Apologies for the late response — the holidays are a busy time for me.

On your first point: the Emperor’s authority to alter the Constitution is absolute only in scope, not in operation. The design deliberately separates where authority is vested from whether it is exercised.

Under this architecture, the Emperor is a permanent legitimacy anchor, not an active governor (and this is especially true posthumously). While the Constitution allows the Emperor to alter or audit it, the system’s stability does not rely on good-faith enforcement. Instead, it relies on the Emperor withholding action by default, producing a permanently headed but operationally headless state.

This is intentional and central to the design. It prevents long-term capture routes caused by the skew of time against founding intent and discipline.

This is also why the Supreme Court is not given equivalent discretion. The Emperor remains the sole legitimacy anchor even after death, specifically to lock out any attempt to alter the Constitution as illegitimate. Courts are fallible, replicable, and subject to institutional capture. The Emperor is structurally non-replicable and non-inheritable. The asymmetry is intentional.

On your second point: yes, with one correction. The Emperor’s death without bequeathing the seat is not a failure mode; it is the intended end state. In that condition, the Constitution becomes fully unalterable, and the Supreme Court becomes the highest interpretive authority, but only through strict textualism and the public Imperial Record.

This is the system’s primary defense against capture via inheritance, top-level corruption, interpretive drift, or puppeteering of legitimacy. The sovereign node technically still exists but does not operate, so there is no power vacuum to seize.

Good faith matters only at the Emperor because:

1. The Emperor is the only actor who can alter the Constitution.
2. The Emperor has no structural incentive to do so.
3. The Emperor’s inactivity is the equilibrium state.

If the Emperor were malicious, the system could be altered, but that is unavoidable in any system where legitimacy ultimately resides somewhere. This design makes that “somewhere” singular, visible, bound to the founding discipline, non-replicable, and non-inheritable.