Japan's imperial system is not cheap, however. Including salaries for some
1,150 imperial employees (administrators, cooks, gardeners, musicians,
scholars, financial managers, servants) and for 970 palace police officers, the
total annual bill is around $200 million. Japan's royal family owns neither the
ground on which the imperial palace sits—which during the real-estate boom of
the late 1980s was reported to be worth as much as the entire state of
Florida—nor any of the almost ten square miles of property, including farms,
burial grounds, and outlying villas and palaces, that have been designated by
the government for the court's exclusive use. The Emperor is, in effect, a
glorified salaryman, paid a yearly tax-free stipend of about $2.4 million. A
portion of that, perhaps a third, goes to support certain staff members in the
Emperor's personal employ—assistants for his private research on gobiid fish,
for example. Daily living expenses for Empress Michiko and Princess Sayako, for
the Crown Prince and Crown Princess, and for the Emperor's aged mother also
come out of the Emperor's stipend. Several additional households that belong to
the imperial family are given their own tax-free stipends, generally about
$220,000 a year.
With the nation straining under a huge budget deficit and serious economic
malaise, some courtiers worry that the royal family will be accused of not
earning its keep. Of course, bean counting misses the point. In Japan, as in
Britain, the monarchy serves as the repository of the nation's traditions. "We
have a two-thousand-year history," Satoshi Takishima, who until recently ran
the palace's tombs division, once told me by way of explaining his visceral
resistance to innovation. "We are not in the habit of changing things." Another
courtier underscored the point by invoking a mystical simile: "The Emperor
system is like air, not something somebody made."
The truth is, however, that many of the traditional trappings of the Japanese
throne, from archaic-looking Shinto wedding ceremonies to the design of some of
Japan's most sacred shrines, were purposely created by Japan's governing elite
as a way to unify the populace after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. This event,
which ended two and a half centuries of feudal rule, brought the imperial house
closer to the center of Japan's culture than it had ever been before. Hitherto,
for example, the average Japanese knew little about the Emperor, or about his
mythical claim to descent from the sun goddess.
The Meiji Restoration, a dramatic historical period, saw the creation of an
ideology from which the Japanese in important respects have scarcely budged.
Takashi Fujitani, a history professor at the University of California at San
Diego, writes, in his book Splendid Monarchy (1996), "The emperor and
his family continue to perform their ceremonials as if they were
traditional—somehow timeless and without a history—and in so doing erase the
memories of a past when national community was but the dream of a few." The
calculated manufacture of tradition is not uniquely Japanese. As the historian
David Cannadine has pointed out, only in the late nineteenth century did the
British monarchy resume staging splendid public spectacles; for quite some time
before that its rituals were clumsy and essentially private.
For Britain's monarchy the challenge is to symbolize the spirit of the
nation in a United Kingdom irrevocably beyond the Age of Empire. Japanese
courtiers face the task of conveying, through the imperial family's activities,
a binding ideal of Japanese nationhood that goes beyond the myth of unique
blood—a concept that is beginning to lose its appeal even within Japan. That
task would be daunting enough without the prevailing official culture of
diffidence and indirection.