TOKYO – Just a few weeks ago, the campaign to make women eligible for Japan’s time-honored Chrysanthemum Throne seemed assured of victory. Now that movement is frozen in its tracks, thanks to a powerful newcomer on the royal scene: a 6-week-old embryo.
The Imperial Household Agency announced Tuesday that Princess Kiko, whose husband Prince Akishino is second in line to the throne, was in the early stages of pregnancy, delivering a possible solution to the royal family’s much-bemoaned lack of male heirs.
The announcement suddenly offered an attractive alternative – wait and see if it’s a boy – to the government’s determination to push through legislation that would avert a looming succession crisis by allowing a woman to become monarch for the first time since the 1700s.
The measure was overwhelmingly popular with the public, and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi vowed to push ahead with it in a major speech in parliament.
But the push officially went into meltdown Wednesday, with Koizumi making a hasty reversal of his oft-declared insistence to get the bill through the current session of parliament. His top deputy, Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, raised the possibility of scuttling it altogether.
At issue is the country’s much-respected and obsessively cloistered royal family, considered by many to be the ultimate symbol of Japan’s ethnic, cultural and spiritual identity. Before 1945, the emperor was considered a deity, and still stands at the head of the national Shinto religion.
No male heir has been born since Akishino in 1965. He and Kiko, 39, have two daughters, ages 14 and 11.
Crown Prince Naruhito, first in line to the throne, has one daughter with his wife, Crown Princess Masako. Enormous pressures to produce a male heir contributed to a stress-induced condition that caused Masako to withdraw from public activities in December 2003.
A high-powered panel made a lengthy study of the succession dilemma last year and concluded that the government should change the 1947 law banning women from the throne to allow Naruhito’s 4-year-old daughter, Aiko, to take the crown. Aiko’s children could then carry on Japan’s imperial traditions, assuring the family’s survival.
The prospect of a throne occupied by Aiko, whose baby steps and budding reading habits are avidly fawned over by an adoring public, was immediately popular, reaching its zenith in October, when a poll showed 84 percent of Japanese in favor.
Then the brawl began.
Conservatives feared that putting a woman on the throne and letting her children follow her would destroy Japan’s tradition of emperors following from the male line of the royal family. While eight women have held the throne over the centuries, males fathered by an emperor or one of his male descendants have always taken over after them.
Some critics have urged bringing back royal concubines to produce male heirs, as was done until the early 20th century. Others favor reinstating the old aristocracy, banned after World War II, to widen the pool for emperor candidates.
Former Trade Minister Takeo Hiranuma recently raised the unseemly prospect of foreign blood polluting the imperial line.
“If Aiko becomes the reigning empress, and gets involved with a blue-eyed foreigner while studying abroad and marries him, their child may be the emperor,” Hiranuma told a gathering of reform opponents.
“We should never let that happen.”
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