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A black court cap sits on his head, and a second crown is planted on top of it. Gold beads hang off the plate and a red disk rides above. Nobody wore both at once, and Go-Daigo is borrowing the look from old pictures of Prince Shōtoku.

Emperor Go-Daigo did not want to be a figurehead, which in the Japan of his day made him a dangerous man. Emperors reigned; regents and warriors ruled; that had been the arrangement for centuries. Go-Daigo set out to end it and take the government back to the throne. His first plot against the Kamakura regime was uncovered in 1331. He was seized and shipped to the Oki Islands in the Sea of Japan, about as far from power as the country could put a man. He did not stay. In 1333 he got off Oki, rallied the lords already rising against Kamakura, and when the regency fell that summer he came back to the capital and declared himself in direct command of everything. He called it the Kenmu Restoration. It was the real thing he had always wanted, and it lasted barely three years. The warriors who had fought for him expected land and offices and felt cheated; the court he restored moved too slowly and rewarded the wrong people. In 1336 his most powerful general, Ashikaga Takauji, turned on him, took Kyoto, and set up a rival emperor and a new shogunate. Go-Daigo fled south into the mountains at Yoshino and founded a court of his own, and for the next half-century Japan had two emperors at once. He died at Yoshino in the autumn of 1339, still the emperor of nothing much, still insisting he was the true one. The Taiheiki gives him a deathbed no ruler forgets. He lay holding a copy of the Lotus Sutra in one hand and a sword in the other. His bones might be buried in these southern hills, he said, but his spirit would face north toward Kyoto until his enemies were destroyed and the throne was whole again. The painting was made right then, and it is one of the strangest imperial portraits in Japan. It was supervised by Monkan, the monk who had initiated Go-Daigo into the secret rites of Shingon, and it shows the emperor not in plain court dress but as an esoteric master. He wears a court cap with a second crown set on top of it, headgear no one could actually wear, over a monk’s patchwork robe. He holds the tools of the ritual: a five-pronged golden thunderbolt, the vajra, in one hand and a five-pronged bell in the other. A living emperor is being shown as a Buddhist adept who could bend the unseen world by hand. He had tried to rule outright and lost; here he is, painted as a man who commanded a different kind of power entirely. He lost that argument too, in the end. His Southern Court held out for decades and then was folded back into the northern line in 1392. The odd thing is which side later Japan decided was legitimate. Centuries on, the government ruled that Go-Daigo’s southern emperors had been the rightful ones all along. The man painted here with a thunderbolt in his hand won his case by a verdict handed down nearly 600 years after he was dead.