What government did japan have in the past?

Answer 1

If you mean a different government than the one ruling today then the answer is certianly yes!

The kingdom that eventually came to rule all of Japan was called Yamato and it is believed that it became important in the Kensai region as early as 250 AD. This kingdom would grow to absorb much of the surrounding territory, becoming a unified empire. These Emperors would rule in a manner similar to the classical Chinese model, in which the Emperor served in the center of a bureaucratic engine as well as being both a religious and temporal leader.

This original empire did not have much of a standing martial culture. As a result, when wars occurred in the north of Honshu against a mysterious people that were referred to a the Emishi, the martial class that developed was largely unincorporated in the existing government and concentrated around several powerful families. These families eventually clashed, resulting in the Gempei Wars of the 1180's. Following this, Minamoto no Yoritomo, one of the leaders of the victorious Minamoto family, established the first of the Shogunate governments.

The Shogunate were a series of governments that were centered around a particular clan of military leaders. They ruled over a system of provincial lords or daimyo who also ruled through their own militarized clans. With the exception of a period referred to as the Warring States period or the Sengoku-jidai, Shoguns ruled as temporal leaders of the Japanese Empire while the Emperors served as spiritual leaders and the de jure patrons of the Shoguns.

However, at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate, instead of another shogunate rising, popular rebellion placed the power back in the hands of the Emperor in the late 1860s. At this time there were some experiments with democracy and various other European governance models as Japan wanted to be recognized as a world power. However, until the 1930s, the Empire was largely controlled by an aristocracy not unlike that of Prussia or the German Empire.

In the 1930s though, the military of the Japanese Empire, that had been slowly building up since the 1880's, effectively took control of the government. Just like the the old Shoguns of old, figures like Prime Minister Tojo Hideki supplanted many civilian members of the government. This was a movement that continued until the end of WWII when the current government was put in place during the Allied Occupation of 1945-52.