This July 11, 2019 column by Masayuki Takayama, introduced and recommended by the author in a May 24, 2024 blog entry, weaves together biology, poetry, and politics to argue that Japan’s imperial house must remain strictly male-line, rooted in the continuity of the Y chromosome.
Drawing on interviews with biologists, Takayama describes how all humans begin as “female” at the fertilized-egg stage, how the Y chromosome and testosterone later “tell” the body it is male, and how this same Y chromosome supports men’s health until post-reproductive age, when its decline leads to arteriosclerosis, dementia, and cancer—an arc he likens to the fleeting beauty of cherry blossoms celebrated by Motoori Norinaga and Saigyō.
He then cites recent University of Tokyo research mapping Y-chromosome sequences, claiming that modern Japanese and Jōmon Japanese share the same Y lineage for over ten thousand years, with almost no overlap with Chinese or Koreans, and uses this to dismiss popular theories such as Ryōtarō Shiba’s “same ancestors as Koreans” and Namiō Egami’s “horse-riding conqueror” hypothesis as false.
Echoing Hiroaki Nagahama’s book The Birth of Japan, Takayama argues that previous attempts to trace ethnic identity through maternal mitochondrial DNA are “child’s play,” insisting the decisive key is the Y chromosome and praising Japan for maintaining a male-line imperial succession as a means of preserving ethnic continuity—before condemning current proposals from the Communist Party and the Asahi Shimbun to introduce a female-line emperor as an attempt to “defile” the Japanese people and as evidence of Asahi’s “ignorance and malice.”

The fact that I buy Shukan Shincho every week in order to read the serial columns by Masayuki Takayama and Yoshiko Sakurai has already been stated.
Masayuki Takayama, in this week’s issue as well, fully proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
Everyone who has read him must have thought, “He is incredible.”
Yoshiko Sakurai, too, is a person worthy of the People’s Honor Award.
Together with the late Nobuichi Watanabe, from the days when the Asahi Shimbun dominated Japan until now, she has literally fought a lonely battle to correct the abnormality of this newspaper, its many fabricated reports born of its anti-Japanese ideology, and has continued to criticize the way it has sided with the anti-Japanese propaganda of China and the Korean Peninsula.
First of all, I want to deliver Masayuki Takayama’s splendid essay to all the people of Japan and to people all over the world.

Scent of the Asahi
Masayuki Takayama

Even if she was a bad wife, when a man loses her, for some reason the husband seems to lose his life force and soon follows his wife to the grave.
Conversely, when the husband dies, in the great majority of cases the wife becomes rather full of vitality, and she absolutely does not follow her husband in death.
The average life span of Japanese is 80 for men and 87 for women.
This shows that, after the bothersome husband has departed, the wife spends seven years in peace of mind.
Why do men die earlier.
It is because they are men, that is, because they possess a Y chromosome, and that is what determines it.
It is sad, but that is our fate.
What follows is something I learned in an interview with Kumiko Takeuchi and Mary Barton, but at the stage of the fertilized egg all human beings were originally “female.”
The proof of that lies in the nipples on a man’s chest.
No milk comes out of them and they are not even an erogenous zone.
They are a completely useless thing, yet they are proof that before becoming a man he was once a woman.
Then when does a male become a male.
Six weeks after fertilization, when cell division has begun, the sex-determining factor on the Y chromosome sets the testes functioning and makes them secrete large quantities of the male hormone testosterone.
That drenches the brain and every corner of the body in testosterone as if in a shower and tells the body, “You are a man.”
The male genitals also develop as a result.
Only inborn homosexual men have genitalia that are one size larger than those of normal males.
We still do not know why God made such a waste.
Those who are born male in both mind and body are constantly being exhorted by their brain: “You are a man, behave more like a man,” and unlike women they grow beards and body hair, and their muscles bulge.
MacArthur was ridiculed by his first wife, who said, “You may be a general by day, but at night you’re only a private,” but that is how men are constantly required to do their best day and night.
In fact, it is also the Y chromosome that supports this effort; it prevents the cells from becoming cancerous, prevents arteriosclerosis, and removes amyloid plaques that form in the brain.
Thanks to that, a man, without falling ill, can go on striving, take a beautiful wife, and beget children.
However, once he passes reproductive age, the Y chromosome gradually begins to lose its function.
As a result, arteriosclerosis sets in.
Plaques build up in the brain and dementia begins, and cancer cells start to run rampant.
The fatigue from constant exertion also accumulates.
The phrase “pin-pin korori” refers to the ideal way of life in which one lives actively and healthily and then suddenly drops dead before becoming bulky household waste.
The decline of the Y chromosome seems to me precisely a law of nature designed to realize this.
As men, we keep on striving and do our best, but once our role is finished, we are allowed to fall away quickly—this fleeting way of life Japanese men likened to the cherry blossom.
Having lived long enough to reach his sixtieth year, Motoori Norinaga wrote the poem, “If someone asks what the heart of Yamato is, say it is the mountain cherry blossoms glowing in the morning sun.”
Saigyō likewise wrote, “If I have a wish, it is to die beneath the blossoms in spring, around the time of the full moon in the second month.”
The sadness of being male is well expressed.
As for that Y chromosome, it has now become clear that the base sequence of its genes differs between ethnic groups.
According to a recently published map of the Y-chromosome sequence by graduate students in the Faculty of Science at the University of Tokyo, the Y chromosome of present-day Japanese and that of the Jōmon people are the same.
In other words, from the days of the Sannai-Maruyama site over ten thousand years ago, the Japanese have remained Japanese all along.
When this Jōmon factor is compared with that of Chinese and Koreans, there was found to be almost nothing in common.
That is a great discovery.
Ryōtarō Shiba said that “the Koreans and we share the same ancestors.”
Namiō Egami also said that “a horse-riding people crossed over and created the Yamato court,” but it turns out that this was all utter nonsense.
In Japanese history we are taught that Yayoi culture was brought by migrants, but in fact there were no such migrants.
Regarding ethnic identity, it has been examined conventionally on the basis of women’s mitochondria, but that is child’s play.
The decisive factor is the Y chromosome, as Hiroaki Nagahama also writes in The Birth of Japan.
Even so, the Japanese are remarkable.
They learned early on the sadness of the Y chromosome and, not only cherishing the cherry blossoms for that reason, they maintained the imperial line as a male-line succession that links the Y chromosome as a means of preserving the ethnic purity.
Now the Communist Party and the Asahi Shimbun are recommending a female-line emperor.
They regard that as the best way to defile the Japanese people.
Can you not smell the stench of ignorance and malice rising from the Asahi.