Since the start of 2020, the topic of Prince Harry and Meghan leaving the British royal family has been covered by TV news programs, weekly magazines, and other media with an unusually large amount of attention. Japanese news outlets are quick to provide stories about the British royal family to the public. But are events within a royal household, such as the former Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s departure, really that important? And is it worth reporting even at the expense of other news? Looking around the world, many royal families exist beyond the British one. Are these covered in the same way by Japanese media? This article analyzes international reporting related to royal families.

The former Duke and Duchess of Sussex during their first visit to Northern Ireland (Photo: Northern Ireland Office/Wikimedia Commons [CC BY 2.0])

Royal Families Around the World

Today, there are 27 (Note 1) royal families in the world. Broadly speaking, royal families can be divided into three main types: those without substantive powers (the United Kingdom, Japan, Belgium, etc.); those with some limited political authority (Tonga, Monaco, Liechtenstein, etc.); and those in which the monarch effectively governs the state (Oman, Saudi Arabia, Brunei, etc.). In this article, among monarchies, we define as a kingdom a state in which the king, as head of state, unifies the nation either substantively or symbolically. Beyond these, many royal houses remain in Africa and Indonesia, and in not a few cases they retain practical authority in matters such as land distribution. However, multiple royal families may exist within a single country, and their jurisdictions do not necessarily align with national borders. In this article, unless their rule extends across the entire country, we do not count them as monarchs.

Why do kings and royal families exist in the first place? Looking back through history, kings originate from lineages that survived local power struggles. Those lineages then took the form of hereditary dictatorships. To maintain their power, they invested not only in repressive rule but also in long-term image-building to make themselves acceptable to the public. In some cases, they tied their rule to religion, even creating myths that their continued dominion was ordained by God. Yet where dissatisfaction with royal families mounted due to corruption or abuse of power, some were overthrown by the military or democratization movements and disappeared entirely. Many of the royal families that survive today have been stripped of their power, with only their symbolic status preserved.

Malaysia’s 13th king, Mizan Zainal Abidin (center), salutes (Photo: Wazari Wazir/Flickr [CC BY-NY-SA 2.0])

How Are Royal Families Reported on?

In countries where the royal family holds real power, it makes sense to focus on their movements, because who makes up the royal family can dramatically change the country’s system and its international relations. In reality, however, it is the symbolic royal families without real power that are frequently reported on. Let’s look more closely at how much importance is placed on topics about royal families that do not directly engage in politics. As a case study, we collected Asahi Shimbun articles over 10 years (from 2009 1 to 2019 12) that reported on royal families around the world and did not include political elements. (Note 2)

The total number of characters devoted to reporting on royal families in Asahi Shimbun over 10 years was 60,633. Of those, 28,876 characters were related to the British royal family. In other words, nearly half of all royal coverage worldwide was about Britain. After the UK, Thailand had the next-highest total with 7,953 characters, followed by Saudi Arabia with 4,998. The fact that the UK’s count is more than three times that of Thailand shows just how dominant coverage of the British royal family is.

Looking more closely at the overwhelmingly prominent coverage of the British royal family, more than half of it concerns marriages and births. By contrast, in Thailand and Saudi Arabia, the bulk of reports were obituaries of kings, and there were no articles that mentioned marriages or births. Across all royal coverage, only four countries—Britain, Sweden, Bhutan, and Malaysia—had articles touching on marriage or childbirth.

Departures from Royal Families Around the World

So to what extent was the story about Prince Harry and Meghan (the former Duke and Duchess of Sussex) reported? On SNS, as if to reflect the attention, the coined word “Mexit” (modeled after “Brexit,” the term for the country’s exit from the EU) (Note 3) was widely used. Using Asahi Shimbun (morning and evening editions) from 2020 1 1 to 3 18, we checked the coverage. We found that in about 2.5 months, there were 10 articles about the couple’s departure from the British royal family, totaling 7,218 characters—far exceeding the total coverage of the Saudi royal family across all morning editions over 10 years.

Some may view the prominence of this story as stemming from the rarity of such a departure within the British royal family. However, as seen in Japan where female royals who marry commoners must relinquish their status, leaving a royal family is not necessarily rare. Around the world there are cases where departures have grave underlying issues. Let us look at some examples together with the number of characters they received in past coverage.

The Thai Royal Palace (Photo: Andy Marchand/Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 3.0])

Prince Harry was fifth in line to the throne at the time he left the royal family. In Malaysia in 2019 1, however, the 15th king, Muhammad 5, suddenly abdicated mid-term. With about 2 years left in his term, this was the first abdication since Malaysia gained independence from Britain in 1957. The reason was not disclosed, but his marriage to a Russian woman, a former Miss Russia, has been cited as the background. Despite being a match that led him to give up the throne, they divorced in less than 1 year. Coverage of this was limited to just 260 characters in the Asahi evening edition.

There are even more serious cases involving human rights. Consider the case of a former crown princess in Thailand leaving the royal family. In 2014 12, Vajiralongkorn—then crown prince and now king—divorced his then crown princess, Srirasmi. Srirasmi left the royal family and returned to civilian status. After the divorce, however, her parents and siblings were arrested one after another on corruption and lese-majeste charges. Thailand has an extremely strict lese-majeste law: in one case, a Facebook post resulted in a 30-year prison sentence. The divorce received just 455 characters in an Asahi evening-edition article.

In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), some have tried to flee the royal family. In recent years, female relatives of Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the UAE vice president and prime minister and ruler of Dubai, have made successive escape attempts. First, in 2000, his daughter Princess Shamsa fled while on holiday in the UK, but was found two months later and forcibly returned to Dubai. Next, in 2018, Shamsa’s sister Princess Latifa attempted to escape the country by yacht. She too was intercepted near India when a UAE special forces unit seized the yacht and she was forcibly returned to Dubai. In 2019, Maktoum’s wife, Princess Haya, is said to have sought asylum in the UK. In London, Haya brought a case, and in 2020 3 a court issued a ruling finding that Maktoum had ordered the abductions of his two daughters and threatened his wife. Even so, this series of incidents involving human rights was never once covered in Asahi Shimbun.

Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE vice president and prime minister and ruler of Dubai, attending the 2010 World Economic Forum (Photo: World Economic Forum/Flickr [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0])

The mid-term abdication in Malaysia, the spate of arrests of relatives after the Thai divorce, and the escape cases in the United Arab Emirates are not simple departures from royal families. Yet almost none of these topics have been taken up by Japanese media. Even combined, the total character count devoted to these three cases does not reach one-tenth of the total devoted to the former Sussexes’ departure.

Gossip-Oriented Royal Coverage

As we have seen, multiple royal families exist around the world. The absolute volume of international reporting in Japanese newspapers—especially on royal families—is by no means large. However, within that limited coverage, symbolic royal families, above all the British royal family, occupy an abnormally large share.

If topics about royal families are worth reporting, then the royal houses of countries with real power that directly affect their state systems and international relations—such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Brunei—should arguably carry more weight. From the perspective of economic ties with Japan, these countries cannot be ignored either. The Japanese economy is heavily dependent on oil from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and on natural gas from Brunei. Therefore, royal developments such as the choice of successors can become major concerns. Yet over the past 10 years, topics like marriages and births in the royal families of these three countries were not reported even once.

Among UK royal articles that exclude political topics, the themes are basically gossip. The background to why Japanese media—even beyond weekly magazines—favor the private affairs of the British royal family may lie in the lingering afterglow of the splendor of Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s 1981 royal wedding. The ceremony had the highest budget on record and was said to have been watched by 750 million people around the world via television broadcasts. Later, Princess Diana’s life, cut short by a car accident at the peak of her popularity, could be seen as having a dramatic quality. Or, from the standpoint of access to information, it may simply be that, as an English-speaking monarchy with relatively few information restrictions, news about Britain’s royals flows more readily.

In any case, is it really necessary to concentrate coverage on skewed royal topics—above all on symbolic monarchies that do not directly engage in domestic or international politics or economics—such as marriages, births, and the departure of a prince far down the line of succession? Moreover, despite serious human-rights issues within some royal families and the authoritarian systems maintained by them, we must soberly evaluate the significance of the media—the “watchdogs of power”—choosing to keep a special watch on the British royal family rather than Middle Eastern royal houses.

Members of the British royal family gathered on the balcony of Buckingham Palace (Photo: Michael Garnett/Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]])

Note 1: Although the reference excludes Malaysia’s royal family, which in effect operates on a rotational basis, this article counts it as a royal family. The breakdown of the 27 countries is as follows.

・Royal families without substantive powers (1２ countries): Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, Greenland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Lesotho, Cambodia, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, Japan

・Royal families with some limited political authority (3 countries): Monaco, the Principality of Liechtenstein, Tonga

・Royal families whose monarchs effectively govern the state (12 countries): Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Swaziland, Brunei, Oman, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, Thailand, Bhutan

Note 2: Calculated using the Asahi Shimbun morning edition. When multiple countries were involved, the total character count was divided by the number of countries and allocated to each. Because this measures international reporting in a Japanese newspaper, coverage of Japan’s Imperial Household is excluded.

Note 3: “Mexit” is a coined word combining “Meghan” and “Exit.”

Writer: Yuka Ikeda

Graphics: Yuka Ikeda

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