The morning after it broke, news that Princess Kiko is expecting a baby in September was greeted with predictably meaningless blather on the TV wide shows. Commentators made a connection between the pregnancy and that ceremony the princess and her husband, Prince Akishino, attended in September of last year where storks raised in captivity were released into the wild. Later, the couple wrote poems about storks.
Coincidence or providence? If it's the former, then it only goes to show how little these talking heads know about advance public relations. If it's the latter, then maybe the Emperor is still a god and we don't know it.
As a matter of fact, the arguments for retaining the male-line succession rule have a religious ring to them, and people who speak up against it tend to attract dirty looks, as if they were uttering blasphemies. In an article that appeared in the Asahi Shimbun, a manga critic commented that the current controversy over images of Muhammad printed in European newspapers has a parallel in Japan, where cartoonists never draw the Emperor.