Frame of Reference

I'm sure that the Japanese Imperial Family is a subject that occupies a lot of your time. I mean, I can't go a day without devoting at least a couple of hours thought to their Y-chromosome problems. Specifically, that the Japanese family hasn't produced a boy since 1960-something.

Now, the country I was born in didn't have anything in the way of official royalty. Elvis and Michael Jackson excepted, of course. But I don't have any real sense of why a royal family is worth all the effort and expense. What with the Magna Carta and all, non-royal types are admitted to have the same basic human value as blue-noses. Or blue-bloods. Whatever.

My point is, most royal folks these days just hold symbolic posts, with a few exceptions like that guy who seized power in Nepal or the Saudi royal family. But the Japanese royal family is prohibited from exercising any actual power outside of officially endorsing parliament's choice of Prime Minister. Yet there is a nearly venomous debate over the future of the royal family and whether or not the Imperial House Laws (the part of Japan's legal codes that control what the royal family can and can't get away with) need to be changed.

As things stand now, there are a couple of people in line to succeed the current emperor. But they are all men over the age of 40. There's no sign of a male heir to the throne, and the current law specifically limits succession to males. While this seems like an easily solved problem, it has, in fact, exposed all sorts of rather disturbing opinions floating loose in modern Japanese society. Like the minister who theorized that if a woman was allowed to become empress, she might marry a strong-willed man of poor morals who would manipulate the throne for his own nefarious ends. Like, uh, presiding over the wrong sorts of charity galas and receiving honorary degrees from universities with departments of evil studies. Or the far sighted Cassandra who pointed out that an empress-to-be might follow and imperial tradition and study abroad, but come back with a "blue-eyed foreigner" and want to have his ungodly half-breed babies, which would then ascend to throne, bringing about the end of, er, whatever.

Now, let's forgo that fact that they seem to think that no woman, not even one raised as the heir to the chrysanthemum throne, could possibly refuse the wishes of her husband. The end-all fear is that she might come down with a case of Wonder Bread fever and bring home some honky? All this time I was under the impression that there was more depth, more resilience, and just more will to survive in the Japan's cultural heritage. Consider, for a second, that the English royal family has been regularly infused with German blood for the last couple centuries. Is there any reason to think that the Japanese family couldn't find some Asian nobility hanging around somewhere? Even if that isn't an option, are we to believe that the thread of nobility is so thin that it can't cling to blood without a y-chromosome?

Sorry. I'm going on too far here. The idea of a royal family strikes me as being fairly pointless in the first place. But all this sexist bullshit trying to pass itself off as tradition and heritage makes me sick. If you want to hang on to believing in an outdated ideal, fine. But don't expect it to apply to people who actually live in the present without being mocked.