Princess Kikuko, 92, Progressive Member of Japanese Royalty
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Japan’s Princess Kikuko, the emperor’s aunt and an outspoken supporter of allowing women to assume the throne, died Saturday at the age of 92.
The royal family began observing a five-day mourning period on Saturday. A funeral was expected to be held later this month.
Kikuko, also known as Princess Takamatsu, was the widow of the late Emperor Hirohito’s younger brother Takamatsu and the granddaughter of Yoshinobu Tokugawa, Japan’s last shogun, or feudal lord.
Kikuko had been a champion of cancer research in Japan since the 1930s. Using money donated by the public, she established a cancer research fund in 1968, organizing symposiums and awarding scientists for groundbreaking work.
Kikuko was seen as one of the most progressive members of Japan’s tradition-bound royal family, the world’s oldest hereditary monarchy.
She had no children. Her husband – a philanthropist and an adviser to Hirohito in the 1940s – died in 1987 of lung cancer.
Many Japanese were shocked by her 1995 decision to publish his diaries – written before and during World War II and containing criticism of Japan’s wartime military – despite opposition from the Imperial Household Agency.
In 2002, after Crown Prince Naruhito and Princess Masako had a daughter, Kikuko was the first royal to publicly call for changes to a postwar law that allows only male heirs to assume the Chrysanthemum Throne.
In an article she wrote for a women’s magazine she argued that having an empress was “not unnatural” since women had assumed the throne in the past, most recently in the 18th century.
No male has been born in the imperial family since the 1960s, raising concerns about a succession crisis once Naruhito becomes emperor.