Another round of political debate on how to ensure the bloodline stability of the Japanese royal family ended fruitlessly again. Experts on royal issues point out that as female members of the royal family leave the royal family due to marriage, the royal population continues to shrink-even if they are allowed to retain their status after marriage, there are few men who are willing to "marry" into the royal family. What is revealed behind this is far from being as simple as inheriting the order.
Talk is ineffective
For decades, ensuring the stability of the royal inheritance has always been one of the most difficult problems facing the Japanese political system. Currently, the royal model stipulates that only male royal family members of paternal descent can inherit the royal throne. However, since the birth of Prince Winnie the Prince of Akihito in 1965, the royal family has only had one new male inheritor, Prince Yuan, born in 2006. Meanwhile, the current only daughter of Emperor Yuan and Emperor Yuan, now 23 years old, has been excluded from the line of succession because of her female status.
After lengthy consultations with the ruling party and the opposition party, the outside world had expected the leadership of both houses of Congress to reach a consensus on the reform proposal of the Royal Model during the routine meeting that ended in June 2025.
The round of reforms included two main elements: first, allowing female royal family members to retain their royal status after marriage, and second, allowing male offspring from the old royal family to restore royal status in the form of adoption, thereby increasing the number of male heirs.
By the end of May, the leaders of the two sides who chaired the negotiations — the ruling senior counselor of the Democratic Party, Moshin Tarot, and the leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party in Ho Chi Minh City — seemed to have reached a preliminary settlement. Due to constitutional doubts and widespread public opposition, they agreed to temporarily suspend the controversial second proposal, the restoration of the identity of the old royal male descendants, and decided to prioritize a plan to allow female members to retain royal status after marriage.
However, even on this seemingly more consensual scheme, there are still many differences between the two: should the remaining royal status of female members be a voluntary choice or should it take effect automatically? should their spouses and children also be equal royal status?
But by early June, all progress came to an abrupt halt. Taro Aso suddenly changed his position, declaring that he could not accept the shelving of the second proposal, and insisted that the topic of returning the descendants of the former royal family to their families must be discussed. Noda Yoshihiko immediately severely accused him of "overthrowing the negotiating table" and destroying all previous efforts and achievements. Although Fukushiro Nukaga, Speaker of the House of Representatives, declared that he hoped to reach a final agreement during the special session of Congress in autumn, frankly speaking, this seemed an elusive goal.
As an observer who has been paying attention to the political debate over the succession of the throne for twenty years, I think that the Self-Democratic Party is deeply supported by the firm belief that the conservative party is “male inheritance” and that its real stance is to maintain the status quo. In their view, the principle of paternal male inheritance clearly established in the current Royal Model is the best institutional arrangement without any change.
However, if the ruling party continues to adhere to this principle, the Japanese royal family is likely to inevitably go to decline. The number of royal members has shown a severe and irreversible decline. At the same time, polls have always shown that the Japanese people's support for female emperors is high. The self-government party knows that it can not sit down and do nothing, and in order to preserve political turnaround, they have formed a panel of experts on the surface, consulted with the opposition party, and eventually always defeated negotiations with general scrutiny of the results, thus delaying decisions indefinitely. Even though the party frequently mentions the possibility of restoring the male succession of the royal family, it has never conducted any substantial research on the concrete implementation
This does not mean that they are willing to wait for the natural demise of the royal family. I speculate that most politicians may think that this matter has nothing to do with them in their hearts, and would rather leave this hot potato to future politicians until the situation is really critical. For those who really care about the future of the royal family, this situation is undoubtedly deeply frustrating. Watanabe Kayama (1793-1841), a samurai and painter of the Edo period, once famously said, "Don't forget the plan of a hundred years because of a temporary expediency." Unfortunately, few politicians today have the wisdom to understand this proverb.
The first sight of the palace.
But what could change from a realistic perspective, even if the latest round of political negotiations eventually reached a consensus on revising the Royal Model and even allowing women to inherit the throne?
Because the core problem is not the gender of the successor, but whether he or she can enter into a marriage. The real crisis is that both male and female members of the royal family are faced with the great dilemma of finding a suitable spouse.
Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare released shocking figures in June 2024: the country's total fertility rate has fallen to a record low of 1.15. Studies show that 80% of the reason why the birth rate drops sharply stems from people choosing not to get married. Besides the obvious economic factors, the profound change of the concept of marriage and family in the whole society is also an important driving force. Around 1990, the proportion of lifelong unmarried people in Japan, both men and women, hovered around 5%; By the 2020 survey, however, the proportion had soared to around 30% for men and close to 20% for women.
Before the war, the huge royal family and the Chinese class provided sufficient potential objects for royal marriage, and today, royal family members have to choose spouses from the ordinary people, so the "marriage winter" that spans the entire Japanese society, the impact on royal family members is not the same as the ordinary people.
It was the late Prince Chongren of Mikasa Palace who took the lead in warning of this crisis of "shortage of marriage partners". This far-sighted royal patriarch once made amazing predictions about this.
In 2004, in a radio interview celebrating his eighty-eighth birthday, the Prince of Saqqara spoke of the hardships he experienced in adapting to the court rituals when his mother, Queen Yin Ming, was married to the royal family. He warned that in the future, most ordinary people are afraid of getting married to the royal family because of the excessive attention of modern mass media to the royal life, and he predicted that the situation would only get worse.
“To get a civilian woman into the royal family is a difficult step in itself. Britain is a monarchy with our country, but Queen Elizabeth is still able to find marriage candidates for children from the royal nobility. But in Japan, the post-war aristocracy has collapsed.” he recalls, “As I thought, this was only an initiative to reform the imperial system on the edge, and the result may be that even if we allow women to land in the future, in modern Japanese society, it may be difficult to find a man willing to get married to the royal family.”
Prince Mikasa himself has publicly expressed his support for a female emperor, saying that "there is no logical problem in establishing a female emperor", but he has deep doubts about the success of this system: "At the practical level, how will it work? If only a female emperor is established, and then the whole system gradually dies out, then allowing women to ascend the throne loses its fundamental significance. I think that is the main problem." He accurately predicted that the shortage of marriage partners will be the biggest challenge for the royal family in the future.
In recent years, there has been an increasing public discussion about the possibility of a female emperor, partly because of the rising folk popularity of Prince Aiko, the only daughter of the current emperor and empress. Nowadays, many people openly support the amendment of the law, hoping that the beloved son can one day inherit his father's throne. Perhaps aware of this, many members of parliament-especially those in the opposition party-began to adopt a double-sided strategy: they claimed to support the accession of a female emperor, but at the same time they opposed the succession of the descendants of female royalty members, the so-called "female palace family". This ambiguous statement is obviously to avoid the political risk of being accused of gender discrimination.
This position will be widely welcomed by those who adhere to the principle of "male inheritance".According to this scheme, the prince of the Son of Love, although she can become an emperor, but her children born with civilian husbands will be deprived of the right to inherit the throne. This “generation-to-generation” “dead-fooled” female emperor system did not essentially affect the foundations of the principle of male inheritance.
Creating a more humane court environment
However, those who advocate such a scheme don't seem to realize that it will mean a complete disregard for the human rights of the heir to the throne and his spouse, and will only make the already narrow and bumpy road to succession even more bumpy.
Imagine, if the children of an emperor were destined to not inherit the throne, how would she, her husband and her children understand the meaning and value of their role?
The problem is equally severe for both men and women, but it may be especially difficult for a man who marries a female royal family member – after all, in the long history of the Japanese royal family, male civilians have “married” to the royal family without a precedent.
Observing the cases of other countries may give you a glimpse. There were three consecutive queens in power before the current king of the Netherlands ascended the throne. Among them, Prince Klaus, the husband of Queen Beatrix, suffered from depression for a long time; Prince Bernhard, the partner of her predecessor, Queen Juliana, was infamous for accepting bribes in the "Lockheed Incident".
I’m not suggesting that the idea of a female emperor should be completely abandoned because of these potential difficulties. But in a society such as Japan that has imprisoned women for generations in the role of housewives, we need to think more carefully about how a man as a “back palace” member into the royal family—whether as a partner of the queen or the spouse of other female royal family members—can trigger a deep chain reaction.
These potential challenges include the remaining fetters of a man's past life and career, and his deep existential anxiety about his social orientation and the meaning of life. Empress Masako's experience may provide a mirror for the difficulties that male partners may face in the future-this woman who was a promising professional diplomat before marriage suffered from mental health problems after marrying into the royal family.
It is necessary to reiterate that the shortage of spouses is a common problem for men and women in the royal family. In addition to the excessive media attention mentioned by the Prince of Saskatchewan, the rise of everywhere online information and social media today has aggravated the situation.
Even though weekly magazines may blur facts and fiction when they report to the royal family, I still believe that as part of the traditional print journalism industry, they retain at least a minimum of professional ethics. In contrast, social media is a completely different ecosystem – a scene where no one is responsible for information falsehood. Anonymous users spread their views to a large audience in a space that is almost unregulated, where there are no boundaries, no responsibility and more difficult traces of moral concerns.
Unlike ordinary citizens, members of the royal family do not respond to criticism from the outside world and do not file a lawsuit. It is because the royal family is unable to defend themselves that some seem to have gained a sick pleasure from attacking this special system.
Since Princess Mako's engagement to Kei Komuro, we have witnessed a wave of attacks in the media and online against Empress Michiko, Empress Masako, and the Akishino couple and their families. Imagine, if your family, relatives or close friends are going to marry into the royal family, how many people won't be afraid of it?
Per we have long neglected a fundamental fact that members of the royal family are also human beings of flesh and blood, and this collective neglect is now forming a vicious cycle that fundamentally threatens the survival of the imperial system as a symbol of national unity.
If we really want to continue the symbolic role of the emperor, we must take immediate and urgent action to make the imperial family a more human place-a place where ordinary people can walk in without constant fear of devastating their happiness and mental health. If the system of obedience, court circumstances and heavy burdens were to continue to be imposed on them, it would only accelerate the irreparable demise of this royal blood that lasted for thousands of years.
The true piano.
Journalists. Born in Osaka Prefecture in 1961. He once worked in a national newspaper and was responsible for reporting on the royal family and historical issues for a long time. In 2006, he won the Japan Newspaper Publishing Editors Association Award for reporting the "Tomita Memorandum" of Tomita Asahiko, former director of the Palace Office. In 2022, he won the National Press Club Award of Japan. In April 2024, he officially ended his journalist career. He is the author of many works related to the royal family, such as Symbolic Twins: Biography of Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko.
The article is for exchange and learning only, and does not represent Rixinshuo's views