By Hanako Montgomery, Junko Ogura, Chris Lau, CNN
Tokyo (CNN) — Japan may have its first ever female prime minister, but her government’s attempts to avoid a royal succession crisis are making the chances of a woman taking the imperial throne ever slimmer.
With just three eligible heirs to the Chrysanthemum throne – and two of them 60 or over – the imperial family is facing a succession crisis.
Japan’s monarchy has for centuries maintained male-only succession, which is on-brand for a deeply patriarchal society where men dominate other spheres of life such as business and politics.
Now, that rule has come to threaten the very survival of the world’s oldest monarchy which, in recent decades, has spawned more daughters than sons.
To solve the dearth of heirs, government ministers have proposed reinstating former branches of the royal family, thereby expanding the pool of male successors. The changes are awaiting parliamentary approval.
But it has left scholars, opposition politicians and some citizens wondering: why not just let women take the throne?
‘No rational basis’
“It is difficult to find any rational basis for refusing to allow a woman to become emperor,” said Professor Makoto Okawa, who studies imperial lineage at Chuo University in Tokyo.
Japan previously had eight empresses, mostly when the male heirs were too young to rule, until the Imperial House Law was enacted in 1889 during the Meiji era, officially banning female emperors.
Despite the law, the country’s overarching constitution does not bar women from taking the throne, Okawa said, nor can it be regarded as a “Japanese tradition” to exclude them.
“The idea of excluding women in advance as persons incapable of becoming emperor should be understood plainly as misogyny,” said Okawa.
Various polls have shown most people are open-minded about female emperors.
Another resident, Kana Sakakura, noted that countries in Europe, such as the UK, have long histories of female monarchs.
“I suppose when you really compare it to other countries, it does feel like Japan still has an atmosphere where women taking on leadership roles in society is avoided,” she said.
But the cause of female succession has gained little traction. And Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and her ruling Liberal Democratic Party are among the sternest voices of opposition to such a change.
During a parliamentary discussion earlier this year, Takaichi said it was still “appropriate to limit eligibility to male descendants of the imperial lineage.”
Her government’s proposed amendments, expected to pass into law this month, do not contain a single scenario where a princess can ascend to the throne. Neither can their children, if they marry a commoner – an almost certain occurrence, given the royal family’s shrinkage.
Though its role is largely ceremonial, the imperial family – believed in Japanese myth to be descendants of the Sun Goddess – is a powerful symbol of unity in the country of 123 million.
The family’s centrality to the nation is such that US army general Douglas MacArthur, overseeing Japan’s development immediately after World War II, described the emperor in a telegram as “a symbol which unites all Japanese,” according to the US State Department’s Office of the Historian. “Destroy him and the nation will disintegrate.”
Imperial downsizing
In pre-war Japan, identifying a successor was less of a conundrum.
Back then, the imperial family was bigger and incorporated other collateral branches, known as Oke, which offered a pool of candidates if the main bloodline failed to produce an heir.
But that all changed in 1947. As Japan grappled with a war-ravaged economy, the Imperial House Law was amended to downsize th