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N O V E M B E R 1 9 9 8
by Gale Eisenstodt
ON this unusually steamy day in late May, Makoto Watanabe is frantic. In less than twenty-four hours the Emperor and Empress of Japan will leave from Tokyo's Haneda Airport to begin a twelve-day official tour of Brazil and Argentina. Watanabe perches restlessly on the edge of an overstuffed chair covered in gold cloth. His secretary brings in green tea, served in blue-and-white china cups embellished with chrysanthemums, the imperial symbol. The phone rings, and Watanabe races across the office. "Yes, yes -- morning coats," he says. In a moment the phone rings again. This time Watanabe goes over the details of a speech that Emperor Akihito is to deliver.
A thoughtful man whose profile is one of attenuated sharp angles, Watanabe is the grand chamberlain -- perhaps Akihito's closest adviser. He is also a courtier who seems to be perennially caught in the middle as Japan's imperial system -- a system at once delicate and durable -- is pulled this way and that by the conflicting forces at work in Japan as a whole.
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Watanabe's life is tightly intertwined with that of the imperial couple. Most days he is by their side at 9:00 A.M., attending Shinto ceremonies or official audiences for, say, principals of junior high schools or participants in the Special Olympics. Some nights there are banquets for visiting heads of state. Watanabe is privy to the most mundane details of palace life. At the outset of one interview he fretted about the Empress's affliction with a form of herpes that was causing pain in her shoulder.
The imperial chamberlains, of whom the grand chamberlain is the chief, are part of an inner circle of palace bureaucrats, or oku, who work closely with the Japanese royal family. Until the 1970s, when the government decided that morning coats and automobiles would be more appropriate, the chamberlains wore white robes and rode in horse-drawn carriages to pray at the palace shrines. Together with the omote -- the administrative courtiers who serve as liaisons with cabinet officials, ministries, and other agencies -- they make up the Imperial Household Agency, a secretive bureaucracy that wields enormous control over the affairs of the imperial family. The friction between the oku and the omote has long been fodder for Japan's tabloid press. The strife is real, engendered in part by differences in the roles and perspectives of the two groups. On one occasion when I spoke with Watanabe, he stressed the urgency of fixing a "communication problem" with the omote.
The courtiers of Japan's royal house did not need the death of Princess Diana last year, and the anti-monarchical sentiment amid the mourning that ensued, to remind them that modern monarchies can be fragile institutions, venerable but also buffeted by the crosswinds of the moment. "Emperor Akihito realizes that the greatest challenge for a monarchy in a democratic society is simply to survive," a senior Japanese palace official said to me recently. But how to survive? Behind the walled, moated perimeter of the Emperor's 285-acre palace grounds, an island of luxuriant foliage and delicious air amid Tokyo's congestion, courtiers like Watanabe endlessly and inconclusively search for a response to that challenge.
THINK of the imperial grounds as a splendid but secluded village. The Imperial Household Agency headquarters, a European-style structure built in the 1930s, is the town hall. To one side is the palace, rebuilt in 1968, with traditional Japanese-style patinaed-bronze roofs and elegant formal rooms. Some distance away is the two-story modern home of Emperor Akihito, Empress Michiko, and their unmarried twenty-nine-year-old daughter, Princess Sayako. It consists of sixty-two rooms (many reserved for official use) laid out around a garden. Dispersed around the grounds are shrines, archives, a hospital, and a silkworm nursery. On a stroll one encounters the occasional volunteer group, its members bent and wrinkled, dutifully sweeping leaves. Smartly dressed men and kimono-clad women arrive in tour buses for audiences with the Emperor. But mostly there is silence.
Here in this compound, in once-magnificent offices that show unmistakable signs of decay (peeling wallpaper, empty Kirin beer bottles, dying plants perched perilously on dusty shelves), Japan's imperial minders speak in dissonant voices.
There are the purists, who subscribe to the view of monarchy articulated for Britain in the late nineteenth century by the political writer and Economist editor Walter Bagehot: royalty must remain cloaked in mystery and magic. They shun talk of more frequent and less formal imperial outings. By scripting press conferences, limiting photographs, and assuming personal responsibility for royal foibles, the purists seem intent on purging the imperial family of its humanity and individuality. They cherish a vision of Japanese monarchy that the public is becoming increasingly disinclined to accept.
Then there are the more forward-looking courtiers, who are busy studying the King of Thailand's development projects and the Belgian monarchy's involvement in trade missions. They want to give Japan's Emperor a more activist role. Members of this group are desperately searching for a modern theme that would solidify public support. "Strong ideological opposition to the monarchy has weakened in recent years," says one senior courtier. "But now we have a new problem: there is an increase in the number of people who don't feel they need the system. And the monarchy hasn't been made meaningful to the younger generation."
This attitude could emerge more powerfully in the event of significant provocation. Imagine, for a moment, that Princess Masako, the Harvard graduate and onetime diplomat who married Crown Prince Naruhito in 1993, does not produce an heir. This is a real possibility, after five years of childless marriage and, apparently, a dutiful effort to conceive. If the Crown Prince, now thirty-eight, dies without issue, his brother, Prince Akishino, thirty-two, will be next in line to the throne. But after him? So far Akishino has fathered only daughters, and an 1889 law limits succession to a male. Some courtiers, albeit off the record, argue in favor of changing that law. To amend it, however, would require approval by the Diet, or parliament. This would in all likelihood entail a wrenching debate about the meaning of monarchy. The Japanese people would come face to face with the fact that the throne reflects their society all too well. It is built of awkward compromises sustained by administrative inertia. It is an expression of Japan's muddled nationalism.
THERE seems to be no definitive textbook on the management of monarchy, but if a recent analysis in Britain's Financial Times is any guide, the Japanese have done well with some of the basics. Japan's royal family is for the most part morally upright, so far as is known. Its members are discreet with regard to the media. They stay far away from politics. (Japan's 1947 constitution prohibits political involvement by the Emperor.) The royal family lives elegantly but not ostentatiously.
Japan's imperial system is not cheap, however. Including salaries for some 1,150 imperial employees (administrators, cooks, gardeners, musicians, scholars, financial managers, servants) and for 970 palace police officers, the total annual bill is around $200 million. Japan's royal family owns neither the ground on which the imperial palace sits -- which during the real-estate boom of the late 1980s was reported to be worth as much as the entire state of Florida -- nor any of the almost ten square miles of property, including farms, burial grounds, and outlying villas and palaces, that have been designated by the government for the court's exclusive use. The Emperor is, in effect, a glorified salaryman, paid a yearly tax-free stipend of about $2.4 million. A portion of that, perhaps a third, goes to support certain staff members in the Emperor's personal employ -- assistants for his private research on gobiid fish, for example. Daily living expenses for Empress Michiko and Princess Sayako, for the Crown Prince and Crown Princess, and for the Emperor's aged mother also come out of the Emperor's stipend. Several additional households that belong to the imperial family are given their own tax-free stipends, generally about $220,000 a year.
With the nation straining under a huge budget deficit and serious economic malaise, some courtiers worry that the royal family will be accused of not earning its keep. Of course, bean counting misses the point. In Japan, as in Britain, the monarchy serves as the repository of the nation's traditions. "We have a two-thousand-year history," Satoshi Takishima, who until recently ran the palace's tombs division, once told me by way of explaining his visceral resistance to innovation. "We are not in the habit of changing things." Another courtier underscored the point by invoking a mystical simile: "The Emperor system is like air, not something somebody made."
An article (based on a lecture delivered at the First International Research Symposium of the Center for Japanese Culture on March 9, 1988), tracing the development of Japan's Buddhist and Shinto religions.
The Meiji Restoration, a dramatic historical period, saw the creation of an ideology from which the Japanese in important respects have scarcely budged. Takashi Fujitani, a history professor at the University of California at San Diego, writes, in his book Splendid Monarchy (1996), "The emperor and his family continue to perform their ceremonials as if they were traditional -- somehow timeless and without a history -- and in so doing erase the memories of a past when national community was but the dream of a few." The calculated manufacture of tradition is not uniquely Japanese. As the historian David Cannadine has pointed out, only in the late nineteenth century did the British monarchy resume staging splendid public spectacles; for quite some time before that its rituals were clumsy and essentially private.
FOR Britain's monarchy the challenge is to symbolize the spirit of the nation in a United Kingdom irrevocably beyond the Age of Empire. Japanese courtiers face the task of conveying, through the imperial family's activities, a binding ideal of Japanese nationhood that goes beyond the myth of unique blood -- a concept that is beginning to lose its appeal even within Japan. That task would be daunting enough without the prevailing official culture of diffidence and indirection.
Emperor Akihito's interviews and press conferences are formal, staid affairs, and his speeches are almost entirely written for him by courtiers and cabinet members. A talk with Makoto Watanabe is one of the few ways of gaining insight into Akihito's mind, and even this route is oddly circuitous, lined with confusing road signs, and studded with dead ends. And yet Watanabe would argue, with some justification, that Akihito chafes at being dictated to and in fact asserts himself on certain issues. Shortly after Emperor Hirohito died, in 1989, Akihito made a point of clearly articulating his support for the present Japanese constitution -- a subtle rebuke to Japan's extreme right-wing activists, who assume that Hirohito never really liked this American-crafted document. (Hirohito did have his reservations. He wanted to be consulted, to encourage, and to warn, in the manner of the British monarchy.)
Akihito has edged delicately toward controversy in other ways. In 1990, when Hitoshi Motoshima, the mayor of Nagasaki, was shot by fanatics for suggesting that Hirohito was partly responsible for the behavior of the Japanese military during the Second World War, Akihito visited the mayor and conveyed his sympathy. Akihito has also demonstrated some initiative in the matter of the Japanese island of Okinawa. His father was never welcome there. Okinawans felt betrayed by Hirohito, and held him responsible for the island's wartime devastation and for encouraging the United States to prolong its postwar occupation. Akihito, however, has shown interest in the poetry of Okinawa and has made several trips to the island, despite being attacked by a firebomber on one occasion.
Hiroshi Takahashi, a journalist and perhaps the most knowledgeable chronicler of the Japanese throne, credits Akihito personally for sharpening and deepening the public expression of Japanese remorse for Japan's ravaging of China and its people during the Second World War. This expression, uttered in the course of Akihito's visit to China in 1992, was particularly controversial, because conservatives did not want the Emperor to apologize to the Chinese at all, and they lobbied the Diet to dilute his speeches. Nobody at the palace will confirm Takahashi's claim, though Watanabe will say that the Emperor makes some editorial changes to the remarks he delivers, seizing opportunities to speak his own mind.
But such gestures, and much else of what the Emperor does, may be too subtle for the average harried citizen to grasp. Many Japanese regard Akihito as bland in comparison with his charismatic father. And the truth is that many of the Emperor's duties are nothing but symbolic drudgery -- attesting the appointment of ambassadors and ministers, putting his seal on documents from the cabinet. Every year in early summer the Emperor plants rice at the palace paddy, and the Empress goes off to cultivate silk at the imperial silkworm nursery. "This is a nice tradition," one courtier says, "but Japan's silk industry is pretty much gone, and the number of rice farmers is rapidly shrinking. And Japan's computer industry doesn't need encouragement from the imperial family."
Some Japanese believe that the seeming reticence of the throne is a deliberate choice of the Emperor's advisers. No doubt this is true to some extent, but a good part of the perceived reticence is due simply to inertia. A friend who once worked at the palace told me that it took him a full year to negotiate access to files he needed in order to complete the task for which he had been hired. "The apathy is extraordinary," he recalled. Like Watanabe, most senior officials at the palace come from one of the ministries, many on a short-term basis. The ostensible purpose of this system, which reflects pre-war patterns, is to keep the palace well connected and well informed. But it no longer works. In pre-war times a stint at the palace carried prestige. Today many regard the assignment as an unwelcome diversion from their careers. Understanding little about the imperial system, the temporary courtiers cling blindly to precedent so as not to make some terrible mistake. There are, of course, exceptions. One I met was Tokumitsu Murakami, a director at the Imperial Household Agency, whose bookshelves were filled with volumes on the imperial system written by both left- and right-wing scholars -- part of his determined effort to understand what is going on. "It's nice that he's trying," said one Japanese journalist who covers the court. "But he'll be gone soon." Indeed, Murakami recently left the palace's employ.
Taking the notion of imperial impartiality to paralyzing extremes, courtiers rarely seize what might seem like obvious opportunities. After the 1995 Kobe earthquake many volunteer groups formed to help the victims. One adviser suggested dispatching the Crown Prince and Princess to pitch in as a show of support. But the idea was abandoned out of fear of possible criticism for favoring one group over another.
Last year, after the death of Princess Diana, I watched with great interest to see how Britain's royal minders would deal with the public call for the palace to break with protocol and lower flags to half mast, and for the Queen to openly exhibit grief. I was astonished by the rapid and coherent articulation of public opinion and the speed of the throne's reply. Had Japan's Imperial Household Agency been confronted with a similar challenge (not that the Japanese public would ever have been so forward), it probably would have taken the courtiers weeks to overcome infighting, passivity, and the meddling of interest groups.
The online version of this article appears in two parts. Click here to go to part two.
Gale Eisenstodt, a writer based in London, was formerly the Tokyo bureau chief for Forbes magazine. Her articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, and Vogue.
Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; November 1998; Behind the Chrysanthemum Curtain; Volume 282, No. 5; pages 20 - 36.
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