Masako Owada: Japan’s 21st Century Princess

Back when she was a student at Harvard, Masako Owada introduced some of her friends to a card game called Emperor. The various players drew titles from emperor to commoner. Funny thing was that Owada always managed to win: when she played she always turned out to be empress.

Who says that cards do not deal the hand of fate? Owada seems to have the world at her feet. On June 9 she will marry Crown Prince Naruhito, who will be the next Emperor of Japan, the world’s oldest monarchy. The Japanese royal family does not have private wealth like Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, but the government takes splendid care of it. More important, the imperial family enjoys the nation’s respect, unlike the beleaguered Windsors, who may be only a few tapes away from oblivion. As crown princess, Owada will deal with the world’s most powerful and interesting people — statesmen, business leaders, educators, artists — and travel the globe. If she decides she wants to learn something new — say, the violin or calligraphy — tutors of consummate skill are right at hand.

Best of all, she is marrying a husband who appears to care for her deeply. Heaven knows he has campaigned long and hard to win her. Victory came six years after the couple met in 1986 and after she had turned him down twice. When the pair gave their engagement press conference, Naruhito, 33, was fairly bursting with pride. He beamed constantly and offered his “heartfelt thanks” to his bride-to-be. A member of the Owada family acknowledges the crucial importance of the suitor’s ardor. “It is easy to see that this was not an easy decision. One decisive factor was the strength of love that, as a human being, she must have felt very intensely from the prince.”

The choice was hard because Masako Owada had another world at her feet — one earned by her own efforts rather than inherited or acquired by marriage — that was incompatible with membership in the imperial family. Until she resigned last January, she was a rising young member of the Foreign Ministry, conducting shuttle diplomacy with Washington on such issues as semiconductor trade talks and Japan’s refusal to accept foreign lawyers. At 29, with graceful, perfect English and a sharp, analytical mind, she had a chance to pierce the glass ceiling that prevents Japanese women from rising to prestigious positions in government and business. She had the potential to let in some fresh gusts of revolutionary air. There can be no doubt that Owada knows her worth.

So do her countrymen. The winning of Masako-san, the familiar and endearing title by which she is usually called, is seen as a triumph for the imperial family. On an international level, the press is avid: unlike the feckless Brits and the sulky Grimaldis, this pair are good-news royals, appealing, admirable and with the allure of mystery. Tabloids and weeklies have become fascinated by the young woman with the Mona Lisa smile and habit of looking upward from downcast eyes — not unlike the young Lady Di. At home, Masakomania dominates the thriving women’s magazine business, although Owada has given no interviews and precious few photo opportunities.

More seriously, Owada represents values that modern Japanese admire most: discipline, a love of learning, discretion and, perhaps most important, the poise and sophistication to deal with the world beyond their borders. Until now she has built her life along the lines of her father’s brilliant diplomatic career. Hisashi Owada is Japan’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs. She is aware she comes from a fortunate background, is comfortable with it, and has a sense of responsibility. Former teachers say she has strong convictions about expanding Japan’s role in international political and cultural life. Despite the fact that much of the world envies them their business dominance, many Japanese feel their country is regarded as recessive, insular and conformist.

The prince was able to persuade Owada that as his wife she would be able to use her diplomatic skills in a very effective way. If so, he will have to help make it happen. A truly enigmatic institution, the imperial household is secretive and, in general, tradition bound. Beyond its role in guarding the practice of religious rituals, nothing much is known about it. By comparison, European royal houses are open books.

Feminists, a minority among Japanese women, are divided about Owada’s decision to join such a closed society. Some think she let down the side. Says Keiko Higuchi, professor of women’s studies at Tokyo Kasei University: “There is a view that it’s too bad she doesn’t continue her work as a pioneer.” She will be consigned to attending cultural events, tending to charity work and composing poems, an exacting task expected of all imperials. But, says Yukiko Kishimoto, the author of several books on women, “she is already a star and a diplomat, and she made up her own mind, which shows great independence.”

Kuniko Inoguchi, a professor of international politics at Tokyo’s Sophia University, believes the selection of Owada is an indication that the royal family wants to move forward. Its members are often seen as prisoners of the Imperial Household Agency, a 1,132-person bureaucracy that controls everything from rigid security to silver service to press interviews (almost none). It is hard for an outsider to adapt to such a sequestered life. Michiko, the present Empress, who married Emperor Akihito in 1959, is, like Owada, a commoner. She broke ground by insisting on certain innovations, such as raising her children ) herself. She suffered for her determination, coming close to a nervous breakdown in the 1960s.

Always popular, she has risen in stature through the years and has now passed the word that she will be Owada’s ally. Says Inoguchi: “The royal family are guardians of tradition, but in wider choices, they go ahead. Michiko dared to bring up her own children. Naruhito is marrying a career woman.” Poet Machi Tawara, who is Owada’s contemporary, notes that she “chose her own timing. We can identify with that. There’s a lot of talk about the crown prince saying ‘I will put all my might in protecting you my entire life.’ Some of my friends said, ‘I want someone to say that to me,’ but my reaction was that the imperial household must be quite a place if Masako Owada needs to be protected.”

But the institution is not so much malign as remote. The bride-to-be has just spent six intensive weeks learning its religious rituals and ceremonies. She has already participated in one of its quainter customs. Wearing a formal silk kimono for the first time anyone could recall, she joined her parents in their living room to receive ceremonial gifts (five bolts of silk, six bottles of sake and a pair of sea bream) from the grand master of the prince’s household. His highness was not present. As soon as he received word that the presents were accepted, he was off to ancestral shrines on the palace grounds to inform the gods of his engagement. It’s about as far from late 20th century negotiations as you can get.

Why did Masako-san choose to enter this world? Around Tokyo, many young people speculate that the reason might be as simple as the ticking of the biological clock. She was nearing 30, late for a Japanese woman to marry and have children. And with the crown prince in the picture, very few men would be willing to court her. A more serious explanation is suggested by various teachers. It has to do with the fact that she is deeply Japanese in her outlook and that the call to duty, as well as the promise of love, was strong. On both sides of her family, she is descended from the samurai class, warriors in feudal times, administrators and teachers later. The word samurai means “to serve.”

The press refers to her as a superwoman, and the list of her accomplishments tallies with that tag. Still, she was something of a late bloomer. Friends remember her as a child who loved sports and animals more than books. She once thought about becoming a veterinarian and, until she quit the Foreign Ministry, kept pictures of dogs and kittens on her office desk. When the occasion called for it, she was fearless in standing up to teachers and willing to speak for the class when she felt that injustice was being done.

At one point a teacher decreed that parents had to sign off on their children’s tests to prove that the scores had been duly brought home and inspected. The drill called for the parents to write “I saw this” on the test sheets. Not everyone wanted to attempt this particular hurdle, and her pals turned to Masako, a good choice since she already had superior penmanship. “I saw this,” she wrote confidently on their papers, until someone in the class squealed. In the dustup that followed, Owada spoke out, saying each student should choose whether to reveal her scores. Recalls a classmate: “At a time when everyone took the teacher’s word as absolute, she already sensed some right and wrong.”

Masako could be cheeky. In high school English class, the students would try to disrupt a lesson by asking the teacher endless questions. Before the start of the session, Owada and her best friend to this day, Sumiyo Tsuchikawa, the two most fluent English speakers in the group, would go to the blackboard and write down teasers like “Did you go out with anyone during college?” The rest of the class shouted out questions in Japanese for the pair to translate in chalk.

Masako was a key figure in organizing a team for softball, an activity the school disapproved of as dangerous and unfeminine. The game clearly caught her imagination in those early teenage years. She played third base and was cleanup hitter. She was a tough player: in the batter’s box, she stared down the pitcher. When the ragtag group played the teachers, she liked to catch their line drives right in front of her face. Recalls an admiring classmate: “She could do things ordinary girls couldn’t — like hit fungoes.”

After winning a tournament and receiving a large trophy, the victors held a party. On such an occasion many teenagers might get sentimental, but her friends say they have never seen Masako cry. Says classmate Sachiko Takamine: “I’m positive she still has her boyish side. She has become an incredible woman with femininity and masculine strength. She now has the appropriate aura for a princess. She has the wisdom to adapt herself to any environment.”

Shortly after that triumph, Masako’s life changed. Her father accepted an invitation to teach at the Harvard Law School, and the family packed up and moved to the Boston suburb of Belmont. Perhaps because she was challenged by a language that she knew but was not expert at, she became serious, studious and focused. The infielder and the would-be vet gradually receded. Her adviser, Lillian Katz, says Masako “never needed moral support. She knew her own worth, and she knew that she was her parents’ pride and joy.” Belmont has reason to remember its former high-schooler. Since the engagement, Japanese tourists arrive by the busload to ogle her alma mater and the Owada house.

When the elder Owada’s two-year teaching stint was over, his daughter remained in the U.S. and went to Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in economics. Her thesis adviser was Jeffrey Sachs, who went on to advise countries around the world on how to switch from controlled to free-market economies. “She had a certain extra dimension, a real analytical mind,” he observes. “Her thesis concerned Japan’s trade performance after each shock in oil prices during the ’70s and ’80s, and how the country paid for fuel by increasing exports. She devised computer work that was sophisticated, especially for an undergraduate.”

The Owadas wanted their daughters — Masako has younger twin sisters — to “have some solid base to stick to,” says an immediate-family member. “The parents wanted them to avoid becoming rootless people. It was simple things, like customs and observing traditional Japanese festivals.”

Masako evidently agreed. In 1986 she entered the law department of the University of Tokyo to study for the Foreign Ministry entrance exam. The stocky teenager was becoming sleek and turning heads in a division that is only about 5% female. She passed the stiff exam after just one year — most people require two years of study, and only 5.3% succeeded in 1986, Owada’s year. Even now, Tokyo professionals can be heard to say, “She did what a man can’t do,” and then hurriedly correct themselves.

In October 1986 she met her fate at a reception given for Spain’s Princess Elena in Tokyo. It was a typical ceremonial trade-off: young women were invited to amuse the pretty Spanish royal and also to be reviewed by the bachelor crown prince. Naruhito liked Masako-san at once. Shigemitsu Dando, a former Supreme Court justice and longtime adviser to the imperial household, confided to his diary that “she was very graceful but also cheery and ! outgoing.” Four meetings were arranged, and the imperial watchdogs began a routine background check over three generations.

There were problems with Owada. Her grandfather was linked to Chisso, the firm responsible for major chemical dumping first detected in the ’50s that led to the death or crippling of thousands. He was not connected to the company at the time but later, as the firm’s president, was involved with the settlement of lawsuits. Second, Owada did not seem that interested in an imperial future. Furthermore, she may have had a boyfriend or two. And then there was the press, which caught on to Naruhito’s interest almost at once. The Owadas were besieged. Masako-san was tough with reporters, often demanding their business cards, and even slamming her hand against photographers’ lenses. As celebrities before her have learned, retaliatory action doesn’t do much good. By the time she flew off to Oxford in 1988 for two years’ study assigned by the Foreign Ministry, a reporter had rented a room across the street from her house for snooping purposes, and 50 of his colleagues were clamoring around her at the airport.

As it happened, her future husband had just finished two years at the same university. For Naruhito, who speaks English almost as fluently, Oxford was a liberation. Though he did have minimal security protection, he was for the first time in his young life on his own. A wine fancier, he could walk into a liquor store and pick his own bottles. He could go to the laundry and make a fool of himself by letting suds flood the floor. When the winter turned harsh, he could tape his own windows or suffer the consequences. He made good use of his experience, writing a thesis on the Thames as a commercial highway during the Middle Ages. Later, he was to write a book on his English experience, illustrated with his own photographs that caught the charm of a very different land.

The gossip goes that on his return he pursued at least two other eligible young women. But it was always really Owada. The prince wanted no other, and the imperial household had persuaded itself that her grandfather was blameless in the Chisso disaster and that any dalliances Masako-san may have had were unimportant. She, meanwhile, was laboring at the ministry, scrupulous about providing up-to-date information and taking pains with the phrasing of documents so as not to nettle other parties to a negotiation.

But, of course, the imperial household knows a thing or two about negotiating also. Somehow, mandatory security was brushed aside so the pair could meet privately, if not alone. Naruhito would propose, his quarry would demur. Volleys of phone calls from the lover followed. There were rendezvous on the imperial duck-hunting grounds. All the while, secrecy was an obsession. But one short exchange shows that the young pair were establishing intimacy and rapport. After some nervous discussion about avoiding the press, Masako- san joked to Naruhito, “Perhaps I should get dressed up in a panda suit.” Some panda.

At one point the Owada family formally rejected the suit, on the grounds that their daughter could not decide. At least the reply hinted that she was thinking about the offer.

Finally, last Dec. 12, she relented: “If I can be of support to you, I would like to accept humbly. Since I am accepting, I will work hard to make your highness happy, and also be able to look back on my life and think, ‘It was a good life.’ “

That statement may sound modest, even servile, to Western ears, but in Japan the reaction was quite different. In the last clause, Owada had dared to say in public that she sought fulfillment in her own terms. To young women — and many men — that came close to calling for a new covenant. Marriage is not necessarily an attractive prospect to an educated woman, especially one of the growing number who, like Owada, have lived part of their childhood abroad and have a wider and more cosmopolitan experience than most Japanese.

From the beginning of his school days, a boy is pushed to study hard in order to gain acceptance at a top university, preferably the University of Tokyo. Then he starts toiling for a corporation or in a government bureaucracy. The hours are endless, and when they are over, he is often expected to go out and get drunk with clients. Weekends are for golf, again usually with clients. Back home, his wife takes full charge of the children and manages the money. This lockstep life is a foundation of Japan’s economic supremacy, which is just beginning to show cracks.

If a Japanese family is posted abroad, the parents may leave a son home with relatives so he can pursue the rigors of his education. He may be smart, but he is often so sheltered that as an adult, he can scarcely decide what to eat or which clothes to put on in the morning. But a daughter usually travels with the family and gets a taste of other cultures. Grown up, these women do not want to settle for a corporate automaton as a husband.

A government report released in 1992 disclosed that 74.5% of single women did not care that they were unmarried. No wonder. In households where both partners work, women spend 4 hours and 17 minutes a day on housework. Men toil at home for 19 minutes. No one expects that the new imperial couple will be tidying up the palace, but Owada struck a blow for female rights when she said she had her own legitimate expectations in life.

Both in Japan and around the world, there is avid speculation about what she will do in her new position. Can she and her husband really shake up the Establishment? Some observers fear that the imperial household will have its way and turn her into a bland creature whose every gesture is scripted. They point to the change in the way she dresses. Never trendy, she was mildly Mod at Oxford and wore dark, dress-for-success outfits at the ministry. Since her engagement, she has abruptly switched to bright colors and conventional, almost matronly styles.

Clothes may not be the way to understand Owada, but everyone is looking for clues. “There are several key words here — Harvard, University of Tokyo, diplomat,” says investigative journalist Naoki Inose. “The family thought Masako would be marketable.” Others have taken her achievements further and declared her to be Japan’s version of Hillary Clinton, but that is a big stretch. Masako knows her worth just as securely, but she is too reserved to have either Hillary’s very American assumptions or her bumptiousness.

Yoshimi Ishikawa, author of several books on Japan and America, believes a change from the rampant secrecy surrounding imperial life would be a very healthy thing. “Masako Owada has the capacity to be a star. The Japanese like people who study hard — her educational career gives her charisma.” He thinks she has a chance to open up a closed world. “The prince loves her so much that if she wants change, he may help. If Masako Owada can make a good bridge between the family and the people, maybe we can create a new era of Japanese history.” Eloquently stated, and a goal worth striving for, but if Masako-san wants to build that bridge, she’ll have to be a hell of an engineer.