Tradition Afflicts a Modern Princess

"The issue with Masako and Aiko is really about discrimination against women and women's rights, an issue that Japan finally needs to confront as a modern society," said Yoko Komiyama, a national legislator from Japan's largest opposition party, the Democratic Party. The party's platform for upper house elections next month calls for allowing empresses to reign.

Japanese women trail their U.S. and European counterparts in the quest for equality, statistics show. Many Japanese women are still expected to leave their jobs after marriage, especially after childbirth. The percentage of women elected to the Diet, Japan's parliament, stands at 7.3 percent, roughly half the comparable percentage in the United States and almost five times less than in Germany.

Worse, Japanese women say, are the little indignities. Rural grandparents in particular still stress to a new wife the importance of bearing a male son. During divorces in some families, it is not unusual for a father to fight for custody of his sons, but not his daughters. Female office workers still complain of having to serve coffee and tea for their male co-workers.

But younger women in Japan, in particular, are rebelling by delaying childbirth and having fewer children. That is a big reason, experts say, for a big drop in the national birthrate, now among the lowest in the world. This year, Japan's fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.29 children per woman -- compared with 2.13 in the United States, according to government statistics.

Reiko Yokoi, 64, a housewife in Nagoya, posted a message on a feminist Web site recently to express her anger at Masako's treatment. In a telephone interview afterward, she lauded the crown prince for rallying to the defense of his wife.

"I had to go through life with a man who felt he could be bossy, who was very traditional about the role of a woman and who told me that it wasn't feminine when I asked questions about politics or economics," said Yokoi, whose husband is a retired business executive. "That is no life for any young woman, and especially not for a modern woman like Masako. It tears at my heart to think what they are doing to her."

Masako initially turned down Naruhito's marriage proposal. Her friends were shocked when she changed her mind and accepted the highly traditional role that would one day make her empress. Her marriage to the baby-faced Naruhito also came over the objections of some in the court who felt she had been tainted by her life in America.

As crown princess, Masako was forced to learn and speak in a formal form of Japanese unique to the imperial family, walk a half step behind her husband and learn hundreds of Shinto rituals for both public and palace life. But bearing a son was always her primary duty. After eight years of marriage, she gave birth to Aiko in December 2001.

Japan has had eight reigning empresses among 125 rulers in the imperial family genealogy, but scholars see them as temporary solutions. Their children were not permitted to reign; they were followed by their next closest male relatives. The Imperial House Act in 1889 prohibited female succession altogether.

One palace reporter who works for a major Japanese news outlet and who spoke on the condition of anonymity summed up the male-line argument like this: "The imperial successor is like a racehorse; it doesn't matter who the mother is."

The prince, however, in his recent and highly rare public chiding of Imperial Household Agency leaders -- whom he cannot fire under unspoken Japanese codes -- delivered an impassioned plea that many interpreted as a call to allow Aiko to be his heir. The agency has indeed launched a study into how the imperial rituals could be modified for a female monarch, according to sources close to the agency.

But the courtiers and forces in Japanese politics are still pushing for a continuation of the male-line system, and the pressure on Masako has built. Last June, Toshio Yuasa, the agency's director general, told the public that "frankly speaking, as grand steward of the Imperial Household, I want them to have another child." Last December, he went a step further, calling for Naruhito's younger brother, Prince Akishino, who has two daughters, to attempt to have a third child.

Soon after that, Masako, her long hair cut into a bob, her once-full cheeks drawn thin, withdrew from public life. She was briefly hospitalized for stress-related shingles. She spent time with her mother at a mountain retreat. But when she returned to Tokyo last April, she was still deemed unfit for travel and her condition, according to Imperial Household Agency officials, has not improved.

Her convalescence had been expected to last until the spring, but she remains in seclusion, spending her days resting in central Tokyo's Togu Palace -- a fortress-like 1960s study in Japanese minimalism with flat, step-like roofs. It houses soothing art such as a silver screen of seven flying cranes drawn by noted Japanese artist Kenji Yoshioka.

For a woman who herself once savored the freedom of flying, it has become, many say, a gilded cage.

Special correspondent Sachiko Sakamaki contributed to this report.