A friend is vacationing in Japan right now and went to the (a?) Meiji shrine. He snapped a picture of a plaque that credits the Emperor personally with the adoption of foreign learning and modernization. That's not how I recall it from my scattered, decades-old reading in Japanese history but that was then and my book list was comprised of the one or two books available for sale at a store. They held to the line that the Emperor was largely a figurehead. I imagine an imperial shrine would emphasize the Emperor anyway, just like presidential libraries stress their subjects, but what's the present consensus? Is there a difference between Anglophone and Japanese historiography on the issue?