Japan is well known for its Symbol Emperor System（天皇制 Ten-nou-sei）, with the emperor having ultimate authority, and some Japanese people brag about having a sole dynasty which has lasted, they believe, for more than 2000 years.
Even without having political power, the Emperors serve to establish Japan’s fame by visiting foreign countries and encouraging devastated people by visiting disaster-stricken areas. In this SNS era, however, we can also see the dark side of peoples’ feelings toward the Emperors that we would never have found without SNS.
In 2021, the then-Princess Mako（眞子）, the eldest sister of Akishinomiya（秋篠宮） -the younger brother of the current Emperor- married a commoner. Well before their marriage, some people had maligned her fiancé because his mother had allegedly gotten involved in some financial scandal. When they announced that they had gotten married, they also revealed that they would fly to the US, and that her husband, Mr. Komuro, would be a lawyer there. After their rollout, defamation was thrown toward Ms. Mako, too.
Even after they moved to the US, a couple of tabloids put out sneaked pictures of them, and some people let rip, saying things such as, “Mr. Komuro wouldn’t pass the bar exam forever”, and “It is ridiculous for them to live in New York for its high rent”. When the graduate school to which Mr. Komuro belonged announced that he had failed the exam after studying there for two years, a lot of people on SNS criminally made whoopee over the news (he successfully passed the exam the following year).
Since X started feeding oft-seen posts as recommendation recently, I often see posts calling out the Crown Princess Kiko（紀子）, the wife of Akishinomiya, for her misbehaviors at formal parties with foreign VIPs.
On December 10th, the Imperial Household Agency（宮内庁 Kunai-cho） announced that Crown Prince Sakihito（悠仁）, the son of Akishinomia, passed the entrance exam of Tsukuba University（筑波大学）, one of the most difficult and sought after universities in Japan. Again, some people started bursting into abominable invectives against him, posting things such as, “Don’t make an Imperial slot instead of us”, even though they don’t know how hard Sakihito worked.
To the contrary, Crown Princess Aiko（愛子）, the daughter of the Emperor, has been most praised on SNS. As far as I remember, I haven’t seen any post damning Aiko recently; however, about 15 years ago, while a lot of press were reporting that she didn’t go to school very often, a lot of people tore into her and her mother, Crown Princess Masako（雅子）.
As this short history pertaining to the Emperors shows, the current changes so swiftly. This definitely sounds like a “conspiracy theory”, but I believe there are some people and agencies which try to make a Juggernaut online, leading the public and a bellyful of innocent people into blindly believing it. This is why we are supposed to be equipped with digital literacy.
コメント