It’s been a big couple of weeks for royal events. On this side of the world, Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor arrived. On the other, Emperor Naruhito’s accession to the chrysanthemum throne of Japan marked the beginning of a new era. All eyes however have been on the new Empress Masako, who has kept largely out of public view for many years. So who is Japan’s enigmatic new Empress?
A month after marrying Crown Prince Naruhito in 1993, Princess Masako was seated at a state banquet between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin. She chatted with Clinton in English, Yeltsin in Russian, and greeted Francois Mitterrand in French. She seemed like a breath of fresh air blowing through the staid old imperial palace. People wondered if the arrival of this western-educated young woman into the imperial family would bring about a change in the position of Japanese women.
But it wasn’t to be. Twenty five years on, the liberated and outspoken former diplomat is barely recognisable in the sphinx-like figure, sheathed in white, who stood silently behind her husband as he was enthroned as Emperor. (She was not, as many women, western and Japanese, noticed, permitted to be present when he received the sacred regalia – sword, mirror and jewel; the Imperial Household Law prohibits women of the imperial family from attending.) On the surface at least Masako has turned into the ideal Japanese woman in the traditional mould – a mould which more and more young Japanese are breaking away from.
Some years ago I tried – and failed – to arrange an interview with her. Her parents and old school and university friends, however, were happy – even eager – to talk. They painted a different picture of her than her public profile might suggest.
The daughter of a high-flying diplomat, Masako Odawa grew up largely outside Japan. Born in 1963, she went to school in Moscow, New York, Tokyo and Boston and ended up fluent in five languages. Instead of taking the traditional course and applying to Japan’s top university, Tokyo, she went to Harvard where she studied economics.
Back in Tokyo she passed the fiendishly competitive foreign service examinations, one of three women to get through out of eight hundred contenders. She seemed all set for a glittering career as a diplomat. But then she was invited to a party where Crown Prince Naruhito was present. The Imperial Household Agency – a body of formidable old bureaucrats whose job is to uphold the imperial institution no matter what – needed to find him a wife; her exam success had put her on the list of candidates. Naruhito was bowled over. She was invited to the palace several times, a sure sign that she was the favoured candidate.
But she had other things on her mind. Shortly afterwards she left Japan for Balliol College, Oxford, to do a postgraduate degree in International Relations. She was also a coxswain of the otherwise all-male rowing team there. Television footage of the time shows her striding along in a grey trench coat in no-nonsense low-heeled shoes, brushing aside the Japanese paparazzi who swarm around her.
Nevertheless she maintained her Japanese modesty and refinement. Japanese journalist and news anchor Yukie Kudo is still a close friend. She told me, ‘She did her make up the American way and wore jeans and pants rather than skirts. But inside she was very traditionally Japanese in a way that no one is anymore.’
That seems to be the key to her transformation; for all her westernisation she remained a traditional Japanese woman at heart.
For five years, Masako didn’t meet the prince. The Imperial Household Agency, desperate to ensure the continuation of the imperial line, presented him with a succession of eligible women but he turned them all down. There was only one woman for him, he said: Masako Owada.
Meanwhile Masako was commuting between Tokyo and Washington, conducting high-level discussions about American access to the Japanese semi conductor market. Finally the prince invited her to an imperial duck hunt where he told her he understood her doubts about joining the imperial family and added the unforgettable words, ‘I promise to protect you as long as I live.’
So what happened? Masako is only the second commoner to marry the heir to the chrysanthemum throne, the previous empress, Michiko, being the first. Like the Duchess of Sussex, Masako had to be trained and groomed, taught what she could and couldn’t do and wear. There is no room for nonconformity in the Imperial family. As the Japanese saying goes, the nail that sticks up must be hammered in – and hammered in she was.
In Masako’s case the need for her to buckle down and get on with the job was even stronger because the whole future of the imperial family rested on her shoulders. She had one job and one job only: to produce a male heir. It was a task foisted upon her thanks to a barely-connected succession of decisions of which no one quite foresaw the consequences.
Throughout most of Japan’s history the emperors had had concubines in order to generate heirs. In 1889, the Meiji Constitution, promulgated by a newly modernising Japan, adapted the Prussian model and restricted the succession to men. Then Naruhito’s grandfather, Hirohito, declared that as a modern man he would no longer have concubines, which left it up to the empress to ensure the succession. She bore a son, Akihito, and Empress Michiko had two. But then the male descendents stopped. When Masako married Naruhito, his younger brother, Prince Fumihito, had had a daughter but there were no male heirs at all. Unless Masako could produce a son the imperial family would die out.
Years went by and no son appeared. Masako was grounded. She spent most of her time in the Akasaka Palace, hidden behind massive stone walls in a vast estate in the middle of Tokyo. Then finally after eight years, in 2001, she gave birth not to a son but a daughter, Princess Aiko. The succession crisis was not resolved until 2006 when Prince Fumihito’s wife Princess Kiko had a son, Prince Hisahito, now second in line to the throne after his father. At last the pressure was off. But meanwhile Masako had succumbed to depression, brought about, as her husband said in an unprecedented television interview, by ‘moves to negate her career and personality.’
In recent years, Masako has seemed to be on the road to recovery. Now, at the age of 55, rather earlier than expected due to Emperor Akihito’s abdication, she is Japan’s new empress. Hopefully she will be able to step out of the shadows and become herself – which is what many Japanese would like. She’s a brilliant woman who has been forced to toe the line. Perhaps now she will be able to put her multiple talents to use. Only time will tell.
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