[floatl][
10,000, including foreign academics, rally to preserve male-line imperial succession
Crisscross - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 at 21:41 EST
TOKYO ---Some 10,000 people, including 86 lawmakers, Japanese and foreign academics, staged a rally Tuesday to oppose a proposal to allow women and their descendants to ascend to Japan's imperial throne, citing the importance of preserving the tradition of the world's oldest hereditary monarchy....
...Some foreign nationals also joined the rally and sent messages saying that Japanese should protect their male-line tradition.
"It's easy to destroy a treasure. It can be destroyed in one day. But having such thing and having it with everyone agreeing to have it, it takes 2,666 years," said Alice Meilin King, a pro-Japan Taiwanese who is a national policy adviser to Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian.
In a message read aloud to the crowd, Ben-Ami Shillony, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who is an expert on Japanese history, expressed his view that allowing a female-line monarch in Japan is as unthinkable as having a female pope in Rome....more...
Previous threads:
--Lawmakers demonstrate..
--Japan succession law flaunts constitution....
