Japanese princess's baby may be first test-tube emperor

When Japan's Imperial Household Agency announced last week that Crown Princess Masako was pregnant, it was historic in several ways.

When Japan's Imperial Household Agency announced last week that Crown Princess Masako was pregnant, it was historic in several ways.

After eight years of marriage and one miscarriage, concerns had been growing that the 37-year-old princess might never have a heir, raising the possibility of extinction for the world's oldest monarchy. On the slumping Tokyo stock market, the news caused an immediate rise in shares of companies selling baby goods, and politicians spoke of their hopes for an economically beneficial baby boom.

But there is another remarkable aspect to the imperial pregnancy, one that has been scrupulously passed over by the country's discreet and reverent media. If the pregnancy goes smoothly and Princess Masako gives birth to a son this December, he will not only become the 127th occupant of the Chrysanthemum Throne, but, according to Japanese imperial watchers, he will also be the world's first test-tube emperor.

The evidence is circumstantial, and will never be confirmed by the courtiers of the Imperial Household Agency (IHA), Japan's equivalent of Buckingham Palace. But Japanese doctors and journalists interviewed last week by the Independent on Sunday believe that Princess Masako became pregnant after treatment conducted early last month by one of the country's most eminent fertility specialists. It is a remarkable development for one of the country's most closed and traditional monarchies, in a country with a conservative attititude towards fertility and reproduction.

Journalists covering the imperial family point to an intriguing sequence of events which began at the beginning of March with the appointment of Dr Osamu Tsutsumi as Princess Masako's official consultant. The prince and princess already have four official doctors in attendance, but this is the first time that an outsider has been appointed.

Mr Tsutsumi is no ordinary doctor, but a professor of gynaecology at Tokyo University Hospital, which operates a large and well-regarded fertility clinic.

Soon afterwards, the small group of journalists covering imperial affairs noticed something else unusual. Both the prince and princess are keen exercisers, but on 10 March their daily horse riding and tennis games abruptly stopped. Soon after that, the princess began missing official engagements. The excuse given by the IHA was that the princess had a cold, which immediately caught the attention of seasoned imperial watchers.

"It was the same with Kiko [the princess's sister-in-law] and even with Michiko [the present empress]," said one journalist with a leading media organisation. "When they got pregnant, the first excuse that was used was a cold." Sure enough, last Monday, the IHA announced that Masako was "showing signs" of being six or seven weeks pregnant.

In other words, the conception occurred soon after Dr Tsutsumi took charge. When contacted last week, Dr Tsutsumi declined to comment. Publicly, Japanese journalists are being even more circumspect than usual, after the embarrassment of December 1999, when they reported Masako's pregnancy shortly before she miscarried. The assumption is that she conceived after in vitro fertilisation in early March. As one Japanese doctor said: "When you think about the timing and the fact that they can make this announcement so confidently after only six weeks, it's obvious."

It was not until 1983, five years after Britain's Dr Patrick Steptoe pioneered the technique, that Japan's first test-tube baby was born but since then it has become common. The average Japanese woman bears only 1.4 children in a lifetime, the lowest birth rate of any industrialised nation. At the same time, the pressure of expectation on childless couples is greater than in the west.

In 1998, there were 11,000 in vitro fertilisation births, equivalent to 1 per cent of new-born Japanese babies. Attitudes to artificial insemination, however, have generally lagged behind the west: it was only last year that Japanese gynaecologists accepted that sperm and eggs could be combined from donors who are not married. Fertility clinics gained wider exposure when the wife of a journalist at the national television channel NHK had quintuplets after receiving fertility drugs. But no one with the celebrity of Princess Masako has gone public about their treatment.

Some of the less reputable Japanese magazines reported two years ago that the couple was receiving treatment, but the private lives of the imperial family remain taboo. Earlier this year the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung apologised to the Japanese government after running a photograph of the Crown Prince with the words "dead trousers" running across his groin, implying that he was impotent.