if the Emperor chose to command. What was to be regretted was that no Emperor had been strong enough to command. The saying "le roi regne, mais il ne gouverne pas" has never been accepted in our country as the constitutional principle. That the imperial prestige was never totally lost even in the depths of the turmoil of war may be proved by the fact that the Emperor often interceded in struggles between various _daimyo_, who waged weary and acrimonious wars against one another. The political situation of the Emperor, however, had been unsettled for a long while, only because the situation had remained for long not urgent enough to require to be made instantly clear. If it had had to be solved at once, without doubt it must have been solved in favour of the Emperor. Especially after the civil war of the Ohnin era, to restore the nominal power, of which the Shogun of the Ashikaga family was in possession, would have added nothing substantial to the real power of the then Emperor, for the Shogunate of that time was but a scapegoat in the hands of impudent and adventurous warriors.