Are princes and princesses also kamis?

 Shibtoism teaches the emperor is the "heir to the sun" and kami/demigod. Are the princess and princess also kami? Or just the emperor? Dose this mean Showa wasnt a kami until after Taisho died? Did Akhihito become a normal human again when he abdicated? Or is both he and Nahruhito demigods at once?

If there can be no Emperess only an empress concort (emperor's wife or empress dowager (emperor's widowed mother), dose this mean princes are demigods but not princesses?

The most holy relic in Shintoism, is the mirror of Amaterasu. So holy that only the emperor can look at it, no one else can. Is it looking the mirror what makes one a Kami? Is the idea that the mirror absorbed part of her when she look at it while emerging from the cave?

I realise that kami dont nesserily mean god in the Abrahamic or Greek sense and can mean sprit or devine. So the emperor being a Kami dosent mean he is a god, the way Amaterasu is a Goddess. The Shinto panethon dose clearly put Amertarasu on top superior to all others. Or at least the most important, if she isnt the queen of the gods, the way Odin is king of the Asir Gods in Odinism.

"It is permissible to say that the idea that the Japanese are descendants of the gods is a false conception*; but it is absolutely impermissible to call chimerical [fictional] the idea that the emperor is a descendant of the gods." - Showa 1977. So Showa clearly believed himself to have a holy bloodline.

This is why the flag has a red circle. Its the Sun, ie the Emperor's progenitor.

  • in the fascist era it was taught that all Japanese are childern of Sun. Not just the emperor. They taught Koreans were desended from the Moon (the Sun's weee and less important brother) there for lesser inferior creatures.. I dont know if they taught Chinese and others were the childern of Storms the Sun's youngest and bad brother.