JAPAN: Rules for an Ex-God

Emperor Hirohito’s three demure (and formerly divine) daughters worked in the Imperial kitchen last week. In their summer villa near Nasu, Kazuko Taka, 16, Atsuko Yori, 15, and Takako Suga, 7, dispensed with the customary retinue of servants, rolled up their sleeves and washed up the dinner dishes. In Tokyo, their father read in his morning newspaper the first draft of a new Imperial Household Law, drawn up by the Japanese Government to replace a statute in effect since 1889. High points:

¶ The emperor cannot abdicate.

¶ No son of a concubine can become emperor.*

¶ No woman can succeed to the throne. (Western-minded lawmakers had opposed this rule because the new Japanese constitution decrees equal legal rights for women. But traditionalists won out. Their argument: in the Japanese home, the man is superior to the woman. What if a female emperor married?)

¶ It is forbidden to use the Imperial Crest (a 16-petal chrysanthemum) as a trademark. No Japanese businessman has ever tried to use the crest as a trademark, but a prewar Diet candidate once distributed sweet cakes decorated with a chrysanthemum and was promptly jailed for botanical lese majesty.

*Such succession was permitted by the old law. Hirohito’s father, Emperor Taisho (1912-26) was the son of Emperor Meiji’s No. 1 concubine.