Issue:
February 2023
The tone may differ, but British and Japanese royals need the media to stay relevant
For those curious about the effect exposure to -35C weather had on the penis of a Windsor princeling – wonder no more. In his spare-no-details ghostwritten memoir, Spare, King Charles III’s younger son, Prince Harry, confirms that the result is much the same as for those who have not inherited eye-popping wealth, titles and the lifetime attention of the paparazzi: frostbite.
The image of the fifth in line to the throne applying ointment to his throbbing member after a trek to the North Pole is now forever embossed on the public mind, along with other highlights from his life, including losing his virginity to a “horse-loving” older woman in a field behind a pub, and a 2019 altercation with his elder brother, Prince William, that allegedly ended with Harry injuring his back on a dog bowl.
It might be assumed that the appetite for salacious details about the British royals has been exhausted by now. But apparently not. Spare is the fastest-selling non-fiction book in history. The public has been softened up by years of scandalous tabloid stories about Charles, who carried on an adulterous affair with his current wife – and Queen Consort – Camilla Parker Bowles, after wooing Princess Diana into the unhappy union that produced an heir (William) and a "spare" (Harry). The reporting bar fell to a new low in 1993, when sections of the British press published a full transcript of a hacked phone call between Charles and Camilla in which the then Prince of Wales fantasized about living in his lover’s trousers and being reincarnated as a tampon.
https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2022/12/crown-confidential-launch/
Perhaps the starkest theme to emerge from Spare is Harry’s hatred for the media – even (incorrectly) blaming them for his mother’s death in a Paris tunnel in 1997 while her drunk driver was fleeing a posse of paparazzi.
By comparison, the Japanese imperial family gets an easy ride from the press. One reason is that the emperor and his family live more mundane lives, bound by codes and strictures and without access to the same personal wealth or taste for tax-funded bling as the Windsor firm. It is hard to imagine one of the emperor’s children partying in a Nazi uniform, snorting coke or engaging in the priapic adventures of their U.K. male counterparts.
And unlike British hacks, Japan’s mainstream media can be relied on to practice self-restraint.
Emperor Hirohito, both revered and reviled, was largely insulated from prying reporters’ questions about his wartime role by self-imposed restrictions. In 1992, the Imperial Household Agency (IHA) successfully persuaded the bulk of the Japanese media to obey a six-month embargo on the engagement of Crown Prince Naruhito and diplomat Masako Owada. The story was an open secret among journalists in Tokyo until – much to their frustration – the the Washington Post broke the embargo in 1993. When the new imperial couple struggled to produce an heir, Japanese journalists who suspected that the princess was receiving fertility treatment were warned off the story. Most duly left the story alone.
In 2003, Japanese magazines carried anonymously sourced articles that suggested Princess Masako was depressed and had withdrawn from her official duties. A book speculated that she wanted to abdicate and get a divorce. Officially accredited IHA journalists who had heard about her depression steered clear of one of the biggest stories of the year. In May 2004, when the British newspaper the Times ran a story headlined "The Depression of a Princess" – based on information from local contacts – it was initially condemned, then accepted, by royal watchers in the Japanese media.
While some U.K. journalists who cover the royals – such as the BBC’s Nicholas Witchell – are household names, Japanese correspondents are largely anonymous transcribers of IHA press releases. Yohei Mori, a Seijo University professor who once covered the imperial family for the Mainichi Shimbun said mainstream journalists seldom write anything that hasn’t been sanctioned by the IHA. He gathered materials through the freedom of information law to write a book on how much the imperial family costs taxpayers. “I couldn’t have written a book like that as a correspondent,” he said. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlhzGeLsiJs
Post-Hirohito, weekly magazines have grown less circumspect about carrying stories critical of the imperial family. In 2001 Newsweek Japan – then one of the more liberal publications – carried a prominent feature on Emperor Akihito’s recognition of his family’s Korean heritage. Unusually for imperial pronouncements, this was barely covered in Japan’s newspapers and television, in contrast to South Korea, where it was front-page news.
In 2005, Newsweek Japan commissioned me to write a front-page story called "Does Japan Need Its Imperial Family?", though the strict directive was to steer clear of any discussion about abolishing the monarchy. The editor, Keigo Takeda, was concerned that many Japanese were indifferent to the family, an attitude he partly blamed on its inability to connect with the timorous media. The following year, though, the magazine spiked a proposed front-page article on the imperial succession issue, in the week that Princess Kiko gave birth to the family’s first male heir in 40 years. The article, tentatively titled "Wouldn’t a girl be better for Japan?", was judged to be “against the public mood”.
While Queen Elizabeth II and Emperor Naruhito, as figureheads of their respective institutions, have been largely immune from media flak, proxy attacks on more peripheral figures are increasingly common. Sarah Ferguson, Prince Andrew’s ex-wife, was mercilessly lampooned and eventually ejected from “The Firm” after being caught by paparazzi in 1992 getting her toes sucked by her lover. The family of Crown Prince Akishino, the emperor’s brother (and the imperial family’s own spare) has also taken its media licks. Akishino took a rare pop at journalists in 2021 when he criticized coverage of his daughter Mako’s marriage to Kei Komuro, a non-royal. “Be it in magazines or over the internet, words that deeply hurt anyone cannot be accepted,” he said. As if in response, the magazine Jitsuwa Bunka Tabuu this year effectively accused Akishino of being a hypocrite, claiming he once enjoyed eating exotic South American animals, despite supposedly being an animal lover.
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14491957 https://www.fujisan.co.jp/product/1281692310/new/
Princess Masako has been the subject of a string of articles, often anonymously sourced, questioning her work ethic, her dedication to her husband, and even her patriotism. In 2006, a journalist for the woman’s weekly Josei Seven even claimed that Masako was fleeing Japan for the U.K., where she would claim refugee status with her daughter, Aiko. The story was made up.
Until fairly recently, British media reporting of Queen Elizabeth and her family was more reverential, shielding the family behind a wall of chummy class deference. The family, notes Index on Censorship, has “actively suppressed uncomfortable narratives about themselves” and hundreds of files in the national and royal archives remain shielded. A turning point of sorts came in 1969 when the Queen invited the BBC into their lives for a fly-on-the-wall documentary, because, like Newsweek’s Takeda, some thought they were becoming too distant from the hoi polloi. Princess Anne (Elizabeth’s only daughter) was among those who thought Royal Family, watched by nearly 70% of the British public, was a “rotten” idea because it opened the floodgates to yet more media intrusion. “The last thing we needed was more attention or access,” she said.
Surely aware of the corrosive impact such access has had on a once solemn institution (polls sometimes show support for the Windsors at dangerously low levels), the IHA keeps a far tighter grip on the public image of their charges – and who could blame them? But as Takeda understood, that too causes problems. One, as sociologist Kiryu Minashita points out, is that interest in the imperial system has waned to the point where many younger Japanese would be hard pressed to name the members of the extended family. Another is that while the mainstream media can be reined in, the internet cannot – and there, pretty much anything goes.
In what some are calling a “turning point” in its relationship with the public, the IHA is this year overhauling its communications. That means a formal public relations office, more PR staff and a bigger official online presence (the IHA currently has a single staid website, in contrast to the British royal family, which have multiple social media accounts, each with more than a million followers). Will it work? No, says Mori of Seijo University. “Just shifting output channels to social media won’t change anything,” he said, adding that to the contrary, the IHA was still conducting business like as if it were still the first half of the 20th century.
The unhappy truth for modern-day hereditary monarchies is that they need the hated media, partly to perpetuate the myth of tradition - that they are a source of continuity and, according to Open Democracy, “part of an imagined lineage that claims legitimacy through permanence”. That relationship helps allay suspicions that they shouldn’t be there at all because they enshrine privilege, hierarchy and deference in societies that are supposed to be meritocratic. After all, would anyone care about Prince Harry’s penis if he hadn’t used countless media platforms to tell the world about it?
