Emperor’s last appearance end of era
It’s not only 2018 that is nearly a wrap.
’Tis also the season for a long goodbye for the world’s longest-running hereditary monarchy.
Doubling, too, as one of the culture’s longest-running parables, it should all come into further focus when Emperor Akihito of Japan appears on the balcony of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo with his family on Dec. 23. It being his birthday — and it being the final time he will appear in this way before he takes leave next spring, when he formally renounces the throne — the show-and-tell promises to be a momentous one.
Though Japan does not do Christmas, per se, the Emperor’s Birthday has long been a national holiday and, since 1989, when Akihito was installed, it has fallen on this day in late December, marking the date of his birth in 1933.
Traditionally, too, it is one of only two chances that citizens have to enter the inner garden of the palace to actually see the imperial clan, which is somewhat more cloistered than, say, their British royal counterparts. As the late columnist Alexander Chancellor once wrote, the emperor is not someone who they insist “performs public duties, displays emotion, or convinces them he is human. They are just happy that he is quietly there, not bothering them in any way.”
However, in April 2019, for the first time in two centuries, an emperor from the Land of the Rising Sun will officially step down, making way for his son, Crown Prince Naruhito, aged 57. Something that was all the sotto voce scuttlebutt when I was briefly in Tokyo last year — the Japanese that I encountered enjoyed nothing more than a little gossip about their royals all the while telling you that they don’t really go for much gossip about their royals. It’s complicated.
The royal switcheroo specifically came to pass, by the way, when it was requested by the aging Akihito, and was only permitted when special legislation was passed in the national legislature, because the imperial household law has no express provision for abdications.
Some of the after-effects? For one, on a purely cosmetic level, this will be the final time Dec. 23 is celebrated; the holiday shifts to Feb. 23, the day on which Naruhito was born. But because the abdication is not until April, there will be no Emperor’s Birthday in 2019.
Possibly more problematic? What some have been dubbed “Japan’s Y2K problem,” since the new coronation has a corollary effect on the tech sector. Long story short: the Japanese calendar, as an article in the Guardian explained recently, numbers the years starting from the coronation of a new emperor (using not the name of the emperor, but the name of the era they herald), but because Akihito has been on the throne for almost the entirety of the information age, many systems have never had to deal with a switchover. In some cases, they never even really shifted over from the previous emperor’s era.
Microsoft even issued the followed software update warning: “Some algorithms attempting to count the years during a transition year may not consider the possibility of two partial Japanese Calendar years, in two different Calendars Eras, within the same Gregorian year.” You got it? Yet another ongoing storyline: how the incoming empress, the current Crown Princess Masako, will fare. A beacon of modernity and sparkle when she entered the imperial clan (some shades of Meghan Markle here), the Harvard- and Oxford-educated wife of Naruhito had a well-publicized breakdown in the early 1990s that left her unable to speak for months and was rarely seen for many years. In 2015, she finally made a return to official duties; today, speculation grows as to how she will approach her heightened role.
In an unusually candid statement to mark her birthday last month, Masako ventured, “Even though I feel insecure about how helpful I will be when I think about the days ahead … I want to devote myself to the happiness of the people, so I will make an effort to that end.”
Yet another more existential, potentially catastrophic, thread running through this moment in Japan’s history? The departures of the emperor, together with his wife, Empress Michiko, comes on the heels of the news that Princess Mako, Akihito’s granddaughter, is seeking to marry a non-royal, and consequently give up her royal title, as her cousin Princess Ayako did recently. Royal observers note that the imperial clan now has just 18 members, 13 of whom are women (none of whom are eligible for the throne, according to the archaic rules).
To put an all-too-fine point on it: Naruhito does not have any sons, so the inheritance technically goes to his brother, Prince Akishino, after which it then passes to Akishino’s son, now 12, Hisahito. And if Hisahito doesn’t have any sons, it’s the end of the line.
“A lot, in other words, is riding on little Hisahito to replenish the stud book,” as the Economist put it an article last year.
The saga glides on.