Japan empress to attend flower show

Tokyo, Mar 8: Japan's Empress Michiko attended a flower exhibition today, two days after an announcement that she is suffering from what appears to be a stress-related illness, in another sign of tension in the royal family.

Officials said Michiko had suffered from mouth ulcers and nosebleeds, as well as showing symptoms of intestinal bleeding, after having a cold last month A spokesman for the Imperial Household Agency, which handles royal affairs, said her doctors believed the illness was due to stress. She is taking medicine and will spend some time resting.

Dressed in a beige kimono, Michiko, 72, smiled and nodded as she viewed an exhibition of traditional flower arranging.

The empress is expected to receive Sweden's King Carl Gustaf and Queen Silvia when they visit from March 25-29 but will then take some more time to rest at a royal farm north of Tokyo.

The announcement of her illness came just weeks after the government protested over a book by an Australian journalist about Michiko's daughter-in-law, Crown Princess Masako, for what Tokyo said were errors and insults to the royal family.

Michiko, wife of Emperor Akihito, shattered tradition in 1959 by becoming the first commoner to marry an heir to the Chrysanthemum throne and won popular acclaim by choosing to raise her three children at home rather than entrust them to nurses.

But she has suffered several bouts of ill health rumoured to have been caused by a strenuous round of duties arranged by the powerful courtiers who organise the lives of the imperial household.

Michiko's trials have been mirrored in some ways by those of Masako, a Harvard-educated former diplomat who has been largely out of the public eye for more than three years with a stress-related mental illness blamed by many royal watchers on pressure to bear a male heir.

Reuters >