Japan Govt Starts Work to Draft Imperial House Law Amendment

Tokyo, June 11 (Jiji Press)–The Japanese government has started work on drawing up a bill to revise the Imperial House Law, after the country’s legislative branch compiled its consensus Wednesday on measures to secure a sufficient number of Imperial Family members. The government will first report an outline of the planned bill to the leaders and deputy leaders of both chambers of the Diet, or parliament, and then give an explanation at a plenary meeting among political parties from both the ruling and opposition blocs. It hopes to submit the legislation to the Diet late this month, aiming to secure its enactment during the ongoing parliamentary session ending July 17. “We seriously take the parliament’s consensus and will immediately start work to draft a bill (to amend the Imperial House Law),” Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara, the government’s top spokesman, told a press conference Thursday. Yoshihiko Isozaki, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s Diet affairs chief in the House of Councillors, the upper parliamentary chamber, told reporters the same day that the amendment may be submitted to the Diet in late June. The Diet’s consensus, forged at Wednesday’s meeting among the heads and deputy heads of the House of Representatives, the lower parliamentary chamber, and the Upper House and representatives from political parties, backs the two measures for securing a sufficient number of Imperial Family members and calls on the government to legislate them. One of the measures allows female members of the Imperial Family to retain their Imperial status after marriage, and the other calls for the adoption of male members in the paternal line from former Imperial Family branches back into the family. The consensus seeks a careful designing of a system on the adoption plan in light of the age of those to be adopted, the scope of adoptive parents, specific procedures for adoption and a condition that adoptees should not hold the right to succeed the Imperial throne. How to deal with these points will likely be a major issue in the work to legislate the two measures. “If something insufficient is presented, it may be sent back in light of the Diet’s consensus,” said Hirofumi Ryu, a Centrist Reform Alliance lawmaker who plays a key role in the major opposition party’s discussions on matters related to the Imperial Family. On the Diet’s handling of the planned Imperial House Law amendment, Isozaki of the LDP told Yoshitaka Saito, Diet affairs chief of the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, at a meeting Thursday that it is desirable for the bill to be debated at the rules and administration committees. In response, Saito demanded the establishment of special Diet committees as the venues of discussions, saying that no government-sponsored bill has ever been dealt with at the rules and administration committees. The two sides agreed to continue talks on the matter. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]