Unconventional Frankness
In 1991, Princess Takamatsu and an aide discovered a twenty-volume diary, written in Prince Takamatsu's own hand between 1934 and 1947. Despite opposition from the Imperial Household Agency, she gave the diary to the magazine Chūōkōron which published excerpts in 1995. The diary revealed that Prince Takamatsu had opposed the Kwantung Army's incursions in Manchuria in September 1931, the expansion of the July 1937 Marco Polo Bridge Incident into a full-scale war against China and had warned his brother Hirohito in November 1941 that the Navy could not fight more than two years against the United States.
After the death of her sister-in-law, Empress Kōjun, in 2000, Princess Takamatsu became the oldest member of the Imperial Family. In 2002, after Crown Prince Naruhito and Crown Princess Masako had a daughter, the ninety-year-old princess was the first member of the Imperial Family to publicly call for changes to the 1947 Imperial Household Law, which limits the succession to the Chrysanthemum throne to legitimate males in the male line of descent. In an article she wrote for a women's magazine, she argued that having a female tennō was "not unnatural" since women had assumed the throne in the past, most recently in the eighteenth century.
Princess Takamatsu died of blood poisoning at St. Luke's Medical Center in Tokyo on 18 December 2004. She had been in and out of the hospital with various ailments during the last decade of her life. Her funeral was held on 26 December at Toshimagaoka cemetery in Tokyo's Bunkyo Ward.
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