Crown princess sits with troubled daughter in class
Still apparently traumatised by an encounter with some 'boisterous' boys in her school in March, the eight-year-old daughter of Japan's Crown Prince is only attending a couple of hours of school each week - accompanied in class by her mother, Crown Princess Masako.
Speculation is growing over the mental frailty of Princess Aiko, inevitable given Masako's own widely reported mental health problems. Now 47, Masako has rarely been seen in public since 2004 and is suffering from what the palace finally admitted to be an 'adjustment disorder'.
Officials of the Imperial Household Agency have confirmed Aiko was only able to attend the first hour of classes at the elite Gakushuin Primary School between March 8 and 11 after being shocked at the 'rough behaviour' of some boys in her class.
She failed to attend the end-of-year graduation ceremony at the end of the month and was also absent for the April 9 welcoming ceremony for new third grade students. Since then, Aiko has attended school for three hours a day, accompanied by her mother, although she has taken some days off complaining of a cold.
An official said Masako was taking her to school in the morning and later returning with her to the palace, where Aiko is having private tuition.
Issei Nomura, the grand master of Crown Prince Naruhito's household, told a press conference on Friday that the princess is 'doing her best with the support of her parents'.
But the concern remains that another Japanese princess is struggling to come to terms with royal life lived in the constant glare of publicity.
'Intuitively, you have to think there is a link between what Princess Masako and her daughter are going through,' said Noriko Hama, a social commentator and professor at Kyoto's Doshisha University. 'It must be a very difficult time for everyone in that household and from everything that we see, Masako and her daughter are particularly close.
'Masako is ferociously protective of her daughter and does not want her to fall into the hands of the Imperial Household Agency and endure what she went through. It's speculative, but I believe that is why Masako does not want to travel overseas with the prince.'
In veiled comments, Naruhito himself has laid the blame for his wife's illness at the door of the agency, which manages the affairs of the imperial family. The decline in her well-being was widely linked to the need to provide a male heir for the imperial dynasty. That issue was solved when Prince Akishino, the Crown Prince's younger brother, had a son in September 2006.
Yet still Masako has been unable to shake her illness. And that, in turn, is likely to have affected her daughter, Professor Hama believes. 'She is having a very strange childhood - even more so than young princes or princesses in other countries - because the three of them seem to be a very tight-knit family that is isolated within the structure of the imperial household,' she said. 'There are tensions with the emperor and one only has to look at this child's expression - or lack of one - to conclude there are a lot of things going on in her mind.'
Unfortunately, there seems little likelihood of the pressures on Naruhito's family easing in the near future, as his father approaches the age of 80.
Failure to fulfil his duties as heir to the throne are unthinkable - so the young princess will have to battle on, with the support of her mother, at least until she reaches the age of majority and can start making decisions on her own. Even then, however, she will not be able to entirely shed the imperial straitjacket.
