While he didn’t explicitly state it, Japan’s Emperor Akihito has reiterated his wish to step down from the throne in the near future in a publicly televised address.
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According to The Washington Post, Emperor Akihito was reported as saying there have been times when he has really felt his age.
Emperor Akihito didn’t directly use the word “abdication” in Monday’s message.
In this photo taken Sunday, Aug. 7, 2016 and provided by the Imperial Household Agency of Japan on Monday, Aug. 8, 2016, Japan’s Emperor Akihito reads a message for recording at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.
People watch Japanese Emperor Akihito delivering a video message at a store in Tokyo, Japan, on August 8, 2016.
“While, being in the position of the emperor, I must refrain from making any specific comments on the existing imperial system, I would like to tell you what I, as an individual, have been thinking about”.
The quiet discussion reportedly started about five years ago, around the time he had health problems – he was hospitalized for bronchitis in 2011, and had heart bypass surgery in 2012.
Emperor Akihito said one possibility when an emperor could not fulfil his duties because of age or illness was that a regency could be established.
“When the Emperor has ill health and his condition becomes serious, I am concerned that, as we have seen in the past, society comes to a standstill and people’s lives are impacted in various ways”.
However, conservative traditionalists in the Abe administration are anxious that if the law were to be changed, liberal politicians in parliament would take the opportunity to push for women to be allowed to become emperor. Almost half of Japan’s emperors quit the throne while alive, according to Japanese state broadcaster NHK.
Will that happen? After the emperor’s speech, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said, “I will think about this with great force”.
Current law, set in 1947, is largely inherited from a 19th-century constitution that banned abdication as a potential risk to political stability. His elder son Crown Prince Naruhito is the likely successor. A revision to that law or special legislation would be required to enable the 82-year-old Emperor to abdicate.
The 56-year-old crown prince is first in line to the Chrysanthemum throne, followed by his younger brother Prince Akishino.
Although he never used the word “abdicate”, Akihito made it clear that he will have to step down, ending almost three decades as the head of the world’s longest-running hereditary monarchy.
The 82-year-old monarch said that declining health has made it hard for him to continue in his official capacity.
The public broadcaster NHK had last month said that Akihito wanted to step down.
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Others worry that devoting political energy to discussing abdication could sidetrack Abe’s push to revise the US-drafted pacifist constitution, seen by many conservatives as a symbol of Japan’s humiliating defeat in the second world war.
