The culture blog post can be found at the link below, and my comments are represented below the link.
Japanese Culture Blog - Princess Masako
エミリー (20:41:46) :
I can’t imagine how stifling it must feel for Masako-hime to fit into the royal family after leading a decidedly independent and successful career in business. It’s an extremely abrupt change, going from something so self-directed to an institution as traditional as the Japanese monarchy, and I think in light of that, her actions make a lot of sense.
I see her avoidance of royal functions and penchant for private, lavish dinners as an escape mechanism from the pressures of the monarchy - or, simply a chance to live life as she would have lived it were she still a businesswoman. Sure, the royal family has a history of frugality, but one has to remember that she’s not exactly textbook royalty. This seems to be an attempted blending of modern business culture with traditional monarchy, except no real middle ground is given. That, I believe, is what’s so problematic.
I wonder if the media would be so critical of her were she a prince avoiding public functions and being free with his spending, however. This seems to me to be a pretty good exploration of the traditional role of women in a modern context, and its (seemingly negative) impact on the parties involved. In my opinion, things need to move a little bit forward in that area if Masako is to derive any comfort in her position.
In that vein, I think the pressures on Masako surrounding childbearing are out of line. I’ve never carried, birthed, or attempted to conceive a child, but from every source I’ve heard, the entire process, if it doesn’t go smoothly, is at best frustrating and at worst absolutely terrifying. The fact that she miscarried alone is extremely traumatizing, especially after trying for five years to conceive. I don’t know what the royal family will do without an heir, but they have to realize that their harassment of Masako is doing nothing but harm, and if it keeps up, there may be no heir to show for it anyway.
I really enjoyed reading comments from other people about this topic - not just the other Japanese students on the culture blog, but people who commented on news articles about it. The major rift in opinions seems to come, as usual, from the issue of tradition vs. non-tradition. I think my comments very much reflect that I'm a social liberal and an American, which pains me a little, because I frankly can't wrap my head around everything the Japanese monarchy stands for and why it needs to stand for what it does. It's simply that, as a person, watching another person deal with what I see as unnecessary stress like this, I can't help but sympathize with her.
I suppose that comes back to the American spiritual bankruptcy I mentioned in my other culture blog discussion - my inability to attribute significance to tradition.
The friction between tradition and progress is, as I see it, going to drive a lot of change as our world moves forward and some of our traditions are suddenly denounced as harmful or otherwise backwards. I realize tradition is part of what forms our identities as members of a culture, but there often comes a point where tradition and progress have to compete for prevalence, leaving us to try to work out compromise. Granted, the end product is watered down, but this is the price of globalization.
(As an aside: The United States is composed almost entirely of immigrants from many different parts of the world, each bringing in their own culture, thus making the country a center for globalization. Most other countries, if I'm correct in thinking so, have, relatively speaking, a much smaller number of immigrants as population, so are more culturally homogenous. While I can identify this predominant culture for most countries, I can't identify a predominant culture for the United States. I wonder if this lack of an identifiable culture is due to this globalization and to the progressive nature of our country, and if a similar trend of progress in other countries would slowly eradicate culture as it has here.)