Japan Upper House Panel Defers Imperial Family Bill Vote to Thurs.

Tokyo, July 15 (Jiji Press)–Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party and the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan agreed Wednesday to postpone a House of Councillors special committee vote on a bill to revise the Imperial House Law from the day. The agreement came amid a spreading view that an extension to the ongoing session of the Diet, the country’s parliament, is inevitable. The Diet session is currently scheduled to end Friday. On Wednesday, the board of the special committee of the Diet’s upper chamber decided to hold its vote on the bill Thursday. It is likely to be approved with support from the LDP and its coalition partner, the Japan Innovation Party, as well as the Democratic Party for the People and Sanseito from the opposition side. The bill, aimed at helping to secure a sufficient number of Imperial Family members, is expected to be enacted during the current session with approval from the full Upper House. It cleared the House of Representatives, the lower chamber, last week. Under the bill, paternal-line male descendants of 11 former Imperial Family branches can be adopted back into the family, and female Imperial Family members can retain their status in the family after marriage. Sons born to the adoptees will be eligible to ascend the throne. An additional clause calling for a review every 30 years is attached to the government-sponsored legislation. At Wednesday’s special committee meeting, Hiroyuki Nagahama of the CDP, the largest opposition force in the Upper House, argued that the husbands and children of female Imperial Family members should be allowed to have Imperial Family status. In response, Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara said, “Both the husbands and children (of female members) will not be given the status,” noting that the government did not include their status in the Imperial House Law amendment because the matter was not mentioned in the Diet’s “consensus,” which was reached in talks between ruling and opposition parties last month. Still, the top government spokesman left room for future discussions on the matter by the Diet. Nagahama also asked why the scope of potential adoptees is limited to paternal-line male descendants from the 11 former Imperial Family branches. Kihara said that there was time when the branches were part of the Imperial Family under the current Constitution and that the male descendants would have had the right of succession to the throne if the branches had not left the family in 1947. Manabu Matsuda of Sanseito said that if the husbands and children of female members of the Imperial Family are not recognized members of the family, Imperial Family members and ordinary citizens would end up coexisting in the same households, possibly undermining family unity. Kihara rebutted this. Citing couples made up of Japanese and foreign citizens as an example, he said that the unity of such households has not been affected by differences in the nationality of the husbands and the wives, or other factors, such as whether they have suffrage in Japan. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]