An expert government panel recommended that female members of the imperial household retain their royal status regardless of marriage but avoided the key question of succession.

In its final report on the issue submitted Dec. 22 to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, the panel also called for allowing males from former branches of the imperial family to regain their imperial status through adoption.

The panel said its two proposals were aimed at addressing the increasingly pressing issue of the dwindling number of family members.

Female members of the imperial family are obliged under the Imperial House Law to relinquish their royal status upon marriage.

The number of imperial family members is now down to 17 after Princess Mako left the ranks in October to marry her longtime boyfriend. Of that figure, only six are in their 30s or younger.

The panel is headed by Atsushi Seike, a former president of Tokyo’s Keio University. Its report will be submitted to the Diet.

The central issue facing the panel since March, when it was formed, was how to increase the number of imperial family members, rather than imperial succession, so as to ease the burden of official duties carried out by Emperor Naruhito and maintain official functions traditionally fulfilled by the family.

With regard to the first proposal, the panel’s final report went further than it did in July. At that time, it suggested that it “can be made possible to retain royal status” for female members of the family.

But the panel is now recommending that they retain their royal status, regardless of marriage, if the imperial family system is overhauled.

The proposed change would not apply to current female members.

The report stated that it should be fully noted that they “have spent their entire lives under the existing imperial system.”

The second proposal concerns the males in 11 former branches of the imperial family and how to bring them back into the fold.

Those branches were stripped of their royal trappings and demoted to the commoner status in 1947, when Japan was under the occupation of allied forces following the nation’s defeat in World War II.

However, the Imperial House Law that took effect in 1947 does not permit adoption into the imperial family. That same decree applied with the predecessor of the law established in 1889.

Adoption was ruled out on grounds it could cause confusion on the precise line of heirs to the throne.

The panel also stated in the second proposal that if males are allowed to become members of the imperial family through adoption they would be ineligible to succeed to the Chrysanthemum Throne.

That would create two categories of male members of the imperial family: heirs to the throne and male members who are not.

How to avoid possible confusion needs to be fully discussed with regard to the adoption issue, experts said.

The report also recommended allowing those males to establish their own branches of the imperial family through a revision of the law in the event the two proposals fail to halt the decline in the shrinking gene pool of imperial family members.

Prince Hisahito, the 15-year-old nephew of Naruhito, is the only young male member of the family. Hisahito is second in line to the throne, after his 56-year-old father, Crown Prince Fumihito, the younger brother of Naruhito, 61.

While a sense of anxiety is growing over how to ensure stable imperial succession, the panel deferred the matter to the future.

It said it would be “premature” to try to settle the issue of imperial succession while Hisahito is still so young, adding it should be discussed when he becomes old enough to marry and how things unfold after that.

The panel’s report did not touch on the pros and cons of the highly contentious question of allowing a daughter of the emperor or a child of the female line of the imperial family to succeed to the throne.

The panel was set up as the Diet called for measures to ensure stable imperial succession following the enactment of a special measures law in 2017 that allowed Naruhito’s father, now Emperor Emeritus Akihito, to abdicate.

(This article was compiled from reports by Ryutaro Abe and Senior Staff Writer Ryuichi Kitano.)