Australian won't apologise over Japan princess-Kyodo

TOKYO, Feb 14 (Reuters) An Australian journalist has refused to apologise to the Japanese government over his book on the life of Crown Princess Masako, which Tokyo says insults the royal family and contains factual errors.

In an interview with Kyodo news agency published today, Ben Hills said Tokyo's reaction to his book, ''Princess Masako - Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne'' was outrageous.

''I regard this as an attempt by the Japanese government to suppress and censor my book and I think it is absolutely outrageous,'' Kyodo quoted Hills as saying.

''There is nothing to apologise for. In fact, there is only one person in this saga that deserves an apology and that's Princess Masako,'' he added. ''I think the Kunaicho (Imperial Household Agency) should apologise to her for bullying her into a state of nervous breakdown.'' Hills has described his book as ''the story of a romance gone wrong, an Oriental Charles and Diana story''.

The 43-year-old Masako is a Harvard-educated former diplomat who many 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 royal life, and has been unable to perform her official duties fully for the past three years.

Japan's Foreign Ministry yesterday said it was seeking an apology and ''appropriate steps'' from Hills and publisher, Random House, Australia, saying the book contains groundless statements about the royal family.

Hills told Kyodo that he intended to go ahead with plans to publish a Japanese-language edition of the book in early March.

Japanese diplomats told Hills that one of the defamatory aspects of his book was his claim that Masako's daughter, Princess Aiko, was conceived by in vitro fertilisation, Kyodo said.

The claim was widely reported in the international press but ignored by the Japanese media, Hills was quoted as saying.

Hills spent a year researching the book and conducted 60 interviews including with sources close to the imperial family, although the palace turned down his requests for an interview, the Australian Associated Press said in a separate report.

While pressure to bear an heir to Japan's males-only throne was widely seen as one of the causes of Masako's illness, 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.

The 5-year-old Aiko, Masako and Naruhito's only child, cannot ascend the throne under current law, and plans to revise the law were shelved after Hisahito's birth.

REUTERS KD DS1442