Book on crown princess to be published in Japan

TOKYO (AFP) - A Japanese translation of a controversial book on the country's Crown Princess Masako is to hit the stores here, months after it was shelved amid government protests, the publisher said Thursday.

The book's original publisher Kodansha had planned to bring out a Japanese translation in February, but backed out after the government said it contained some groundless claims.

Now another Tokyo publishing firm, Daisan-Shokan, has said it will publish Australian journalist Ben Hills' book in Japanese in early September.

"We consider the book worth publishing," Daisan-Shokan president Akira Kitagawa told AFP.

"We use the same translation which had been initially given to Kodansha with some corrections made to historical and objective errors," he said.

"Princess Masako: Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne" blames overbearing palace minders for plunging Masako, a former career diplomat, into depression.

Tokyo sought an apology and "corrections" from Hills and the original publisher, Random House, over the book.

Kodansha, Japan's top publishing house, dropped the translation, citing Hills' refusal to apologise for errors.

Hills has accused Kodansha of succumbing to government pressure by dropping the Japanese edition.

Kitagawa said, "I don't think Kodansha's excuse for dropping the book was rational."

Masako, a former diplomat educated at Harvard and Oxford, left a promising career to marry into the world's oldest monarchy in 1993.

She has made few public appearances since 2003 as she suffers from what the palace calls "adjustment disorder."

In one of the most controversial assertions, Hills wrote that Masako conceived her daughter Aiko, who was born after nine years of marriage, through in-vitro fertilisation.

Mainstream Japanese media rarely write disrespectfully about the imperial family, which is widely revered, although Japanese gossip magazines have increasingly broken the taboo.