[Princess Mako of Japan will forgo the trappings of royal nuptials when she marries her college boyfriend, a commoner, after a long and arduous engagement.]
On Friday, the agency that manages
the affairs of Japan’s royal family announced that the princess, the
29-year-old niece of Emperor Naruhito, would marry her fiancé, a commoner named
Kei Komuro, on Oct. 26.
It’s a long time coming. The
couple, who first met in college, have been engaged since 2017 — but getting to
the chapel has meant running a bruising gauntlet of media scrutiny and savage
public commentary on Mr. Komuro’s fitness to be the spouse of an imperial
daughter.
The pressure on the couple has been
so intense that the princess has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress
disorder, Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK, reported.
No Horse, No Carriage
If you’re expecting pomp and
circumstance, prepare to be disappointed. There will be no royal wedding.
Instead, Princess Mako intends to renounce her royal heritage and settle into a
normal life in New York, where Mr. Komuro, 29, works in a law office after
studying at Fordham.
It’s hard to blame her. Her
engagement has been endlessly and disapprovingly dissected, and her family,
citing negative public opinion, has expressed little
public support for the match.
The couple’s wedding, originally
planned for 2018, was pushed back after news reports that Mr. Komuro’s mother
owed $36,000 to a former fiancé. Some of that money, the press said, had been
used to pay for Mr. Komuro’s schooling.
The affair led to insinuations that
Mr. Komuro was a gold digger, an image that he struggled to shake off.
At the urging of his future
father-in-law, Crown Prince Akishino, he released in April a 28-page document
explaining the loan, and his lawyer later vowed that Mr. Komuro would pay it
back. But the damage was long since done.
Harry and Meghan They Aren’t
Japan’s staid royal family is low
on star power and has largely avoided the dramas surrounding the British
royals.
The family, the world’s oldest
royal line, has served only in a ceremonial capacity since the end of World War
II, and it tends toward carefully managed appearances and oblique statements.
Princess Mako and Mr. Komuro are
unlikely to appear with Oprah Winfrey or get a Netflix production deal, as did
the world’s most famous royal renouncers, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
Hungry for gossip, Japanese
tabloids find chum in even the smallest issue.
The most recent scandal is about a
ponytail. After Mr. Komuro, who had last been seen with a mid-length boyish
coif, was sighted in New York sporting long hair tied in the back, his new look
became front-page news.
The tabloids ran photos of Mr.
Komuro’s head from every angle. Japanese Twitter exploded with scathing
comments, and newscasters tut-tutted the hairstyle as unbecoming of a
princess’s beau.
Keep Your $1.4 Million
Seemingly fed up even before the
latest hullabaloo, Princess Mako has reportedly decided to give up all of the
trappings of royal life.
Even in the happiest case, Japanese
law decrees that women who marry commoners are to be pruned from the family
tree. No woman may sit on the Chrysanthemum Throne, which must be occupied by a
man from the male line of succession — currently, only the crown prince and his
son qualify.
The same laws that will force
Princess Mako out of the royalty also entitle her to official ceremonies
marking her departure and a dowry of around $1.4 million to start her new life.
Princess Mako will forgo both the
ceremony and the payment. She is the first in Japan’s royal family to do so
since the end of World War II.
Instead, the couple will register
their marriage in Tokyo and retreat later this year to New York, where Mr.
Komuro recently began work at the Manhattan law firm Lowenstein Sandler and is
awaiting his results on the New York bar exam.
Princess Mako, who holds a master’s
degree in art museum and gallery studies from the University of Leicester in
Britain and is pursuing a doctoral degree at the International Christian
University in Tokyo, has not announced her plans, although there has been
speculation that she could find work in New York’s art world. She has spent the
last five and a half years working at a museum at the University of Tokyo.
Running for the Exits
The princess is far from the first
woman to have sought an escape from the royal microscope.
Empress Masako, a former diplomat
educated at Harvard and Oxford, famously shied from the public
spotlight and intense scrutiny about whether she would produce a male
heir.
Princess Mako will be the ninth
woman from the Japanese royal family to marry a commoner since new laws
governing the royal family came into effect after World War II.
In a 1965 interview with The Asahi
Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper, Takako Shimazu, the youngest daughter of Japan’s
wartime emperor, Hirohito, said that she had found peace during two years
living in Washington, D.C., where her husband worked as a banker.
“I’m happier than when I lived in
Japan,” she said. “As a citizen, there is no mental pressure.”
The most important thing about the
change, she said later, was that “I was able to live without garnering people’s
attention, quietly.”
