Japan gives Emperor blessing to make history and abdicate the throne
JAPAN’S government has approved a law that will permit Emperor Akihito to abdicate the Chrysanthemum Throne and become the first emperor to step down in more than two centuries.
Akihito is expected to abdicate in December 2018, when he will mark his 85th birthday, in favour of his eldest son, Crown Prince Naruhito. His renunciation of the throne, however, does little to solve the crisis within the world’s oldest monarchy.
The last Japanese monarch to abdicate was Emperor Kokaku in 1817.
Anticipating resistance from conservatives who wanted him to stay on until his death, the emperor went public last August in only his second ever televised address.
The emperor had surgery for prostate cancer in 2003 and was in hospital again in 2008 with chest pains, an irregular pulse, high blood pressure and internal bleeding. His doctor at the time blamed stress, in part brought on by questions over the future of the imperial family.
The key problem is that Japan’s monarchy – which claims a lineage going back 2,000 years to the sun goddess Amaterasu – is running out of male heirs, while altering the law to permit a woman to assume the throne has been obstructed by conservatives.
Crown Princess Masako, the commoner who married Prince Naruhito in June 1993, gave birth to a daughter in December 2001. However, public delight was tempered by knowledge that Princess Aiko could never be empress.
Three years later, the pressure on the crown princess to produce a male heir reached the point where she suffered what the palace termed “an adjustment disorder”. She was rarely seen in public over the following years and marked her 49th birthday, in 2012, with a statement in which she apologised for being ill and absent from public life.
Even now Princess Masako, the daughter of a diplomat who was educated at Harvard and Oxford, does not accompany her husband on official duties. The crisis was averted in September 2006 when the Princess Akishino, the wife of the emperor’s youngest son, Fumihito, Prince Akishino, gave birth to a son, Prince Hisahito.
Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, has refrained from stating a position on the abdication, but he is an unabashed conservative who wishes to once again elevate the emperor to demi-god status.
The emperor, in contrast, is widely seen as a liberal who opposes a return to the militaristic nation of the early decades of the last century and clearly dislikes the idea of Shinto being reinstated as the state religion.
The government was effectively forced to make revisions to the terms of the Imperial Household Law of 1889 to permit Akihito to abdicate, but the law has been framed as a one-off decision and will not apply to future emperors.
Yesterday’s decision means Crown Prince Naruhito, 57, who studied partly at Merton College, Oxford, will become Japsan’s 126th Emperor.