巫女文化と女性天皇：皇位継承の歴史Shamaness Culture and Female Imperial Succession in Japan

One of the main themes of my research is the reality of the culture of miko (巫女), the shamanic priestesses of ancient Japan. I have already investigated its traces in many places, and in recent years I feel the need to continue that research from a new angle growing. A major reason is the question of succession to the imperial throne in the imperial family. In reality it is less a problem of the imperial family than a difficult one into which extremely political circumstances enter. Under current rules, the qualification for succession is limited to “male-line males” (男系男子), and so a question about who will take the throne after the present Emperor is raised in many places. The reason is that Princess Aiko (愛子内親王), the eldest daughter of the present Emperor, is currently not permitted to ascend the throne.

From my standpoint of continuing to look into Japanese history, I do not agree with the conservative claim to limit the right of imperial succession to male-line males. Rather, looking carefully at the historical backgrounds in which women took the throne, I think the need for a woman emperor is rising in our own time. This is hard to grasp even for the Japanese, so I will go through history so that it is easier for readers to follow.

First, the system of imperial succession in Japan changed in the turbulent period after the Meiji Restoration, which is the focus of Shitsurae. It dates especially from the Old Imperial House Law (旧皇室典範) and the Constitution of the Empire of Japan (大日本帝国憲法) enacted in 1889 (Meiji 22), where eligibility for the throne was for the first time restricted in writing to “male-line males.” Before that, though, in the history of the emperors there is neither a clear rule limiting the throne to the male line nor a permanent policy such as a “ban on women emperors,” and we cannot overlook that women emperors took the throne as the times required. It is commonly thought now, at home and abroad, that “emperor = male-line male,” but this is a matter of the modern period onward, not of history as a whole.

In fact, even in the process of drawing up the Imperial House Law in the Meiji period, plans that would admit women emperors and succession through the female line were considered. Let me first note the male line and the female line. The male line means the line that carries on the imperial bloodline through the father’s side (the male bloodline), and the female line means the line that draws the imperial bloodline through the mother’s side (the female bloodline). Looking over the emperors of history, all of them, women emperors included, are descendants in the male line, with a previous emperor on the father’s side, and there has never been a single female-line emperor (an emperor with no imperial bloodline on the father’s side). This is a custom from the Kofun period onward, when movements between the continent and Japan grew large in ancient history. I take this period as the start of the history of the emperors and conduct my research on that basis, but these were not customs that originally existed on the Japanese archipelago; they have a character tied to the structures of continental kingship.

Princess Aiko, for example, is the daughter of the Emperor and a member of the imperial family in the male line. If in the future Princess Aiko were to take the throne and her child were to succeed, that child would be the first female-line emperor, drawing the imperial blood only through the mother. Here lies the difficulty. Article 1 of the current Imperial House Law states, “The Imperial Throne shall be succeeded to by a male descendant in the male line belonging to the Imperial lineage,” so even if the father’s side is of the imperial line, a woman of the imperial family cannot succeed, and a female-line emperor, whose line connects to the imperial lineage only through the mother, is not admitted either. In current debate, the case in which an emperor’s daughter (a woman of the male line) takes the throne is called a “woman emperor” (女性天皇), and the case in which the child of an emperor’s daughter (a man of the female line) takes the throne is called a “female-line emperor” (女系天皇). It has become quite complicated, and even the Japanese have come to be unable to follow it.

Even in the Meiji discussions, the principle of limiting succession to male-line males was finally adopted, through the fierce opposition of Kowashi Inoue (1844-1895) and others, and it continues to this day. Inoue was director of the Legislative Bureau. His main reason for opposing the acceptance of a woman emperor was the thought that if a woman emperor came to the throne and married, the people would be bewildered over the question of which is higher, the emperor (a woman) or her husband. Of course, this was no more than a political sophistry that used the people as pretext, and it goes without saying that in fact it came strongly from their own beliefs. In fact, in the Ryukyu Kingdom, which lasted from 1429 to 1879, the king who ruled politics was a man, but the priestess who held the highest divine rank and presided over ritual was a queen called the Kikoe-Okimi (聞得大君), and in the Ryukyu age there were noro (ノロ), priestesses in every region who sent down oracles and moved politics.

Note here that, in this context, it is said that Japan historically held strong ideas of male superiority over women, but this too is an arbitrary claim that ignores study of history. In the course of studying Japan from ancient history, I have come to be convinced that, though there were such tendencies in part, they are not equal to the nature of Japan or the Japanese. It should also be noted that this male-over-female idea is an extremely new notion that grew stronger in the institutions of the modern age and did not exist in Japan as it originally was. It is true, though, that the male kings of the Kofun period, tied to the roots of the imperial house, had a quite clearly firm system for continuing the male-line emperor.

In the Meiji period it was also thought that the system of concubines could secure many men of the imperial line, and this too lay behind regarding succession by women as unnecessary. In this way, from Meiji on, the throne was limited by the system to male-line males, and that policy has been carried over into the present Imperial House Law enacted after the war. Today, however, those eligible to succeed have decreased remarkably, and if limited to male-line males, there are only a very few, such as Crown Prince Akishino (秋篠宮皇嗣, the younger brother of the present Emperor) and Prince Hisahito (悠仁親王), his eldest son, and in line with this the debate over a woman emperor has risen recently.

In fact, my position of supporting the accession of Princess Aiko is not that of a minority. Opinion polls show that around eighty percent of the people support or accept it, so it is the majority. Since the continuation of the emperor is carried out by the consensus of the people, a woman emperor is quite conceivable in the future. Yet a wartime belief, strong among conservatives, remains firmly: “the emperor’s unbroken male line is the Japanese tradition,” and there are voices objecting to Princess Aiko becoming emperor because “a female-line emperor may be born in the future.” Behind this lie a distorted view of history that treats succession through the male line as absolute, as it has since Meiji, and a past in which women emperors were arbitrarily set aside as exceptions or stopgaps.

In postwar Japan especially, a de facto one-party government by the Liberal Democratic Party has continued. Power changed hands only twice and did not last, and the LDP governs to this day. The LDP, from the standpoint of keeping power, has taken in the conservative base as one of its foundations, so these voices are heard easily. But I am skeptical of whether the view of history the conservatives claim is right, and so I cannot agree. The idea of “unbroken lineage” (万世一系) applied to the emperor, for example, may well collapse in the future, and the day is not far when the imperial house will be understood as a singular presence that has survived through the fusion of layered histories of peoples.

As I have said several times, the problem is not the emperor but the senior retainers around him. They firmly hold the image of “emperor = unbroken lineage” and of the Japanese as a single people, and so it is hard to break the present state. This is an obstacle that runs through the problems of East Asia as well.

The barriers raised by the conservatives are many. The burial mounds said to be the tombs of the successive emperors, concentrated in Nara and Osaka, are managed by the Imperial Household Agency, and archaeological investigation is hardly permitted. If the mounds were investigated, it would become clear that the roots of the imperial house are not single, and the people would learn that some of the emperors’ roots lie in China and Korea. I myself was born and raised in Sakai, Osaka, where a group of burial mounds, such as the Mausoleum of Emperor Nintoku, is part of daily scenery, and I still remember that the elders always said that many traces of Korea remain in the mounds of Sakai. Many traces of foreign origin have indeed been found.

And if genetic testing, which has been growing in recent years, were carried out on the imperial house and disclosed, the false image of the unbroken lineage would collapse easily. The conservatives therefore defend this to the last. Unlike before the war, though, the awareness that the Japanese have layered roots has begun to spread, if only a little, so the shock would not be as great as the conservatives say, and rather I feel the nation would be able to take in new values actively and prepare to welcome a new emperor. The conservative outlook is basically a set of values that grew in the formation of the modern state, and so it is thoroughly modern. This is less a question of history than a memory of how the victory in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and the advance into Korea raised the state’s image of itself, and of course that is a matter of the past and not equal to history as a whole.

In my own view, for the problem of the emperor to move toward a solution, it depends on whether China, Korea, and Japan can enter a new age in which they aim again at reconciliation. Looking only at the modern period, Japan pushed militarism and invaded other countries, and East Asia has stayed divided in complex ways under the influence of the postwar Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, but in truth China, Korea, and Japan have no need to be enemies. Given the present time, in which for the first time since the war a distance from the United States has begun to open, I think East Asia will be pressed to make a great decision, not at once, but the key will come down to when the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Japan occurs.

In the process, a distance will open for the first time from the United States, the guardian of postwar Japan, so Japan has no path to survival other than quickly correcting its relations in East Asia and, at the same time, drawing closer to Europe, which is also beginning to open a distance from the United States. If China, Korea, and Japan then jointly carry out multifaceted historical and genetic research, the layered roots of the emperor will become clear to some extent, and the real image of Japan will be understood to a fair degree.

Then the strong notions of the modern age will collapse, Japan will fall into considerable confusion, and I expect conflict on all sides. At that time male-line succession alone will not hold the country and its people together, and I predict that people who defend and support the accession of Princess Aiko will appear rapidly. I think this is the background against which women emperors took the throne in history, and from this viewpoint the Japanese still hold, deep in their spirit, a belief that allows this. This is not merely my own conjecture but comes from reading the history of the emperors, and I will tell more of this interesting history from the next installment on.