Word: aiko
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...pressure to produce a male heir in the years before and after the birth of her daughter Princess Aiko in 2002 is seen by many as the Crown Princess’s breaking point. While the succession crisis ended with the birth of her nephew Prince Akishino in 2006, Owada has been suffering from an adjustment order and still remains out of the public...
...family gradually died. It was clear that she had failed in her one traditional duty: to produce a male heir. All her education and accomplishments meant nothing by comparison. Japanese tabloids cast aspersions on her patriotism and her toughness, and not long after she gave birth to a daughter, Aiko, in December 2001, Masako sank into a depression. Now she has gone from an icon of style to an object of pity. "She's been crushed," says housewife Hiroko Nishiyama, a Kiko backer. "I feel sorry...
...Kiko, the second princess, had produced only daughters as well, and the Japanese royal family seemed in real danger of dying out. With that in mind, last November Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi backed an initiative that would change Japanese law to allow a female - 4-year-old Princess Aiko - to become Empress. Most Japanese were in favor of the new law, thinking that the time had come when a woman could sit on the throne. (In fact, Japan has had several reigning empresses in the past, though none were allowed to pass the throne onto their children.) But the imperial...
...hearing the news. Though the Internet burned with speculation over the suspicious timing of Kiko's pregnancy, the news immediately put Koizumi's initiative on the back burner. Now, with the birth of a prince, the law is almost certainly dead, and Kiko's boy will cut ahead of Aiko in the line of succession . Still, the quick abandonment of the revision reminds Japanese women just how low the glass ceiling still remains in their country, and underscores how strong political conservatism has become in Japan...
...given Japan's demographic trends, the Chrysanthemum Throne may not be a boy's club much longer. It took the royal family 41 years to produce this prince, and when Aiko and her two royal cousins grow up and almost certainly marry commoners, they'll be snipped from the imperial family, leaving the boy the last royal. If the prince and his future wife have the Japanese average of 1.25 children, odds are just about even that they'll only produce princesses - and this time, there'll be no backup pregnancies to bail them...