In the land of the rising sun, 127 million people are waiting for a historic news to be delivered by Princess Kiko, wife of the Emperor’s younger son Prince Akishino, six or seven months from now. She is pregnant and its announcement has thrown the world’s oldest royal family and Japanese politics into turmoil.

The news broke out — suspected to have been leaked out — at a time when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was planning to change the imperial succession law allowing a female royal member, in the absence of a male heir, to ascend to the Chrysanthemum Throne. Until Kiko’s pregnancy news, it was widely believed that Aiko, Crown Prince Naruhito’s four-year-old daughter, could succeed to the throne. But now the succession issue hinges upon the gender of Kiko’s baby.

If she delivers a boy — first male to be born in the royal family in 40 years — it will end the debate on successor. But if the baby is a girl, the succession battle will resume without its protagonist as Koizumi says he will step down in September and he is unlikely to press ahead with proposed amendments to a 1947 imperial law that prohibits females from occupying the throne. Though the public opinion highly favours equal rights to men and women and gender equality in all respects, the ancient custom and the Japanese royal tradition have kept females off the line to the throne.

With the prime minister’s plan in the limbo, and a majority of parliament members and opponents rejecting it as not the solution to the succession issue on the ground that it breaks the royal legacy, Japanese have to wait until the delivery of Princess Kiko in September or October to know who is the heir to the throne. The inexorable suspense and unending speculation over the baby continues till then.