To her surprise, the burly Diet-member Seiichi Ota, a former cabinet minister, approached her out of the blue with a serious-and delicate-proposition. “He told me: ‘There is one issue we have in common’,” she recalls. “We could fight together to revise the imperial code to permit female heirs to the throne.”
Two years later, that concept is gaining currency. Last week it got a surprise boost when Japan’s ultra-orthodox Imperial Household Agency announced that Princess Masako, wife of Crown Prince Naruhito, had shown “symptoms of pregnancy” and likely is expecting her first child.
Most Japanese welcomed the news. But memories of Masako’s 1999 miscarriage underscore the precarious state of Japan’s Yamato Dynasty. Married almost eight years, Naruhito remains childless. His only brother, Prince Akishino, is married with two daughters. Under current succession codes that bar women from the ancient Chrysanthemum Throne, the imperial lineage will end unless one of the princes produces a male offspring-or Japan’s Parliament changes the rules.
A coalition is building to do just that. On the left, feminists and progressive politicians champion the move under the banner of gender equality. Conservatives favor it as a means to preserve their “sacred” dynasty. “If it’s a girl, let her take over,” a spokesman for Nihon Seinensha (The Japan Youth League), the country’s largest right-wing pressure group, told NEWSWEEK.
Even the courtiers are reportedly weighing radical options. According to the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, the IHA produced a secret report last April, entitled “Discussion on the Imperial Succession System,” that outlined methods for permitting empresses. (The agency denies this.) “Everything depends on whether Masako has a boy or a girl,” says Sounosuke Saito, an expert on imperial household law. “If it’s a boy, the possibility of change will slip further away. But a girl would force the agency to quickly revise the code.”
Women have ruled Japan before. In fact, 10 of the country’s 125 monarchs were female, and the 33rd, Empress Suiko, established diplomatic relations with China’s Sui Dynasty. That seems natural in a country that traces its origin to the mythical deity Amaterasu Omikami, or Sun Goddess.
Yet as Japan’s industrial age dawned with the Meiji Restoration, politicians and legal scholars “modernized” the imperial code in 1889 by writing women out of power. “Japan is a nation where men dominate women,” one top (male) intellectual argued. “Therefore, the husband of an empress could be regarded as holding a higher position than her, and that would harm the dignity of the throne.”
When the rules were next reviewed after World War II, Meiji-era sexism remained on the books. A summary of the 1947 Diet debate noted: “Women’s ability to conduct official matters is inferior to that of men.”
Masako was expected to revitalize Japan’s monarchy. She speaks five languages, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and held a fast-track job at Japan’s foreign ministry before marrying Naruhito in 1993. Official matters, it seemed, were just her cup of tea. Yet instead of dragging the dynasty forward, Masako has found herself lurching back to the Middle Ages in the clutches of an imperial retinue bent on defending tradition. On their orders, she shuns interviews, appears in public infrequently and always walks three steps behind her husband.
Following a brief grace period, the country’s tabloid press began obsessing over her ticking biological clock. Journalists scrutinized her schedule, clothes and heel heights for clues indicating pregnancy.
To ordinary Japanese, their storybook princess has become a pitiable figure. “Princess Diana seems to have had a fuller life,” says one 12-year-old girl as she rides the subway to school in Tokyo. “I feel sorry for Masako because she has no freedom.”
Support for a liberated monarchy is widespread. “I have no problem with that,” declares a cab driver. “Look at England,” offers a 76-year-old housewife. “Boy or girl, it doesn’t matter,” says a dishwasher in a Yokohama noodle shop. Yet the national support rate remains elusive because, sources told NEWSWEEK, Japan’s major media groups self-censor the topic out of their surveys.
In her new book, “Talking About the Imperial Family,” palace-watcher Midori Watanabe suggests that Japan’s monarchy is “a dinosaur in a museum.” “There are seven monarchies in Europe, all of which allow the succession of a female to the throne,” she writes. “Present talk of changing [Japan’s] law is only in keeping with the times.”
On Thursday, six opposition lawmakers, all of them women, took an unprecedented first step. They summoned four experts from the Upper House Legislative Bureau to report on how best to revise the 1947 Imperial Household Act. “This is how all new bills begin,” says Hideyuki Nagano, the bureau official who headed the historic meeting.
Advocates think a rule change might reduce Masako’s stress level and help her continue the pregnancy to term. Plus, of course, it would double the odds that her child-boy or girl-grows up to be Japan’s 127th monarch.
