Japan's Princess Masako has struggled under pressure to conceive a male heir in the stifling Imperial House, writes David McNeill.
Like most Japanese people, when Princess Masako wants to get somewhere in a hurry, she takes the Bullet Train. Last weekend, the princess rode the Shinkansen with her husband Prince Naruhito and their two-year-old daughter Aiko, on their way to an isolated villa in Tochigi Prefecture, about 150 kilometres north of Tokyo.
Mixing with the hoi polloi on public transport, even surrounded by hulking bodyguards, is one way of proclaiming that the first family is nothing special, just another hard-working institution doing its best for Japan Inc. The stage-managed trip was also designed to show that all is well in the Imperial Household, after nearly a year of speculation and innuendo about the mental health of the 40-year-old princess.
The truth, however, is that as the mother of the potential heir to what is supposedly the world's oldest hereditary institution, Princess Masako is about as far from ordinary as you can get, and the family she reluctantly joined in 1993 is facing one of the worst crises in its history.
Since 1965, Emperor Akihito has watched his offspring bring nine female babies into the world and not a single male, a poor batting average that once would have been solved by pressing into service an imperial concubine. Today, the responsibility for continuing the 2,600-year patriarchal line has fallen on the frail shoulders of the former Ms Masako Owada. Unsurprisingly, she seems to have buckled under the pressure.
Late last year, the princess retired from official engagements and retreated behind the imperial moat, sparking rumours that she had suffered a nervous breakdown. While Japan's newspapers kept their distance from the taboo-laden story, weekly magazines showed no such restraint, blaming the breakdown on the clamour for an infant boy in the imperial household, which is facing a succession crisis unless it can produce a male heir.
Masako had spent seven years in the relentless media glare trying to conceive, and endured one highly publicised miscarriage in November 1999 before finally giving birth to Aiko in November 2001, allegedly with the help of fertility experts. The weeklies suggested the princess had tumbled into depression after a lapse into the language of the stud farm by the Imperial Household Agency's grand steward, Toshio Yuasa, who did not disguise his disappointment at the female birth and said he wanted the couple to have another child.
The speculation about Masako's condition intensified after her husband dropped a carefully worded bombshell on the eve of his departure to a royal wedding in Spain in May. In the politest of courtly Japanese, the 44-year-old son of Emperor Akihito railed against the pressures that had driven his wife from public life. The princess, he said, "had completely exhausted herself" trying to adapt to life in the Imperial Household, where her "individuality" had been stifled. Life in the palace had "denied Princess Masako's career as well as her personality".
THE BARBED COMMENTS were immediately interpreted as a coded attack on the bureaucrats who run the household, and they drew the top minder reluctantly out of the shadows. Yuasa said he "did not know" what the prince meant about "stifling" Princess Masako, but the hundreds of critical e-mails that subsequently bombarded his office seem to indicate that much of the public did not believe him.
Palace life is known to be run with rigid formality - when the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, visited Emperor Akihito in June, he had to walk along the sides of the corridors rather than in the centre, which is the emperor's exclusive privilege. Life within the palace is especially hard on women who are seen but rarely heard in what is still a male-dominated institution.
Like her predecessors, Princess Masako is expected to take a demure backseat to her husband in public and avoid overshadowing him. Her first brush with palace protocol came early during the couple's first press conference together when she was scolded by traditionalists after speaking for a few seconds more than the prince. Further criticism came on another occasion after she offered an unsolicited opinion.
Empress Michiko, wife of the current emperor, is widely believed to have suffered a breakdown after years of battles inside the palace. Certainly the nervy, emaciated figure that walks a few careful steps behind Emperor Akihito today bears little resemblance to the lively daughter of a wealthy soy sauce brewer who married into the family in the 1950s.
Some fear the same fate for Michiko's daughter-in-law, who traded a high-flying diplomatic career for the dubious charms of imperial life. The carefree young woman who studied at Oxford, speaks fluent English and was praised for bringing a breath of fresh air to a previously musty palace atmosphere, has been replaced by the increasingly troubled looking princess, who has visibly wilted in her cloistered role.
MASAKO HAS MANAGED just five overseas trips since she married - a remarkably stingy tally compared to royals elsewhere - adding to speculation that a ban has been imposed on imperial globetrotting until baby cries once again echo around the palace walls. The prince has left little doubt about how his wife feels, saying that she was "greatly distressed that she was not allowed to make overseas visits for a long time", and that she regarded such trips as crucial in "promoting international goodwill".
It is this womb-for-hire treatment by palace mandarins, amplified by the press, that many believe has sent the princess spiralling into depression. A slew of stories over the summer, some wildly speculative, forced the palace to admit in July that Masako was suffering from an "adjustment disorder", a stress-induced condition normally associated with student returnees struggling to readjust to life in Japan. Counselling and drug treatment since then appear to be working: television pictures from the Bullet Train trip showed a smiling and tanned princess, looking considerably better than the wan and unhappy woman who stared back at cameras last year.
With Masako now in her 40s, and the imperial line technically facing extinction unless a male heir can be produced, discussion has increasingly turned to the possibility of a female sitting on the Chrysanthemum Throne for the first time since Empress Go-Sakuramachi reigned from 1762 to 1771.
Revisions to the 1948 male-only succession law are clearly on the way. A 50-strong study group of lawmakers is exploring the possibility of constitutional change and it is an open secret that government bureaucrats have already begun laying the groundwork. More than 70 per cent of the Japanese public also supports the idea of an empress, as does the prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi.
But any attempt to alter the constitution is likely to face staunch opposition from the same conservatives who have made life so difficult for Princess Masako.
Whatever happens, the centre of attention in the debate about the future of the world's oldest monarchy looks set to shift very soon to Masako's daughter Aiko, who has peered nervously from her mother's side at the hundreds of blinking cameras on the few occasions when she has been seen in public. The little princess, still weeks shy of her third birthday, will soon find herself in the same media fishbowl that has made life for her parents such a misery.