Emperor Meiji

About Emperor Meiji

Emperor Meiji (Mutsuhito) was the 122nd Emperor of Japan, reigning from 1867 until his death in 1912. His historical significance is immense; he presided over the Meiji Restoration, a period of radical, rapid modernization and Westernization that transformed Japan from a feudal society into a major world power. This profound restructuring of Japanese political, social, and economic life is the primary reason MIT’s Pantheon project ranks him at #822 in global historical importance.

Despite his foundational role in creating modern Japan, Emperor Meiji receives modest attention in the current digital sphere. In 2025, his Wikipedia page accrued approximately 830K annualized views. To provide context on this level of interest, this figure receives only about one-third the attention of contemporary politician Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (878 importance rank, 2.8M views), demonstrating a significant contemporary attention gap relative to his historical weighting. Furthermore, while important, he is far less viewed than an even more historically significant politician like George III of the United Kingdom (#147 importance, only 179K views).

Data suggests this relative decline is a trend, as his pageviews show a -5.1% year-over-year change, indicating that while still tracked, the momentum of interest is slightly receding.