Japan's Mystery of Majesty

JUNJI KUROKAWA / AP

GENERATION IN WAITING: Will Prince Akishino (center) and Princess Kiko (center left, in blue) provide the royal family with a long-awaited male heir?

Japan's Mystery of Majesty
	A succession crisis has led to debate on the monarchy?and the shadowy agency behind it
	By Jim Frederick | Tokyo

 

Posted Monday, August 28, 2006

 

Late on the afternoon of aug. 16, an imperial motorcade departed from Prince Akishino's royal residence in Tokyo and headed for Aiiku Hospital. The main car carried Akishino and his wife, Princess Kiko, elegantly attired in a checkered gray suit. As the unhurried motorcade reached the hospital in central Tokyo, where a throng of reporters and onlookers had gathered, Kiko opened the window and offered the crowd what the Japanese media have dubbed her "princess smile": an enigmatic ｅxpression that suggests she knows she's fulfilling her royal destiny. Kiko had come to the hospital to prepare for the arrival of her third child, scheduled for birth via a caesarean section on Sept. 6. Three weeks is a long hospital stay for an expectant mother, but Kiko is 39 years old and her doctors have every reason to exercise caution: she is quite possibly carrying the future Emperor of Japan.

For a generation, Japan's royal family has been gripped by a succession crisis. By law, the throne can pass only to males. But Emperor Akihito's sons?Crown Prince Naruhito, 46, and Prince Akishino, 40?have so far produced three girls between them. With the chance of a royal baby boy looking increasingly remote, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi backed an initiative that sought to change the succession rules to allow a female heiress. The plan was shelved when Kiko's surprise pregnancy was announced in February, once more reviving hopes for a male heir. Yet few details of the pregnancy?let alone the all-important gender of the baby?are likely to emerge before the appointed hour. As Kiko rests in Aiiku Hospital, which was built with funds partially donated by Emperor Hirohito to commemorate the birth of his own son Akihito, she remains deep in the impenetrable cocoon of secrecy and security that is the hallmark of the Imperial Household Agency (IHA), the mysterious government body that manages every detail of the royal family's affairs.

The IHA's careful control over such matters lends an air of orderly dignity to this historic drama. Scratch the surface, however, and there's far more confusion and uncertainty than meets the eye. There is, of course, the possibility that Kiko will have a girl, instantly reigniting the controversy over whether a woman should be allowed to become Empress. There is the strange, anachronistic role in public life of the IHA, once an almighty organization that's now scrambling to retain power and relevance. There are the efforts of conservatives to use the royal family to further their own nationalistic agenda. And there is the larger, hopelessly unresolved question of what, if any, role this ancient monarchy should play in modern-day Japan.

The Japanese imperial family is an extraordinary phenomenon, widely beloved, yet laden with taboos most Japanese refrain from discussing. Even without counting its mythical prehistory, it's much older than any other surviving hereditary monarchy. Unlike European royals or China's ancient Emperors, Japanese Emperors were considered divine beings, direct descendants of the sun goddess Amaterasu. But after the 12th century, they lost most of their temporal power. A long line of shoguns used the Emperors' cooperation to validate their own rule. Emperors lived in seclusion, often serving as little more than figureheads. Indeed, after eight centuries of military rule, according to The Yamato Dynasty by historians Peggy and Sterling Seagrave, many Japanese in the early 19th century didn't even know that an Emperor still existed.

 

The Meiji Restoration changed all that. In 1867, a group of samurai toppled the last shogunate. Fearful of Western power encroaching on Japan, they placed the 15-year-old Emperor Meiji at the center of the body politic and made him the focal point of their efforts to stimulate a new national consciousness. For the first time, all of Japan was compelled to swear allegiance to an Emperor, and it effectively became a theocracy. Shinto, Japan's native animist religion?which had never developed a formal dogma or orthodoxy?was reconfigured to center on the Emperor. Imperial ties to Buddhism were severed. Codified by a constitution and a flurry of new laws, all earthly and religious power emanated from the Emperor, a god incarnate. Historians bolstered the new imperial legitimacy by using ancient texts to draw a direct line of 120 Emperors between Meiji and Jimmu, the mythological first Emperor said to have begun his reign on Feb. 11, 660 B.C. A number of traditions that many Japanese think of as ancient?including the Japanese flag and the imperial chrysanthemum seal?in truth date from the late 19th century. "I don't think most people realize that the whole current conception of the imperial system is only 135 years old, and a product of politics," says Kyosuke Itagaki, author of a recent book critical of the imperial system.

In modern times, politics and royalty have proved a dangerous mixture. Japan's Emperor worship (as well as attendant views of racial superiority and a belief in Japan's divine global mission) is inextricably linked to the nation's 20th century military expansion, which reached its tragic apogee in World War II. By then, the Imperial Household Ministry, as it was known at the time, had grown into one of the nation's most powerful bureaucracies. It managed Japan's biggest land assets and was among its largest financial institutions, with extensive holdings in the colonial Bank of Korea and the South Manchurian Railway. Given powers to operate independently of parliament, the ministry functioned almost as a shadow government. Its head, Lord Privy Seal Koichi Kido (later convicted as a Class-A war criminal) was Emperor Hirohito's closest confidant during the war. After the war ended, some Allies thought the monarchy should be scrapped. But U.S. General Douglas MacArthur and the Truman Administration decided that retaining it was essential to the occupation's legitimacy, though the Emperor was forced to renounce his divinity. Japan's U.S.-written constitution reduced him to a "symbol of the state."

The occupation saw a massive scaling back of the Imperial Household. At the end of the war, it had more than 6,000 employees; today, the IHA has 1,100. once an independent body directly involved in state affairs, it's now an arm of the Prime Minister's office with no policymaking authority. once one of the nation's richest entities, today it makes do with a budget of $260 million a year. More than 1,000 of its employees are considered omote, or "outside the house." Led by the Grand Steward, they serve as drivers, gardeners, teamsters, cooks and white-collar bureaucrats. Positions that are oku or "inside the house," led by the Head Chamberlain, refer to the direct caretakers of the royal family, such as ladies-in-waiting and butlers?jobs that were traditionally passed down in families for generations.

Even though it's smaller now, the IHA still wields significant power. It keeps a tight grip on the royal family's contact with the outside world and controls the authorized version of imperial?and so Japanese?history. "Even the Prime Minister does not speak directly to the Emperor without going through the IHA first," says Hakubun Shimomura, a Liberal Democratic Party Diet member who helped organize a petition against Koizumi's panel recommending female imperial succession. The IHA rarely allows any unscripted media access to the royals and doesn't hide its aversion to the press. In 1990, Toshiaki Nakayama, a photographer with the news wire Kyodo, released a photo of Princess Kiko brushing aside Prince Akishino's hair. It was one of the most tender and endearing royal shots ever seen?but, says Nakayama, the IHA deemed it inappropriate and tried to suppress its wide distribution. Likewise, the agency refused for many years to disclose such innocuous details as what dogs and cats the royals kept as pets at the Imperial Palace.

Such reflexive secrecy is par for the course, says Shinji Yamashita, a former head of the agency's p.r. department. (It's typical of the IHA that one of its p.r. managers would feel empowered to speak publicly about the agency only after he's retired.) Unlike most government bodies, says Yamashita, the IHA's priority is to make sure nothing ever happens. "Ever since the war," he says, "the aim has been to cut a low profile, to go unnoticed." He adds with a laugh, "The IHA knows it has a reputation for being shadowy, but it's not true. We are normal people?amiable, friendly, kind." As individuals, that may be so. But as an institution, the IHA has been blamed for cruel meddling. Exhibit A: the saga of Naruhito's wife, Masako. Educated at Harvard and Oxford, Masako Owada was a rising star at Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs before their marriage in 1993. Beautiful, multilingual and confident, she seemed the harbinger of a modern, energetic royal era. But she failed at her first traditional duty: to bear a prince. Princess Aiko, born in 2001, remains the couple's only child. In the eyes of its critics, the IHA was responsible for placing intolerable pressure on Masako to produce a male heir. In 2003, she succumbed to depression, withdrawing from official duties to which she hasn't yet fully returned. In May 2004, Naruhito revealed his resentment. At a press conference, he said his wife had "completely exhausted herself" trying to adapt to royal life, adding, "there were developments that denied Princess Masako's career."

Widely interpreted as an attempt to loosen the IHA's grip on his family's affairs, this rare moment of candor and reproach stunned the nation. TV networks replayed his remarks for weeks, and commentators parsed every inflection, gesture, blink or raised eyebrow for added levels of meaning or pathos. The IHA said it would work harder to attend to the Crown Princess's unhappiness, but Naruhito's outburst failed to effect much change. Naruhito and Masako gained a sympathetic reception from the public, but Akishino called his brother's comments "regrettable," and Naruhito later apologized for "causing trouble for the Emperor and Empress." Despite the Crown Couple's well-publicized fertility troubles and the fact that Masako is now 42, the IHA has made no bones about its expectation that they keep trying to have a son. After a 1999 miscarriage, the agency severely restricted Masako's travel schedule, hoping she could undergo more fertility treatments. In 2003, the previous Grand Steward, Toshio Yuasa, was blunt. "Frankly speaking," he said, "I want them to have another child." To this day, the public appears to want her to keep trying, too. When Naruhito and Masako recently took Aiko on their first-ever family vacation, the media and the public heaped scorn upon them for frivolously enjoying themselves while neglecting their official duties.

To a degree unimaginable elsewhere, the IHA controls its charges' lives. Unlike Britain's Prince Charles, who has his own interests and pursuits, including an enormously successful charity, Japan's royals have virtually no say over their calendars. "They don't get to choose where they go or what they do," says Yamashita. "They could never be allowed to favor one charity over another." Indeed, he maintains, it's important that the royal family does not have opinions: "They cannot say they like apples, because if they did, what would the orange growers say?" In significant ways, the Japanese royals, by design, still barely inhabit the earthly realm: they have no surname, no personal wealth or possessions, no passports and few, if any, legal rights. Can they divorce? Can they abdicate? Can they sue? Nobody really knows. Says Akira Asada of Kyoto University: "The royals aren't permitted to live like normal human beings. They are forced to live in a miserable situation, stripped of many basic human rights."

In its determination to stage manage the royal family's lives and mold their public image, the IHA even goes so far as to block certain lines of scholarly inquiry to prevent awkward reappraisals of imperial history. The agency manages 896 tombs across Japan, and it claims to know precisely which 112 tombs hold the remains of all 124 dead Emperors. Despite scientists' protests, the IHA has never allowed the tombs to be fully studied or excavated. "The sites are essential to understanding the history of Japan," says Noboru Toike, a professor of archaeology at Den-En Chofu University in Kanagawa. He is one of the heads of 15 scientific associations that petition the IHA each year for access to the tombs. Each year the IHA declines, saying the sites are the tombs of patriarchs of a still-living religion. Toike and others think there's another reason for the IHA's refusal: many of the tombs are misidentified. Koichi Mori, a retired professor of archaeology at Doshisha University in Kyoto, says, "In 1964 I submitted a list of tombs to them that I suspected were inaccurate. Nothing has changed since then." Yamashita, the IHA's ex-p.r. man, acknowledges that everyone in the agency knows that many of the tombs are mislabeled, but insists that excavation still isn't warranted: "Many of the tombs are not what they say they are. But what is the point? The archaeologists' job is to overturn the accepted, and this is the accepted history of Japan. If you let archaeologists in, it could cause confusion. Why is it so important to find out the truth?"

 

Indeed, the IHA encourages a mixing of history and myth, thus clouding any debate about what the monarchy's role should be. Says Doshisha University's Mori: "It's common knowledge that the first nine Emperors were fabricated." That may be so among academics, but not necessarily among the wider public. Conservatives routinely trot out the IHA's chronicle as fact?so endorsing the idea that Jimmu was the very first Emperor in an unbroken line that has lasted 2,666 years. "It is historical fact that Jimmu existed," insists conservative Diet member Shimomura. "There is no reason myth and history need to be separate?124 Emperors since Jimmu is not myth. It is history."

For Japan's still-powerful ultranationalists, who would like to reinstate a reverence for the Emperor, an unbroken lineage stretching back to Jimmu retains a mystical, even religious, importance. Many Japanese consider the imperial system a unique ｅxpression of the country's culture, history and unity. But for some conservatives the Emperor retains an even greater, talismanic importance as the ultimate embodiment of Japan's kokutai?the body politic. Akira Momochi, a professor of constitutional law at Nihon University, says, "The Emperor possesses a divine existence, a sacred existence." Norifumi Shimazu, head of theology at the staunchly conservative Association of Shinto Shrines, stresses the Emperor's purported central role in Japanese history: "Japan cannot exist as a country without the Emperor. The history of Japan begins with the Emperor. The Emperor is at the root of who we are as Japanese." Yuko Tojo, a right-wing activist who is the granddaughter of wartime Prime Minister and convicted Class-A war criminal Hideki Tojo, calls the Emperor Japan's "spiritual core." "Not only is he a symbol of the Japanese people," she says, "he is the head of many religious ceremonies." But since most of the rites the Emperor performs are hidden from the public, and the content of some of them is secret, most Japanese have no concept of this role.

Of course, most Japanese don't invest the Emperor with the spiritual and religious import that conservatives do. Yet there's no doubt that the royal family is wildly popular: in opinion polls, more than 70% offer it support. But so much of imperial life remains hidden that it's desperately hard for Japan to have an open debate about the monarchy's role in a modern democracy. Koichi Yokota, a professor of constitutional law at Ryutsu Keizai University, predicts that a demystified, scaled-down, more casual monarchy like those in, say, Spain or Denmark is all but inevitable in Japan?even if it takes several generations to come into being. "The more open the system becomes to the public, the less meaning there is for the monarchy's existence," he says. "That's why the conservatives are so threatened. They try to emphasize the uniqueness of the Japanese imperial system by bringing up male heredity and religion. In the long run, I think the system will become something the Japanese people wouldn't mind having?but that would be the extent of their feelings towards it."

Ironically, it's the imperial family itself that often frustrates the right wing's agenda. In July, for example, notes on conversations with Hirohito taken by Tomohiko Tomita, a former IHA Grand Steward who died three years ago, were leaked to a newspaper. These notes seemed to confirm a long-standing rumor that Hirohito had objected to 14 Class-A war criminals being enshrined in the late 1970s at Yasukuni Shrine, the memorial to Japan's war dead that has become a rallying point both for hard-core royalists and World War II apologists. Hirohito's son, Emperor Akihito, meanwhile, has disappointed traditionalists by repeatedly revealing a liberal bent. He has spoken out against compulsory allegiance to the flag, vowed to uphold a constitution that casts him as a mere "symbol" of the people's power, and?to the horror of those who fetishize the purity of the imperial blood?once made reference to his family's Korean ancestry.

Crown Prince Naruhito could take an even more liberal line when he accedes to the throne. Like most royals, he is often maddeningly cryptic when he speaks. But he has dropped hints that he'd like to shake things up. At press conferences, he mentions the "need to review official duties" and "to find an appropriate image for the royal family in the 21st century," as well as his desire to "come into contact with the people of Japan." And while his criticism of the IHA in 2004 is widely seen as a failed attempt to loosen the agency's grip, others speculate that the episode may have taught Prince Naruhito a valuable lesson for the future: it's possible to bypass the IHA and appeal straight to the Japanese people, winning their sympathy directly. once Naruhito assumes the throne after his father's death, he may be further emboldened to step in front of the Chrysanthemum Curtain that the IHA has so resolutely kept drawn. And then, at long last, Japan would be able to have an open discussion about the nature of its monarchy, and the place it should occupy in Asia's most mature democracy.

With reporting by Toko Sekiguchi/Tokyo