The future of the Japanese royal family is a 12-year-old boy

Last week, a 12 year old boy He posed for pictures at the entrance to his new school. His broad smile, his uniform and his naturalness when he accepted the photos clearly showed that he was accustomed to public scrutiny. An examination that will only intensify: when his uncle, Prince Naruhito, will be proclaimed emperor on May 1, the small Hisahito will rise to second place in the line of succession, the last possible male heir.

The law of the Japanese imperial house prevents, today, that women can inherit the chrysanthemum throne. In fact, if they marry a commoner, they are no longer part of the royal family, as was the case in 2004 for Sayako Kuroda, daughter of the current Emperor Akihito and his wife Michiko: he had to ask for a special permission to marry and give up her princess title. This is a serious problem in a very small lineage: of its 18 current members, only five are men. And one of them is the current emperor himself, Akihito, 85 years old and about to abdicate the next day 30, during a ceremony at which can only participate adult male members of the imperial family.

The next ruler, Naruhito, and his wife, Princess Masako, had only one daughter, the 17-year-old Princess Aiko, who, with the rules in force, is excluded from the estate.

He leaves like Immediate heir to Prince Akishino, 53, the younger brother of the future emperor and father of Hisahito. And after him, the 12-year-old boy.

Akishino and his wife, Princess Kiko, had two other daughters, Princess Mako, 28, and Kako, 25. As a cousin, neither can claim to the throne. Mako, promised to commoner Kei Komuro, will leave the royal family in 2020. By here, the wedding must be postponed last year. The official argument is that the couple was not adequately prepared, although the Japanese press claimed that reason were some economic problems – already solved – of the fiancé's family.

With the rules as they are, the pressure on Hisahito will be immense. If his sisters and their cousins ​​get married, it will be up to him and his immediate family – his wife and the children they both have – to take on all the duties of the Royal Japanese Dynasty. And if he does not have any male children, there is a risk of cutting a line of succession that, according to tradition, will be more than 2600 years and that starts, according to legend, by the goddess of the sun Amaterasu.

Naruhito and Princess Masako were already concerned by this situation. The difficulties of having offspring and the pressure to conceive a male child are late, depending on the pressure of the heart, the episodes of depression that the future empress has suffered since her marriage and her entry into the imperial house. For years, it seemed like there would be no heir to continue the lineage. The The arrival of Hisahito in 2006 allowed the traditionalists to pause who reject that a woman can badume the throne even though history has always counted in the empire of the rising sun eight empresses.

In principle, and although succession is badured for the next decades, the Japanese government must begin to study reforms of the Salic law in force. Parliament therefore urged, in 2017, that an extraordinary law be adopted to allow Akihito, as he wished, I could abdicate in a younger member of the dynasty, something that was not previously provided for in the royal standards. Akihito is the first emperor to give up the throne for about two centuries for health reasons.

Tokyo badured that it would open debate on this reform shortly after May 1, when Naruhito will badume the throne to replace his father. But the Conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government seems to hesitate about the possibility of changing the rules to allow a woman to become an empress.

"Given that it is an issue of extreme importance that affects the nation's base, we must examine it very carefully," said Abe to the Japanese Parliament's Diet.

If the Abe government blurs, it will not be because public opinion does not subscribe to the idea of ​​a woman on the chrysanthemum throne. According to a survey published by the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun last November, two-thirds of the Japanese view with good eyes the possibility of having an empress in the future it represents the nation.