NYT: A Princess's Distress Pierces Japan's Veil of Secrecy

[DeepModem Mom]

A Princess's Distress Pierces Japan's Veil of Secrecy
By NORIMITSU ONISHI

Published: August 7, 2004


TOKYO, Aug. 6 - When the Imperial Household Agency announced last week that Princess Masako was receiving therapy for depression and anxiety, it was the first time in the long, long history of Japan's monarchy that there was royal recognition of something most take for granted: personal happiness.

Until then, the issue of personal happiness or unhappiness had never been officially broached, irrelevant as it was in a mind-set that placed the survival of the Chrysanthemum Throne above everything else.

In keeping with that thinking, enormous, ultimately unbearable pressure was applied on Princess Masako, a Harvard- and Oxford-educated woman who had been destined for a brilliant career in diplomacy, to do one thing and one thing alone: bear a suitable male heir.

After Princess Masako disappeared from the public eye eight months ago, the Imperial Household Agency steadfastly denied that anything was seriously wrong. Then last week it put its imprimatur on a statement that the princess was suffering from a stress-induced adjustment disorder and, in addition to counseling, was taking prescription drugs....


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/07/international/asia/07japa.html

[Tight_rope]

1. "depression and anxiety"...welcome to the real world Princess Masako!

[Teaser]

4. she's lived in the real world most her life

It's the insane straitjacket culture of the japanese royal family that's given her the "depression and anxiety."
Marrying into that emotional car wreck would be bad for any normal
person.

[DeepModem Mom]

5. Seems a womens' issue to me, also --

I've read that young women in Japan had seen this accomplished woman as a role model, and then she disappeared from view. She was meant to give birth to a male heir, and had enormous difficulty getting pregnant. When she finally had a baby girl, who was not eligible to assume the throne, as in Britain, there was speculation that things would change, allowing the little girl to be heir. But, so far, apparently that hasn't happened. I don't know as much as I should about Japan, but I think the role of women in that society is a huge cultural issue.

[Snow]

19. The business about requiring a male heir is fairly recent,

as these things go. It might be something the Japanese picked up from western nations back when contacts with the west first started. They don't follow rules very well when it suits their purpose not to - for instance, they picked easily manipulable puppets to succeed King Kojong of Korea during the occupation in the early 1900's. Led to enormous mistrust of the Korean monarchy and eventually the later heirs including the current crown prince of Korea were culturally Japanese.

[bpilgrim]

23. She would be the first Empress in two and a half centuries to reign

She would be the first Empress in two and a half centuries to reign over the world’s oldest hereditary monarchy. Such a change would represent the defining moment of the reign of the present Emperor, Akihito, who during his 15 years on the throne has discreetly modernised the imperial institution. But Japanese courtiers are concerned that debating such a fundamental change publicly will provoke questions about the very existence of the 1,500-year-old monarchy.

Senior officials of the Imperial Household Agency, the equivalent of the Buckingham Palace bureaucracy, have always denied that any changes to the Emperor system are being considered. But, privately, senior sources in the court admit that planning has begun and that unless the Crown Prince, who is 43, and his wife, Princess Masako, 39, have a son in the next few years, a public debate will begin formally.

The Prince and Princess tried to have a baby for eight years. Princess Masako suffered a miscarriage before conceiving again in 2001 after she was treated by one of Japan’s leading fertility specialists. The couple’s delight in their daughter has been obvious during their public appearances. But the fact remains that no boy has been born into the family for 37 years and that under the Imperial Household Law, women are barred from ascending to the throne.

“This is a politically sensitive issue, so we can’t publicly admit we are researching the possibility,” a senior palace source said. “But as a matter of fact we are, and we would be negligent not to.”

more...
http://www.able2know.com/forums/about4811.html

peace

[SemperEadem]

28. Britain doesn't recognize Salic Law

therefore a female or a male whose claim come from female lineage may ascend the throne.

France, (Aragonese) Spain and the Holy Roman Empire(Germany) do recognize Salic Law, hence there has never been a Queen Regnant or a king decended from a royal female in any of those countries. Catherine deMedicis was a queen regent in the minority of her son, Charles IX, not queen regnant of her own right.

Queen Elizabeth is queen regnant, not queen consort, of England. Once her father was crowned king, she became heiress presumptive. There was nothing barring her from the throne.

[SemperEadem]

27. she's already lived in the real world before marrying the Crown Prince

hence her difficulty in adjusting to an archaic mindset and lifestyle. No person who marries into this world, having lived their life outside of the confines of monarchy, goes into it with all of the information needed to live successfully under the constraints.

It was Diana Spencer's problem, it was Sarah Ferguson's problem, it was Mark Phillip's problem. It is a difficult world for a commoner to embrace because of all the freedoms of personhood a commoner enjoys. You marry into that world and you are strapped down in so many ways that it's easy to lose your identity and your personhood because of the 'duty' you must perform for your country.

[truthisfreedom]

2. a picture of the happy family

[DeepModem Mom]

3. I'm not seeing the pic, truthisfreedom --

[Zech Marquis]

6. perfect reflection of Japanese society

you have a very capale, smart, and beautiful woman who had a great career in front of her, and instead og adapting to her unique abilities, these jerks in the Imperial Agency simply shut her off form the world :argh: Meanwhile, it's like they're saying,"oh NOW we'll try to change your duties so you can be happier..."what with the pressure of having a male heir and god knows what else she's been forced to do "as her duty" :grr:

for all the wonderful technology and other advances Japan has made--and I consider Japan as my second home country--there are sooo many changes to be made in its society, especially how women and miniroties are treated :x

[DeepModem Mom]

7. Thanks for your post -- I had an idea of the context of this story...

but was hoping that someone with more knowledge would share some thoughts.

[psychopomp]

10. Actually, that family all have it bad

when it comes to duty. They are not just royalty but the Emperor is the center around which present-day Shinto revolves. Most of all, the Emperor is more or less a slave to Shinto tradition and the clock. Just about every minute of the day is filled by rituals, rites and then public obligations. Same goes for the heir and his wife, I am sure.

Anybody who has been through tea torture knows a tiny fragment of what their life is like, 7 days a week.

Adjusting to this type of life was the first blow for the Princess and the pressure to produce a male heir was the proverbial straw.

[Snow]

20. Hey! My aunt-in-law has a 4th degree black belt in tea ceremony,

thank you very much. and like a 5th dan in flower arranging as well. Humph! Tea torture indeed! It's very soothing, I'll have you know.

[psychopomp]

22. I've had good experiences

but you really need to be in the right place. But, that really isn't the point. Imagine this belabored ritual every day in a variety of applications for the rest of your life and you have the Imperial Household Agency's (Kunaicho) program for the Emperor and the immediate family.

Okay, they are living quite well and the taxpayers foot the bill for a very comfortable lifestyle (the Occupation took most of the imperial money thinking it was an impediment to building a democracy). Some things are more valuable than money and comfort, though, and that is freedom to decide what you will do with your life.

Anyhow, the public seems to want to keep their Emperor living like a king, since they can decide to stop footing the bill and kick them out of the public-owned imperial properties any time they want to.

http://www.kunaicho.go.jp/eindex.html
Imperial Household Agency Homepage

[cap]

8. what's with all this emphasis on fertility...

surely the Princess could have had In vitro fertilization. They could have picked the sex of the child. I wonder why this wasnt done.

[TXDemGal]

25. IVF has very low success rates

esp. for a woman who is now the Princess's age. Even if she'd done IVF right out of the gate at marriage (30 years old?), the success rate would not have been much better.

[no_hypocrisy]

9. The depression will stop when the imperial family & the country stop

treating Princess Masako like a brood mare.

[emad]

11. They've been blaming her for lack of male heir to the Imperial

throne....guess no one at the Royal Court is bold enough to mention it might just be her husband's almost non-existent sperm count that is at least 50% of the problem....

[VirginiaDem]

12. My Masako tidbit

I lived in Japan for four and a half years. My favorite telling tidbit about Masako and her out-of-place-ness is that when she first joined the royal family she gave an interview and said one of her favorite authors is Kenzaburo Oe. He won the Nobel Prize for literature somewhere around 1995. This is interesting for two reasons: westerners love Oe because he translates well. He's deeply influenced by western writers and subsequently writes like them. Unfortunately, for normal Japanese this makes him almost unreadable. I don't know any Japanese people that were able to get through any of his works--his sentences are too damn long and complicated. The second reason is that Oe hates the monarchy and has often written about this. The royal family had a royal cow when she said this in the interview.

[psychopomp]

13. Interesting bit of tid

Thanks, and welcome to DU! There are a number of expats in Japan and ex-expats stateside who post. :toast:

[DeepModem Mom]

29. Very interesting, VirginiaDem -- and welcome to DU!

[TahitiNut]

14. I have no sympathy for "royalty".

The repeated theme of 'poor little princess' and 'role model royalty' continues to ignore thousands of years of human history. Sorry, but I'm still in Madame DeFarge's camp. The constant elevation and celebration of royalty' in our popular culture merely numbs us, from early childhood, to the gross evils of autocracy.

[Arioch]

15. Teaching assistant

For a while Masako was my Japanese professor's T/A at Harvard.

We were discussing her becoming the Princess at the time she finally accepted the Prince's courting...

...he said it would never work.
I have yet to see him be corrected.

[TahitiNut]

16. Yes. I'd call it seduction and corruption.

It's beyond surreal how people regard 'royals' and observe their behavior against some very strange hallucinatory standard. Drunken, perverted, self-obsessed, privileged people living off inherited wealth and wealth derived solely from perquisites and (literally) entitlements who have nothing even approaching the duties of a single mother struggling to raise children or teenagers trying to dodge drug dealers and gangs to get an education. It's fucking appalling that we celebrate such 'lifestyles' and demonize the efforts of ordinary people to attain equity.

[DeepModem Mom]

30. Wow, Arioch, another interesting tidbit -- welcome to DU!

[smirkymonkey]

17. You're right, it's archaic and pointless in a modern society.

It only serves to reinforce the "divine right" of the privileged classes. For the most part, they are ornamental parasites and nothing more.

[Snow]

18. Such as the Bushes, the Lodges, the Rockefellers, and (dare I say it?)

the Kennedys, eh? It seems to be almost a genetic tendency, to have a group of people in a culture who are royals & aristocrats. Might be the best way to handle that is to admit it, then give them appropriate duties. The Scandinavian countries seem to handle it well. Japan goes a bit overboard on the duty thing, England goes a bit overboard on the useless wealthy leisure thing. America's really the only place left that lets its royalty have real power without any requirements of responsibility.

[TahitiNut]

21. Yes, this is the politics of conservatism.

"Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place. A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege. The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others."
—— F. A. Hayek, 1956 Preface to "The Road to Serfdom"

4. I have already referred to the differences between conservatism and liberalism in the purely intellectual field, but I must return to them because the characteristic conservative attitude here not only is a serious weakness of conservatism but tends to harm any cause which allies itself with it. Conservatives feel instinctively that it is new ideas more than anything else that cause change. But, from its point of view rightly, conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them; and, by its distrust of theory and its lack of imagination concerning anything except that which experience has already proved, it deprives itself of the weapons needed in the struggle of ideas. Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality.

The difference shows itself most clearly in the different attitudes of the two traditions to the advance of knowledge. Though the liberal certainly does not regard all change as progress, he does regard the advance of knowledge as one of the chief aims of human effort and expects from it the gradual solution of such problems and difficulties as we can hope to solve. Without preferring the new merely because it is new, the liberal is aware that it is of the essence of human achievement that it produces something new; and he is prepared to come to terms with new knowledge, whether he likes its immediate effects or not.

<snip>

Connected with the conservative distrust if the new and the strange is its hostility to internationalism and its proneness to a strident nationalism. Here is another source of its weakness in the struggle of ideas. It cannot alter the fact that the ideas which are changing our civilization respect no boundaries. But refusal to acquaint one's self with new ideas merely deprives one of the power of effectively countering them when necessary. The growth of ideas is an international process, and only those who fully take part in the discussion will be able to exercise a significant influence. It is no real argument to say that an idea is un-American, or un-German, nor is a mistaken or vicious ideal better for having been conceived by one of our compatriots.

A great deal more might be said about the close connection between conservatism and nationalism, but I shall not dwell on this point because it might be felt that my personal position makes me unable to sympathize with any form of nationalism. I will merely add that it is this nationalistic bias which frequently provides the bridge from conservatism to collectivism: to think in terms of "our" industry or resource is only a short step away from demanding that these national assets be directed in the national interest. But in this respect the Continental liberalism which derives from the French Revolution is little better than conservatism. I need hardly say that nationalism of this sort is something very different from patriotism and that an aversion to nationalism is fully compatible with a deep attachment to national traditions. But the fact that I prefer and feel reverence for some of the traditions of my society need not be the cause of hostility to what is strange and different.

(from the essay Why I Am Not A Conservative; full text at http://www.geocities.com/ecocorner/intelarea/fah1.html )

[SemperEadem]

24. what a surreal world being a royal consort must be

You're nothing better than a brood mare who gets to wear lots of jewels.

The pressure being applied to this woman by the insanely-rigid construct of the monarchy, I'm sure, is crushing the spirit of this poor woman. It is so heartening to see that her husband is standing completely by her side and defending her. It's time Japan get out of dark ages--monarchies are obsolete. Female regiment is just as strong as male regiment. It's not like Japan is going to become a satellite country of the husband of the baby girl born to the Royal couple.

[RobinA]

32. When Charles and Diana

were about to be married my girlfriends were all agog. I said I felt sorry for her. They said, wasn't I just a little bit envious? I said no, she's a brood mare marrying a guy who is barely in the same generation as she is, they have nothing in common, she has no idea what she is doing.

Sadly, I was even more right than I knew at the time. With her I can understand, maybe, she was very young at this time. With Masako, I guess she just thought she could fight city hall. Royals should come with warning labels around their necks when they go looking for brides.

[bleedingheart]

26. How about they end the monarchy and her troubles are over?

While I don't want anyone to be depressed, this woman will get the best treatments available....I doubt everyone in Japan is so lucky.

[DeepModem Mom]

31. Thanks to everyone contributing first-hand knowledge and thoughtful...

comments to this thread. I'm constantly amazed at the breadth and depth of knowledge, level of thought, and deeply-felt opinion among the DU community.