Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi won a legislative victory on Friday by passing a review of the Imperial Family Law, but she faced significant criticism over her handling of the Diet after ruling parties voted to extend the legislative session from Friday to July 25 to facilitate debate on the ruling coalition’s capital aid bill.
Friday, July 17 Chamber of Councillors PASSED a revision of the Imperial Family Law to strengthen the size of the Imperial Family. The bill enables the adoption of male children – at least 15 years old and without a wife or children – of former cadet branches removed from their families in 1947.
It allows royal women to remain part of the imperial family after marriage, although only male children of the former can be included in the line of succession.
The draft law only formally addresses the issue of the number of members of the Imperial House, ensuring that there are enough family members to carry out its duties after older members and daughters have married and left the family.
The issue of strengthening the imperial line of succession is left for further discussion. However, the Constitutional Democratic Party (PKD) argued that by specifying that the sons of adoptees from former cadet branches can be in the line of succession, the government has broken the consensus agreement and smuggled provisions related to the line of succession into the bill.
The emphasis on former cadet branches reflects an approach favored by conservatives, who also wanted to make the change as part of the process of unwinding US occupation reforms. As such, the bill only passed by a 184-57 margin in the upper chamber. However, the prime minister described the passage of the bill after many years of effort as “deeply moving”.
While the passage of the bill ensured that the government met one of its highest priorities for the legislative session, the ruling parties also voted on Friday to extend the legislative session, which was scheduled to end on Friday, by eight days until July 25.
The extension is intended to give the Diet more time to debate and vote on the LDP-Ishin no Kai bill to appoint Osaka as the subsidiary capital of the country – although it is expected that, since the ruling parties have not gathered enough support in the upper house, the approval of the bill will likely depend on the lower house voting again to override the upper house’s rejection.
The vote to extend the session capped a dramatic day in the legislature that included both a vote on the revision of the Imperial Families Act and an extension; criticism of Takaichi’s handling of the Diet, including Sanseito leader Sohei Kamiya hinting that he would support a motion of no confidence; a test session of the upper house’s budget committee, in which Takaichi faced similar questions to Wednesday’s prime minister’s questions and largely gave the same answers; and an agreement between the LDP and the Center Reform Alliance (CRA) to hold an intensive three-hour lower house budget committee session on Friday, July 24 with Takaichi in attendance.
Overall, the atmosphere in the Diet was fraught with even LDP lawmakers expressing disappointment at the Prime Minister’s attitude towards the Diet; many in the LDP had disliked the extension and suggested that if Takaichi had been more willing to work with the opposition earlier, there would have been no pause in parliamentary business and no extension needed.
Originally published at Tobias Harris’s Observing Japan newsletter, this article is reprinted with permission.
