To plenty of his own people as well as to foreigners, there has always been
something cosily reassuring about Emperor Akihito of Japan. Like many
monarchs, he and Empress Michiko have cultivated a personal style over the
years, as practised and familiar in its own way as the British Royal
Family’s handbags, corgis and stiff G&Ts.
There are his double-breasted suits and her old-fashioned hats, as smart as
they are unfashionable. There is their public demeanour, one of intense
solicitousness and earnest courtesy, without a trace of aristocratic
hauteur. And then there are the Emperor’s enthusiasms – his love of tennis,
of the cello, and, above all, his passion for a small, unglamorous fish
called the goby.
In a few days, in recognition of his contribution to goby studies, Akihito
will deliver a keynote speech at the august Linnean Society, an organisation
of natural scientists in London, at which his esoteric expertise will be on
full display. He will talk of binomial nomenclature and the history of
Linnaean taxonomy. He may refer to his own painstaking work in
distinguishing different goby species by minute comparison of their
shoulder-blades. It is an appealing, almost Pythonesque image – the dotty
boffin Emperor ensconced in his palace, sifting through fish bones. And yet
there are few monarchs today more serious, or burdened with greater care,
than Emperor Akihito.
The carefully cultivated image of bland serenity conceals one of the
most complicated, tense and, in many ways, troubled royal houses in the
world. Virtually unnoticed by the outside world, first as Crown Prince and
now as Emperor, the 73-year-old Akihito has overseen a transformation of
Japan’s Imperial Family from a controversial relic of war and dictatorship
to a symbol of peace and antimilitarism. Out of an ancient aristocratic
history, he has recreated his family as emblems of middle-class liberalism.
And he has kept at bay conservative ultranationalists who would hijack the
Emperor as the vehicle of a right-wing revival.
If there is a single theme running through Akihito’s life, it is war – its
horrors and the importance of preventing it. He was born in 1932, the year
after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and spent the Second World War as
a privileged evacuee; he returned to a city burned flat by incendiary
bombing. Since succeeding to the throne in 1989, he has made a point of
visiting places associated with the worst suffering of the war, including
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the southern Japanese islands of Okinawa, and the
Pacific island of Saipan where Japanese, Americans and locals died in a
suicidally hopeless last ditch battle.
His father, Emperor Hirohito, might have ended up tried, or even hanged, as a
war criminal. In the end, the postwar American occupiers merely forced him
to renounce his divine status, and seized the lands and abolished the titles
of the extensive aristocracy. The present Imperial Family’s studiously good
behaviour is as much a necessity as an expression of good manners, a
survival mechanism by an institution that feels lucky to exist.
The new postwar constitution defined the Emperor as a symbol of the state and
the “unity of the people”. From early on, the then Crown Prince Akihito
fleshed out this theoretical definition. His mentors included a female
American Quaker, who would never have been allowed to teach a Japanese
prince before 1945. His choice of bride was equally unprecedented – Michiko
was the beautiful and stylish daughter of a wealthy industrialist, rather
than the aristocrats who had supplied previous imperial brides. When the
couple became parents, they raised their own children at home, rather than
farming them out, as Akihito had been, to a lonely life among nannies and
wet nurses.
This was not just the indulgence of personal taste but a deliberate effort to
present an image of Akihito and his family as representative of the new and
growing Japanese middle-class – and it was pursued, not for its own sake but
as a matter of survival.“Unless the overwhelming majority feel comfortable,
this system could be in trouble,” says one insider. “They have to prove that
the existence of the monarchy means something – it’s a conscious agenda
for them. For that purpose their solution is to work hard.”
They lead a remarkable life, different in almost all ways from that of
foreign royalty. They rise at 6.30am, watch television news and stroll
around the Imperial Palace, a moated woodland in the very centre of Tokyo,
inaccessible to all but a tiny number of visitors and imperial employees.
They lead lives of surprising simplicity.
The various buildings are of late 20th-century construction: smart and
dignified but far from the opulence of a European-style palace. The Emperor
goes between them on foot or, in case of rain, in a 14-year-old car, a cream
Honda Integra, which he drives himself – rather touchingly, he insists on
keeping the speed limit, using his seat belt, and renewing his licence,
despite the fact that these private roads are almost traffic-free and exempt
from the laws of the highway.
He receives visitors – government ministers, foreign leaders and royalty,
newly-arrived ambassadors and the recipients of imperial awards – in a
separate official palace. Thirty-two times a year, dressed in the garb of a
Shinto priest, he pays his respects at a shrine to his legendary ancestor,
the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu no Omikami. In the evenings are official
receptions and banquets. Last thing at night, the Emperor and Empress might
watch a nature programme on television or a video (on a VHS player – they
have no DVD, just as they have no internet access) or read (The Times
is among their daily reading matter, as well as Japanese newspapers and
magazines).
Despite bearing the burdens and duties of royalty, Japan’s Imperial Family
enjoy few of its perks. Apart from two modest seaside villas and a farm,
there are no grand retreats. In the absence of a home-grown aristocracy, and
vigilantly watched by courtiers, they have few playmates at all, and little
free time from official duties. “If they can take one whole day off a week,
they are very lucky,” says Makoto Watanabe, the Emperor’s Grand Chamberlain,
who has served him for a decade. “They belong to this very frugal, serious,
workaholic generation which almost views leisure or a wealthy lifestyle as
immoral . . . It’s rather a cruel thing to say, but it will continue until
the end of their lives. There’s no retirement. They don’t complain about it
and they don’t show it in public, but I’m sure it affects them, physically
and psychologically.”
A budget of 300 million yen (£1.25 million) a year is allocated to the
Emperor’s private household, but all must be accounted for. He has no
property or cash of his own – even the holiday villas are owned by the
state. Once, courtiers report, the Emperor was being briefed by the governor
of the Bank of Japan on the consumer economy. At one point, he interrupted
with a puzzled question: “What is a cash-point machine?”
And the pressure on them is political, as well as physical and financial. The
Emperor studiously avoids any explicit expressions of political opinion, but
over the years it has become clear that he is a man of firm, liberal
beliefs. On visits to China, Korea and SouthEast Asia, he has spoken with
regret of the sufferings inflicted by Japanese forces during the war. All of
this has infuriated the ultranationalist right, the successors to the
Emperor-worshippers of the prewar period, who already resented Akihito’s
modernising reforms. Emperor-worshippers, by definition, cannot criticise
the object of their devotion – and so their target has been the next thing
to him: his wife, Michiko.
A series of whispering campaigns has driven the Empress to several nervous
breakdowns – as recently as this spring she suffered from internal bleeding,
reportedly caused by stress. The intensity and isolation of life within the
Palace, combined with the pressure to produce an heir, has also broken the
spirit of his daughter-in-law, Crown Princess Masako, wife of his elder son,
Naruhito. The succession crisis caused by the absence of a male heir has now
eased, after the younger prince Akishino had a son last year. But Masako
remains an unhappy figure, painfully unadapted to Palace life.
And this perhaps, explains the Emperor’s passion for biology. “His duties,
inevitably, are related to political questions or government,” says
Watanabe. “In natural science there’s none of that. He can straightforwardly
pursue the truth . . . He has contacts with scientists who also pursue the
truth and tell him he’s wrong regardless of whether he’s Emperor or not.”
How appealing it must be to put aside cares of state and stand up in front
of an audience of like-minded rationalists, to talk of species
classification, and the shoulder-blades of gobies.
A world-class scientist
It is a 10cm-long bottom-feeder with a translucent, orange-speckled body and
big bug eyes, by all appearances one of the humbler residents of the seas.
The most recently-discovered fantail coral reef goby, however, is a
blue-blood: it bears the scientific name Exyrias akihito, in honour
of the only reigning monarch who can claim a world-class reputation in
science.
Since 1967, when he completed the first of 38 peer-reviewed papers published
in academic journals, Emperor Akihito has established himself as a world
authority on gobies. This fish family includes more than 2,000 species and
Akihito’s skill is in their taxonomy – identifying which is which – and he
has contributed to the identification of several species.
Peter Miller, an emeritus professor at the University of Bristol, says: “He
has made a very useful contribution, and I’m not just saying that because
he’s the Emperor. I have referenced his papers myself. I doubt that there
are more than a dozen scientists in the world who can match his expertise.”
Akihito learned his love of biology from his father, the Emperor Hirohito,
with whom he would spend childhood summers collecting specimens of marine
life from rockpools at the imperial retreat of Hayama. He was drawn to
ichthyology – the study of fish – on the advice of Ichiro Tomiyama, of the
University of Tokyo, who pointed out that taxonomy was the ideal specialism
for the Crown Prince, because he would be able to work with a microscope in
his own palace laboratory.
His visit this week has been timed to coincide with the tercentenary of the
birth of Carl Linnaeus, the great Swedish naturalist who devised the
standard binomial system of classifying species.
Akihito will visit Sweden before Britain, then on Tuesday he will address the
Linnean Society of London. Linnaeus is one of Akihito’s heroes, and in a
press conference last week he described his satisfaction at being elected to
the eminent Linnean Society in 1980: “I thought I was not worthy.” His wife,
the Empress Michiko, is well aware of Linnaeus’s influence. She said:
“Shortly after we were engaged, His Majesty, then the Crown Prince, talked
to me about fish. He would use the precise binomial nomenclature, such as Tilapia
mossambica. I was astonished, slightly awed and overwhelmed.”
