ASIA : Japanese Media Under Fire Over Empress’ Health

Empress Michiko, who collapsed and lost her ability to speak on her birthday, will resume full duties Saturday, accompanying her husband, Emperor Akihito, on a tour of Japanese states. But the troubles surrounding the 59-year-old empress haven’t ended yet.

Her ability to speak still hasn’t returned. And a row with the mass media, which found themselves blamed for precipitating her collapse, still hasn’t settled down.

Although national newspapers have remained aloof, weekly and monthly magazines that thrive on gossip find themselves battling the Imperial Household Agency, a bureaucracy that thrives on secrecy.

Without specifying any ailment, palace doctors insisted that the empress did not suffer a stroke but collapsed on Oct. 20 because of a “deep sorrow”--a suggestion that pointed the finger at four weekly and monthly magazines that had been publishing an unprecedented series of articles critical of her.

The day before her collapse, the empress herself, in a written answer to reporters for a birthday news conference she had been scheduled to give in person, said she felt “deep sorrow and bewilderment” about the magazine accusations. She insisted they were untrue.

On the demand of conservatives in the Liberal Democratic Party that was ousted from 38 years of power last July, Imperial Household Agency officials were summoned to testify in Parliament as to why they had not protested the stories portraying her as domineering.

After that scolding, the Imperial Household Agency made the protests. And last Tuesday, one of the magazines announced that it would apologize in its latest edition, which went on sale Thursday.

But the magazine, the Weekly Bunshun, limited its apology to two charges it had made against Michiko. One was that Michiko had ordered part of a forest favored by the late Emperor Hirohito to be cut down to make room for a new palace due to be completed in January. The other was an allegation that Michiko and Akihito disliked the uniforms of Japan’s armed forces and had requested that officers attend imperial functions in civilian clothes.

Bunshun denied any intent to engage in “Michiko-bashing” and emphasized that Japan should maintain an “open” Imperial Household. Bunshun’s reference to openness was a slash at the Imperial Household Agency, Japan’s most feudalistic bureaucracy.

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In an incident Wednesday night that may show how strong feelings are running about the media and the empress, three bullets were fired into the front door of the home of the father of the publisher of one of the magazines that has not apologized for its imperial coverage.

Relations between the Imperial Household and the media reached a peak of hostility in 1990 when the agency protested publication of an unauthorized photograph of Princess Kiko tenderly brushing back a lock of Prince Akishino’s hair on the day of their wedding; the agency then banned the miscreant photographer from all Imperial Household events. Akishino is the imperial couple’s second son.

Three decades have passed without Imperial Household Agency comment on reports--widely believed by the public--that Michiko suffered a nervous breakdown shortly after she became the first commoner to enter the imperial family after her marriage to Akihito in 1959. Michiko also reportedly temporarily lost her ability to speak at that time.

The empress’ five-day trip starting Saturday will take the royal couple to Ehime and Kochi prefectures (states) on the island of Shikoku. This will be her first extended outing since her collapse.

A scheduled appearance at Japan’s annual national high-school athletic meet Oct. 23 was canceled, and the only public appearance she has made was on Oct. 28, when she attended a calligraphy exhibition.

Palace doctors last Monday cleared Michiko for the trip, saying that tests on her brain had detected no irregularities in her nervous system. “Coming into touch with the warm feelings of Japanese people toward her may be an important step to her recovery,” said Dr. Ichiro Kanazawa, a Tokyo University Hospital nerve specialist, after examining the empress.