JAPAN: Crown Prince & Commoner

Nothing like it had happened in 2,600 years of Japanese history.

Sitting in the rear seat of a small Toyopet car, the director of the Imperial Household Board rode last week across the moat surrounding the Imperial Palace and was whisked along Tokyo’s streets to the Gotanda district. The car drew up before the high-gabled, ten-room house of Hidesaburo Shoda, president of the Nis-shin Flour Milling Co., the largest in Japan.

Takeshi Usami, the imperial emissary, stepped from the car and, at once, the Shoda door was opened by a low-bowing male secretary who ushered him into the drawing room. Hidesaburo Shoda, 55, and his pretty, grey-haired wife, Tomiko, bowing low, motioned their visitor to an armchair. In courtly language, Usami announced the news: His Imperial Highness, Crown Prince Akihito, had informed the Imperial Household Board that he wished to marry Michiko, the Shodas’ 24-year-old daughter. Conforming to tradition, the Shodas expressed consternation and surprise; the father made low obeisance, murmured that the honor was too great, his family too lowly, and therefore he must decline.

Usami rose, expressed his profound regrets, left the room—but was back just as quickly to remark that His Imperial Highness would be greatly upset. Would not the Shodas please reconsider? Completing the ritual, Shoda bowed again, gave his consent.

Six Silver Trophies. As Takeshi Usami left the house and entered his car, trim little Michiko Shoda watched his departure from her bedroom window. Near her was a glass case filled with wooden Kokeshi dolls and, in a row on top, six silver tennis trophies she had won. It was tennis that had brought her together with the crown prince.

Michiko, who stands 5 ft. 2 in., weighs 115 Ibs., and is 34-24-36, is a graduate of the University of the Sacred Heart (for women) of Tokyo and was the first non-Catholic to become president of the students’ committee. She met Prince Akihito at the mountain resort of Karuizawa, where the Shodas have a summer villa, and beat him at tennis, 6-1. Said Akihito later: “She overwhelmed me.” This spring Michiko joined the Tokyo Lawn Tennis Club and in May won the club’s Crown Prince Cup in a tournament, while Prince Akihito looked on and applauded. She and the prince have been together since, but never alone.

Worm-eaten Apple. Described as a girl who is “always obedient to her parents but also has much will power and drive,” Michiko was strictly brought up, still has a monthly allowance of only $2.78. Considered “a brilliant student” by her former dean, Elizabeth Britt, Michiko in 1955 won a prize in an essay contest sponsored by the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun. Wrote Michiko in part: “We are called the apres guerre generation, and sometimes I feel like Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles who said she had been born into a world like a worm-eaten apple. But must we be handicapped all our lives by the heavy burdens resulting from a disastrous war? The past was bad, but we can free ourselves from its shackles and look forward to a rosy future. The world of the worm-eaten apple is not for us.” Michiko’s rosy future is likely to arouse some resentment, especially on the part of the top ten noble families who have traditionally supplied the fiancee of the crown prince. Because of a press blackout, most Japanese were unaware that a girl from the Shoda family was about to become the first commoner crown princess in history. But that the news has spread to the Tokyo business world seems obvious : in the past three weeks, stock in the Shoda family’s Nisshin Flour Milling Co. has shot up from 153 yen to 188.