Japanese Crown Princess Masako has been made ill by efforts to crush her personality, her husband Prince Naruhito suggested on Monday in an unusually outspoken attack on the straitjacket culture of the imperial household.
Explaining why his wife will not join him on a trip to Europe this month, the heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne said the pressures to conceive a son and adjust to the cloistered palace lifestyle had been too much to bear.
FILE PHOTO: AP
"For the past 10 years, she has tried very hard to adapt herself to the imperial family," Naruhito told a news conference. "In my eyes, she appears totally exhausted from it."
Masako was expected to attend royal weddings in Spain and Denmark after a layoff from official duties stretching back to December when she was in hospital with shingles. But the comeback has been indefinitely postponed.
"I hope from my heart that she will be able to join me in the future," the prince said. "It may take longer for her to recover than we had originally thought."
Rare press conferences by the imperial family increasingly sound like cries for help by emperors, empresses, princes and princesses, stuck inside one of the world's most conservative, isolated and secretive institutions.
Naruhito's recent public statements have been critical of a system that he blames for his wife's poor health. In February he asked the media and -- more pointedly -- the imperial household agency to give his wife some space so that she could rest. He also said life in Togu Palace, the family's home in central Tokyo, was "isolated" and "less stimulating" than the public parks where he wished he could play with his daughter, Aiko.
On Monday, he went a step further by admitting the conformist pressures of the imperial court had a negative impact on his wife, an Oxford-educated multilingual diplomat who was obliged after marriage to become a demure housewife walking several steps behind her husband.
"It is true that there were moves to negate Masako's career and her personality, which was influenced by that career," Naruhito said.
Imperial stress is nothing new in Japan. Empress Michiko is known to have had a breakdown after becoming the first commoner to marry into the family.
But Masako's woes have been intensified by a succession crisis. No male has been born into the world's oldest royal line since 1965, when Michiko gave birth to Naruhito's brother, Akishima.
Now 40, one daughter and a miscarriage later, Masako is under pressure to produce an heir. Under the 1889 succession law, only a male can inherit the throne, though a revision is being considered by parliament.
The princess took refuge in her family's mountain chalet earlier this year, breaking a tradition that members of the imperial family should only stay in imperial villas.
According to Japan's media, her husband was forced to stay at a hotel when he visited. The household agency said this was for security reasons.
Over the past few months, the usually tight seal on stories from inside the imperial circle has been broken. There have been leaks of strife, especially between the crown princess and the bureaucrats of the imperial household agency, suggesting that a campaign against the crown princess is under way.
In several reports earlier this year, all of which were based on anonymous sources within the imperial household agency and the journalists who cover it, the crown princess was portrayed as difficult and selfish.
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