共感の女性君主

――ヴィクトリア女王が拓いた可能性――

抄録

As we saw in the enthronement ceremony in 2019 as well as the abdication message of the Emperor (now Emeritus) in 2016, the phrase “always staying together with the people” is characteristic of the Japanese constitutional system called symbolic monarchy. But we must be careful in interpreting what that phrase really means to the Emperor system in Japan.

This paper will discuss this phrase in reference to the change in the British constitutional monarchy, partly because the British monarchy was and has been an ideal or model for the Japanese symbolic monarchy after 1945, and partly because both Emperors, Hirohito and Akihito, once confessed that they had been influenced by the British constitutional monarchy, particularly that of King George V (1910-1938). The important point is what types of monarchy George V had inherited under a constitutionally organized government from his father, Edward VII (1901-1910).

In Britain, the phrase “staying together with the people” or “sympathy to the people” became widely applied to the monarchy during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), especially after the mid 1870s. This is usually discussed in relation to the idea of “the invention of tradition”, represented by the Golden (1887) and Diamond Jubilee (1897) of Queen Victoria. But the critical moment resulting in “the invention of tradition” and changing the essence of the monarchy, was during the 1860s, when the British monarchy lost one future that might have existed by the sudden death of the Queenʼs beloved husband, Prince Albert, and the Queenʼs withdrawal from public life to mourn him. This period led Walter Bagehot to write his farsighted essay on monarchy which was to be collected in his famous book, the English Constitution (1867). In addition, the peopleʼs feeling towards the monarchy also dramatically changed at that time. Since then, the importance of the monarchʼs popularity, as well as the sympathy between a monarch and the people, has grown.

The monarchy the two Japanese Crown Princes observed while they visited Britain, in 1921 and 1953 respectively, and thought ideal under the new Japanese Constitution when they were Emperors, had been the one personalized and de-masculinized, even if we do not call it “feminization of the monarchy”.