The Dirty Secret To Sustaining All-Male Lines of Royal Succession

And why they are at risk of extinction

Grant Piper
4 min readOct 6, 2024
(By Jastrow (2007) — File:Dionysos Ariadne Louvre CA929.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92346499)

The Imperial House of Japan is considered by many to be the longest-continuous hereditary monarchy in the world. The current emperor is the 126th monarch in the line that stretches unbroken for 2500 years. But that chain is at risk of breaking as Japan struggles with a crisis that would be familiar to anyone living under such a monarchical system. They are running out of male heirs.

Japan, like many nations before them, requires males to inherit the imperial throne. For all of its faults, one of the biggest drawbacks to any hereditary system of government is the chaos it causes when the sitting monarch dies. While Japan’s monarchy has transitioned to a non-ruling one, there are still questions about what would happen if the imperial family stopped producing male heirs. In the past, countless wars were started over questions of succession and ideas about who was fit or entitled to rule.

Noble families going back generations have always crossed their fingers and hoped for a boy when their wives gave birth. Having a healthy male heir was a critical part of hereditary monarchy.

What most people forget is that there were numerous clever ways to try and hedge your bets that are no longer considered…

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Grant Piper

Professional writer. Amateur historian. Husband, father, Christian.