of the current family head and son of Tsunekazu Takeda) and author of a book entitled The Untold Truth of Imperial Family Members, proposed to maintain the male line by restoring the former princely houses or by allowing imperial family members to adopt males from those families. Although Takeda has written that such men should feel a responsibility to maintain the royal house, he said he would find it daunting if asked to play that role himself. According to Takeda, the heads of the former court families agreed in late 2004, just before Koizumi's advisory panel started its discussions, not to speak out on the issue and some of them told him to "not get involved in political issues". Opponents of the reinstatement of former collateral branches, like Liberal Democratic Party politician Yōichi Masuzoe, argued that it would favor members of families with tenuous blood links to long-ago emperors over contemporary female descendants of recent sovereigns. During a series of hearings on the succession problem in early 2012, Yoshiko Sakurai and Akira Momochi, conservative members of the panel of experts, rejected proposals for female members of the imperial family to be allowed to retain their royal status after marriage and create new branches of the imperial family, and instead suggested revising the Imperial Household Law so that male descendants of former imperial families which renounced their royal status in 1947 be allowed to return to the imperial family as adoptees. Another proposal was to reinstate four of the former imperial families, a solution opposed by the government on the grounds that it would not enjoy public support. Government sources told the Yomiuri Shimbun in May 2012 that the suggestion to reinstate men from the former princely houses as imperial family members through adoption had been unexpected. In September 2021, it was considered to amend the Imperial Household Law and allow the 85-year old Prince Hitachi to adopt a male member of the collateral branches of the imperial family. References Bibliography Fujitani, T. Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan. University of California Press; Reprint edition (1998). Lebra, Sugiyama Takie. Above the Clouds: Status Culture of the Modern Japanese Nobility. University of California Press (1995). External links Japan's "Princess Problem" – Website The Royal Universe Japanese nobility