Imperial shenanigans, again

For most of the time, Japan's imperial family look rather a gentle, sleepy, civilised bunch, but yesterday's news exposed them as a brilliant, bold and Machiavellian practitioners of dynastic politics.

Read my colleague Leo Lewis's account in this morning's Times (I'm on leave for a couple of months, back in the Tokyo bureau in March). At the age of 39, Princess Kiko, wife of the Emperor's younger son, Akishino, is six weeks pregnant. If the child is a boy, then he will become the third in line to the throne, thereby defusing the succession crisis and scuttling imminent plans to allow a woman to become a reigning empress.

A bill to change the Imperial Household Law was to have gone before the Japanese Diet during the current parliamentary session. It had the support of the prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, and - judging from the polls - most Japanese people. If it had gone through it would have meant that Princess Aiko, only child of Crown Prince Naruhito, would one day have become Japan's 127th Emperor.

Supporters of the bill saw it as profound symbolic change in a country in which women are lamentably underrepresented in public life. But it was bitterly opposed by conservatives, including the Emperor's own nephew, Prince Tomohito of Mikasa, who regard the unbroken male succession as an inviolable element of Imperial tradition. If the newly discovered foetus does indeed turn out to be a boy, then the conservatives will have won, and the crisis averted, for at least a generation.

Two immediate thoughts. I have no inside information (I'm writing this in Heathrow Airport, awaiting a flight back to Tokyo), but I think that we can confidently assume that none of this was Princess Kiko's idea - that she has come under intense pressure from someone to have another child. The Princess is 39 and has two daughters, Mako and Kako, aged 14 and 11. That she and her husband should suddenly decide to have another child after more than a decade, or that they should conceive accidentally, is scarcely credible, given the intense political pressure generated by the succession crisis.

So who has persuaded them to try for one more?

It could of course be the traditionalists, desperate to avert the horrific prospect of a female monarch. To understand how irrational and reactionary some of these people are, consider the words of Takeo Hiranuma, a one time trade minister and the leading campaigner against the Empress proposal. "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," he told a group of MPs and academics. "We should never let that happen."

There have been recent signs that Prince Akishino, the expectant father, has fallen out with his older brother, Crown Prince Naruhito, over the latter's criticisms of the Imperial Household Agency - so he might be receptive to a suggestion which could, after all, make him the father, rather than just the uncle, of a future emperor. But I think it is equally possible that the idea came from within the Imperial Household as a way of defusing a divisive confrontation which was already threatening to set prince against prince.

But even if Princess Kiko does give birth, and even if it is a boy, it will only be a temporary respite. Japan's succession system originate in an era in which Emperors, as well as their Empresses, had concubines, ladies in waiting who offered multiple opportunites for breeding an heir. In families which practise monogamy it is inevitable, every few generations, that the boys will run out. The change may not be in time for Princess Aiko - but it will inevitably come.

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メカぞぬ【めかぞぬ】

[Richard Lloyd Parry]

What is this extraordinary image? Go to http://timesonline.typepad.com/times_tokyo_weblog/2006/02/who_is_mekazonu.html

[Yrrap Dyoll Drahcir]

This is an image of Welsh maintain monkey,maybe.
And that handsome,,,,,maybe.

there should be picture and it should be easy so even grade 4s can read.!!!!!!!