A government panel on imperial succession has issued a final proposal to revise the Imperial Household Law. It contains two main points. One is that females and their descendants should be allowed to ascend the Chrysanthemum Throne. The second is that the emperor's firstborn child, regardless of gender, should be first in line to the throne. The government is expected to submit a revision bill to the Diet in March 2006.
The immediate effect of the revision would be that three-year-old Princess Aiko, the Crown Prince and Princess' only child, will become the nation's first female emperor since female Emperor Go-Sakuramachi, who reigned from 1762 to 1770. She will succeed her father, now first in line to the throne. The panel's proposal could also bring a historic change to the practice of successions based on a male line in the emperor system.
The 10-member panel, headed by former Tokyo University President Hiroyuki Yoshikawa, started discussions in January, prompted by the fact that since the birth of Prince Akishino, the younger brother of the Crown Prince, in 1965, no male has been born into the Imperial family. Under the current Imperial Household Law, only males who have emperors on their father's side can be heirs to the Imperial throne. The Crown Princess, a 41-year-old Harvard-educated former diplomat, is apparently suffering from stress due to the pressure placed on her to give birth to a son. If this rule remains, there is a danger that there will be no heirs to the Imperial throne in the future. In contrast to the Meiji Constitution, which designated the emperor as the nation's sovereign, the current Constitution upholds the principle that sovereign power resides with the people. But Article 1 says, "The Emperor shall be the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people, deriving his position from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power." If the panel's proposal is implemented, the number of heirs to the throne will increase from the current six to 14, thus helping ensure continuity of the hereditary institution.