A Japanese publisher said on Friday that it has cancelled a plan to print a Japanese-language edition of a book on the life of Crown Princess Masako that has triggered protest from the government.
TOKYO: A Japanese publisher said on Friday that it has cancelled a plan to print a Japanese-language edition of a book on the life of Crown Princess Masako that has triggered protest from the government.
The Foreign Ministry said this week it was seeking an apology and "appropriate steps" from Australian journalist Ben Hills, saying his book, Princess Masako - Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne, insults the royal family and contains factual errors.
Hills, who has described his book as "the story of a romance gone wrong, an Oriental Charles and Diana story", had refused to apologise and had said that he intended to publish the Japanese edition in early March.
The original book, in English, was published in Australia in November by Random House, Australia.
But Japanese publishing house Kodansha Ltd. said it has scrapped the plan for a Japanese edition following Hill's refusal to apologise for the errors, which it had already corrected with Hill's consent prior to the Japanese government's protest.
"We cannot tolerate the attitude the author has shown towards obvious errors in the original book," the publisher said in a statement.
Hills could not be reached for comment. Following the Japanese protest, Hills had said that it was the Japanese government that should apologise to Masako.
"As far as I am concerned, the only apology that is due it that the Imperial Household Agency should get down on its knees and apologise to Princess Masako for its treatment of her," he said in a statement posted on his website.
Masako, 43, is a Harvard-educated former diplomat who many Japanese had hoped would help modernise Japan's staid imperial family when she married Crown Prince Naruhito in 1993.
But she has been suffering from a stress-related mental illness caused by the pressures of adapting to rigid palace life, and has been unable to perform her official duties fully for the past three years.
The pressure to bear an heir to Japan's males-only throne was widely seen as one of the causes of Masako's illness, but the stress may have eased when her royal sister-in-law gave birth last September to Prince Hisahito, the first male heir born to the imperial family in more than 40 years.
Masako and Naruhito have a daughter, the 5-year-old Aiko, but she cannot ascend the throne under current law, and plans to revise the law were shelved after Hisahito's birth.
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