Japanese pray for empire of the son

For the next week, the eyes of much of Japan will be trained on a single room in a private hospital in the centre of Tokyo, where a 39-year-old woman is waiting to deliver her baby by caesarean section. When the baby utters its first scream, TV programmes will be interrupted, politicians will make speeches and the major newspapers will distribute millions of special supplements: four pages for a boy, two for a girl.

But then this is no ordinary toddler, but one born into controversy and with the weight of the world's oldest hereditary institution on its tiny shoulders. If a boy, he will one day head a dynasty that claims to trace its roots back to before the Romans stepped on British soil. If a girl, she will come into the world to the sound of a huge collective sigh of disappointment. Not an easy start in life.

Such are the sexual politics of what may be Japan's first male imperial birth since 1965. Officially, the Government, as its chief cabinet spokesman Shinzo Abe said last week, hopes Princess Kiko gives birth to a healthy baby of either sex tomorrow (the scheduled date); unofficially it is praying that the baby will have an XY chromosome and rescue the Imperial Family from a succession crisis that could make it extinct within a couple of generations.

Everyone knows that this is a souffle that cannot rise twice. At almost 40, and after a complicated pregnancy that put her in Aiiku Hospital on August 15 to prevent possible premature bleeding, Princess Kiko will almost certainly never have another child. Her sister-in-law Masako, 43 this year, has been so worn down by her transition from diplomat to member of the cloistered Imperial Household that rumours of depression, divorce and worse abound.

As the wives of Emperor Akihito's two only sons - Prince Naruhito and his younger brother Akishino - these two women are the family's last hope for a male heir. The once sprawling imperial family tree, and its system of concubines as hired wombs, has been pruned by postwar reforms to a tiny nub. This, in other words, is a dynasty fighting for survival. Without radical legal change, "the Imperial Family will end with the deaths of Crown Prince Naruhito and Prince Akishino," says Japan historian William Wetherall.

Traditionalists believe the family boasts an unbroken bloodline that stretches back over 125 generations and 2000 years and which has survived war, revolution and Japan's transition to a modern secular democracy. Some even cling to the myth that Emperor Akihito is a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, and "the father" of the "pure" Japanese race.

Such ideas of racial purity have officially been banished from political thought in the gleaming modern country that Japan has become since the World War II. But they still lurk around its conservative fringes, as Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi discovered this year when he tried to change the male-only succession law and allow Princess Masako's daughter, 4-year-old Aiko, to eventually warm the Chrysanthemum Throne.

Although public support for the move was at one point over 80 per cent, conservatives, many in Koizumi's own Liberal Democratic Party, fought the revision hard.

The Government's former trade minister, Takeo Hiranuma, warned a panel of lawmakers opposed to the revision that "If Aiko becomes the reigning empress and gets involved with a blue-eyed foreigner while studying abroad and marries him, their child may be the emperor."

He added: "We should never let that happen."

The emperor's cousin, Prince Tomohito, even recommended reinstating the tradition of concubines.

Although all eyes are on Kiko, it is her enigmatic sister-in-law Masako who has sparked this crisis. Drawn across the imperial moat by a mixture of love and duty, the multilingual career diplomat symbolised the growing freedoms of Japanese women and many hoped she might help modernise one of Japan's most conservative institutions. Instead, she became, in the words of one commentator, a "prisoner of her womb", expected to produce a male heir and abandon her ambitions for imperial diplomacy.

In 2001, after over seven years of marriage, she finally had a girl, Aiko, bitterly disappointing conservatives. The birth, following IV treatment, was traumatic as was adjustment to life with the bureaucrats who run the Imperial Household Agency, but worse was to follow.

In 2003, the agency's Grand Steward, Yuasa Toshio, lapsed into the language of the stud farm when he said that he "strongly wanted" the now middle-aged couple to have another child. The princess withdrew from official duties that December and has never returned to a full roster. She is currently on holiday in the Netherlands with her husband, daughter - and the family psychiatrist.

Many conservatives now intensely dislike the princess and there has been a notable rise in Masako-bashing online, where bloggers describe her as a show-pony and a moaner who is too haughty for the "humble, mandatory work" of imperial life. Although the mainstream Japanese media shies away from such blunt commentary, some pundits have stuck their heads above the barricades to suggest the imperial "quagmire" might be resolved if Naruhito divorced Masako and remarried.

Masako's options may narrow if, as many predict, Kiko delivers a boy; a Tokyo magazine said this week that the baby's father, Prince Akishino, let it slip to a friend that after two daughters, his next child will be a son. That might take the pressure off Masako, or it could be the final straw for the beleaguered princess.

"It looked as though Masako's daughter would be the first reigning empress in modern Japanese history and Masako would have been the one who shaped her. And now she doesn't even get to do that," says Ken Ruoff, author of The People's Emperor. All will become clear when the baby at the centre of this drama wails into life.

Not everyone will be unhappy with a girl. Feminists believe this would force the Government to face down the old guard and provide a powerful symbolic boost to Japanese womanhood. "It would be very important if the national symbol could be a woman, and in fact it is ridiculous that it isn't," says Ruoff. "An empress would also make it difficult for the patriarchal far right to hold onto their chauvinism."

Others say the fuss over the sex of the baby misses the point. "The main problem is the lack of access to the family, and the secrecy that surrounds it," says journalist Tomoko Ugajin. "The Imperial Family remains incomprehensible to most Japanese."

That secrecy means that when the fuss has died down next week, the new toddler will be whisked away behind the high walls of the Imperial Palace, to be wheeled out on official photo opportunities. The child's life will move in tandem with the ancient rhythms of tradition, overseen by the same bureaucrats who have made life miserable for its aunt.

The little imperial bundle of joy has no idea what is in store for him, or her.

- INDEPENDENT