天皇制の「世継ぎ」はいらない

【声明】「お世継ぎ」はいらない ！──「奉祝」を拒否し、天皇制の廃止を求めます
の英訳です。英語圏の友人たちに紹介してください。

Today, Princess Kiko, the wife of Prince Akishino, has given birth to her
third child and we are again witnessing a massive wave of “celebration”
all over Japan.
We of course do not justify celebration of the birth of a baby to a
specific privileged “family” or by a specific person as an event worth
national congratulation. But we are more warned against the prevailing
gender-biased discourse that has been spread in an unusual fuss made about
the so-called “heir” crisis, the discourse that unabashedly admires a
woman for contributing to the preservation of royal lineage by giving birth
to a boy baby. In fact, this discourse assumes that everybody wanted to see
Kiko deliver a male child.
The Japanese imperial family has been maintained by the practice of
systematic sex, status, and racial discrimination that turned boy child
bearing to Emperor-serving women’s duty for the maintenance of royal
lineage, controlled the royal bloodline on the male side, and used or
abandoned the emperor’s extra-matrimonial children as convenience required.
The discriminatory nature of the system basically stays. Emperor was once
defined as a “living god.” It was by his order that Japan went to war,
invading and tramping underfoot other Asian nations. It was in his name that
ordinary people were forced to go to war. Yet the Emperor did not take the
responsibility for any of these acts. The emperor system that worked in this
manner is now going to serve again as a machinery to mobilize Japanese
“nationals” for a project to turn Japan into a war-ready country.
Admiring Emperor and the imperial family amounts to denigrating the values
of peace and human rights. Defying this obvious truth, the boy’s birth to
the prince family is likely to reinforce the gender-biased view in society
that man has the natural role of keeping the family lineage. Moves will
certainly be activated to strengthen the emperor system by upgrading the
status of the Akishino family and expanding the scope of its “public
duties.”
The birth of this boy, however, has not resolved the “succession crisis”
that chronically plagues the emperor system. The ongoing debate over
whether the Imperial Family Code should be revised will continue.
Now all moves seem to be machinated to serve the prosperity of the
imperial family and to increase our burdens and curtail our freedom.
We declare such a society is unjust. We do not need the emperor system! We
do not need an heir!
We refuse to join celebration and call for the abolition of the emperor
system.

No “Imperial Heir” 2006 Coordinating Committee
September 6, 2006.