'', designated imperial personal emblem of Kikuko In 1991, Princess Takamatsu and an aide discovered a twenty one volume diary, written in Prince Takamatsu's own hand between 1922 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 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 2001, after
Crown Prince Naruhito and
Crown Princess Masako had a
daughter, Princess Takamatsu, at age 90, became 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 the January/February 2002 issue of a women's magazine, she argued that having a female
emperor was "not unnatural" since women had assumed the throne in the past, most recently in the early nineteenth century. Princess Takamatsu died of
sepsis at
St. Luke's Medical Center in Tokyo on 18 December 2004, eight days before her 93rd birthday. She had been in and out of the hospital with various ailments during the last decade of her life. Her funeral was held on 27 December at Toshimagaoka cemetery in Tokyo's
Bunkyō Ward with
Prince Tomohito of Mikasa as the chief mourner. 560 mourners including members of the imperial family and Prime Minister
Junichiro Koizumi were in attendance. Her body was cremated in
Shinjuku Ward and her ashes were placed in her husband's tomb. She was the last surviving member of the imperial family who was born during the
Meiji period. ==Honours==