Modern Royals Struggle With Rigid, Closed Past

TOKYO - They are modern-day celebrities. They are figures locked into tradition. Such are the uneasily paired perceptions of the Chrysanthemum Throne as Japan marks its move toward the 21st century with the wedding later today of its prince and a commoner.

Even before the frenzy surrounding the marriage ceremony between Crown Prince Naruhito and Crown Princess-to-be Masako Owada this evening (Wednesday morning Japanese time), Japan had witnessed the growing TV visibility of the 59-year-old Emperor Akihito, an accomplished marine biologist, his wife, Empress Michiko, and their three children - Naruhito, 33, Prince Akishino, 27, and Princess Sayako, 24.

Their media prominence has prompted some frustrated imperial family-watchers to advocate shipping the whole clan from the center of Tokyo back to the ancient capital of Kyoto, closing them off to TV cameras and paparazzi press.

Making up for World War II

But beneath all the hype surrounding the royal family, events this year are forcing the Japanese to confront the imperial future, even as they try to reconcile the imperial past.

Newspapers began 1993 with headlines about the upcoming wedding of the crown prince to a 29-year-old career woman who had spent much of her life in the United States and England - a striking surrender to contemporary values by this conservative institution.

By April, the top of the news was Emperor Akihito's visit to Okinawa, where nearly 200,000 soldiers and civilians died in World War II. Thousands of Japanese soldiers were ordered to fight and pressured to commit suicide in the name of Akihito's father, Emperor Hirohito. Questions still abound about Hirohito's wartime role. While he expressed "deep sadness" for this "unfortunate war," he died in January 1989 without ever offering an overt apology.

Akihito's condolences to Okinawans follows a similar outreach trip to China last year and suggests that he is determined to make amends that his father never did.

Historically, Japan's imperial family has remained in the background - unseen, yet central to the identity of the Japanese, a symbol not so much of the country as of what many Japanese believe to be the uniqueness of their character and the homogeneity of their race.

Much of Japan considers itself as impervious and mysterious as the secret Shinto rituals that, even today, transform the emperor from man to the son of a goddess. Coming from a supposedly unbroken line of succession, the emperor is also a link to a history that many firmly believe sets Japan apart from the rest of the world.

According to the national myth - widely accepted as truth until Hirohito was forced to publicly renounce his divinity in 1946 - Japan's 125th emperor comes from a continuous line of descendants that started with the Sun Goddess Amaterasu.

Serious research into the actual family history is sorely lacking, in part because archeological sites such as the imperial tombs have been largely closed to scholarly research. Another reason may have more to do with uncomfortable facts that Japanese scholars might dig up if they seriously tried. Some Western historians theorize that the emperor's family actually descends from a Korean clan.

Subjects pity royal family

The emperor's subjects display a distinctly Japanese sense of protectiveness, sometimes verging on pity, for their ruler and his family. Castle life is viewed as prison-like, surrounded by a suffocating fortress of rules and bureaucrats. A recent poll of young Tokyo women found that 75 percent would not even consider marrying into the imperial family. Empress Michiko's huge popularity dates back to the emotional troubles that befell her after she became the first commoner to marry into the imperial family. Her subsequent nervous breakdown was reportedly the result of the psychological torture inflicted on her by members of the imperial family and their courtiers.

Initially, Owada risked a hostile reception by many Japanese - too kitsui was the word used to describe the severity and ambition supposedly evident on her face. But now, even this confident and accomplished woman draws sighs of sympathy: over her decision to give up a promising career; over the awkward yellow pillbox hat and matronly dress that officials forced her to wear for her first news conference; over the relentless hounding of an anxious press that dissects her every move.

"It's very intuitive to Japan. Sympathy and admiration go hand in hand," says Kuniko Inoguchi of Sophia University. "If the imperial family lived a very good life, if they were very wealthy and had no problems, there might be some resentment. But the fact that Showa (as Hirohito became known after his death) lived with the debt of history, that the current emperor suffers that same debt, and the empress has her own emotional problems that she successfully overcame - people feel a sympathy that's a source of unifying power and attachment."

Polls show that about 80 percent of the Japanese public favors maintaining the imperial system as is. But one recent survey found that while about half of the public had favorable or very favorable feelings toward the emperor's family, 47 percent had no feelings one way or the other.

Still, to the large portion of the population that cares deeply, the emperor retains political, as well as cultural, import. A small but violent group of rightists routinely threaten those who publicly criticize the throne. An equally militant anti-imperialist movement on the left is notorious for shooting handmade rockets into imperial grounds.

For most of Japan's history, the emperor has been remarkably powerless, a spiritual, almost spooky figure whose mystique nevertheless translated into a strong charisma that could unify the nation in periods of crisis.

He remains an unscathed spiritual and moral leader whom the Japanese can hold out to themselves, and to the rest of the world.

"The prime minister might have to resign, but there's no possibility that the emperor will resign," says Yukihito Itoh, editor of the intellectual journal Foresight. "For many people that's a source of stability. There may be very dirty politicians, but the emperor system is quite clean."

Masamichi Inoki, chairman of the Research Institute for Peace and Security and a former adviser to prime ministers, sees the emperor filling this void: "In Japan," he says, "there are only politicians, not statesmen."

To Japan's growing international set, Owada's engagement carries a different cultural promise. She is seen as a signal of Japan's renewed desire to open up to the world, to move further in sync with the ways of an international economy. In that, however, she can be no more than a symbol, a patriotic woman whose life will be tightly controlled, a princess-diplomat working inside an entrenched establishment that seems incapable of seriously re-examining its style of business with other nations. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Huge bureaucracy dictates family life

Though Japan's imperial family has moved to modernize, their private lives still are zealously guarded - and usually dictated - by the secretive Imperial Household Agency. The 1,132-member bureaucracy manages everything from setting the silver for royal banquets to ruthlessly cracking down on journalists whose coverage is deemed even mildly disrespectful.

The Imperial Council that oversaw the investigation of prospective brides and signed off on the Owada engagement consists of such top political figures as Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa. Examples of the agency's long arm: -- According to the Imperial Household Law, Masako Owada's name will be struck from the Owada family registry and entered instead in Crown Prince Naruhito's Imperial Registry as "Crown Princess Masako" when the two wed. Without the family registry she cannot vote or enjoy other civic rights. She can bring defamation suits to the court only through the prime minister. -- The princess is expected to retain the white Toyota she used for commuting as a commoner. However, she'll be allowed to drive only within the royal grounds. -- She will no longer pay taxes other than those she owes on her income as a junior diplomat, a job she gave up to marry Naruhito. -- On the other hand, she will be forbidden from holding a real job, and she will have to seek official permission to have a few old chums over to the palace for green tea and chitchat. -- Neither she nor the prince may travel outside the imperial palace without the nod from the agency except to attend state functions. -- The agency controls everything from what the family members wear (no loud colors, and a princess's fashions should never upstage the empress) to what they say (some close imperial family-watchers insist the emperor would go further in his comments on World War II but is constrained by the bureaucracy). -- Portraying an austere lifestyle that fits with Japan's recession, the agency has made a point of letting it be known that Emperor Akihito and his sons love curry rice, a popular, inexpensive meal.

- Reuters, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times