[FONT=Times New Roman, Times New Roman, serif][...] [/FONT]Never before in the 1,600-year history of the Japanese monarchy has anyone with a day job married into the royal family. Outspoken, witty in a quiet way, far more worldly and better educated (she is a graduate of Harvard and attended Oxford) than most Japanese men, her career clearly on the rise in the Foreign Ministry, Masako Owada was no ordinary working woman. She was a member of an elite group of Japanese women, path makers occupying jobs that only 10 years ago women were virtually barred from holding.
So when it was announced in January that Crown Prince Naruhito -- the 33-year-old elder son of Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko and grandson of Hirohito -- had finally convinced the 29-year-old Owada to marry him, the question many Japanese immediately asked was: Why did she do it? Why would she choose to come under the thumb of the hidebound imperial household, where she will be expected to keep her eyes downcast and her attitude deferential? [FONT=Times New Roman, Times New Roman, serif][...]
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Masako Owada's decision to marry the Crown Prince has clearly touched a national nerve. For months, women have argued over whether that decision is an advance or a setback for women. The debate will continue long after June 9, when Owada dons a 12-layer, $300,000 silk kimono and walks into the shrine deep in the woods of the Imperial Palace grounds. There will always be those who see in her decision yet another surrender to the status quo. But there are others who feel that the arrival of someone like Owada can only hasten change.
FROM THE START, Masako Owada was a rarity. She was a sogoshoku.
In Japanese, the word describes a new group of career-track women entering jobs that, until seven years ago, were almost exclusively the preserve of men. Owada's graduation from Harvard in 1985 coincided with a major legal change in the status of Japanese women. As the United Nations Decade for Women came to a close, and under international pressure to do something, Japan's Parliament reluctantly passed the country's first Equal Employment Opportunity Law. [FONT=Times New Roman, Times New Roman, serif][...]
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According to [FONT=Times New Roman, Times New Roman, serif][Masako´s] [/FONT] friends, she toyed with the idea of remaining in the United States, where she had lived since she was a high-school student in Belmont, Mass. (Her father was teaching at Harvard.) Wall Street's investment banks and brokerage houses were eager to hire this multilingual Harvard economics major, whose senior thesis, written under the tutelage of Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, was a detailed examination of the role of oil prices and exchange rates in Japanese trade policy. But afraid she might lose touch with her own culture, she decided to return to Japan. [FONT=Times New Roman, Times New Roman, serif][...]
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At the Foreign Ministry, few seemed more committed than Owada. [FONT=Times New Roman, Times New Roman, serif][...] [/FONT] Assigned to two of the stickiest problems in Japanese relations with the United States -- American access to the semiconductor market and the limitations on foreign lawyers working in Tokyo -- she was often on the red-eye to Washington or pressed into service as an interpreter when officials like Carla Hills, then the United States Trade Representative, came to negotiate with senior Japanese officials.
During the periodic trade crises over computer chips, she very quietly, very expertly discussed with American reporters in Tokyo such esoterica as Japan's arguments for treating Eproms (an arcane form of memory chips) very differently from D-RAMs (the kind found in most personal computers). [...]
A midlevel Japanese diplomat now in the United States remembers serving as the night-duty officer at the Foreign Ministry last year. At around 2 or 3 A.M., when he was sleeping in a small office, he was roused by a sharp knock on the door. Outside stood Owada. She had just completed an urgent report and needed to get it distributed. "Apart from me and the guards," he recalls, "she was the last one in the building." [FONT=Times New Roman, Times New Roman, serif][...]
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THEY MET AT A reception, or so the almost fairy tale goes, for Princess Elena of Spain. Masako Owada, then 22, had just joined the Foreign Ministry. The long search by the Crown Prince, then 26, for a bride was already on its way to becoming a subject of black humor. Very little in the Imperial Palace happens by accident, but few doubt that love was at work, at least on the Prince's part. "My guess," says one of Owada's friends, "is that for the first time he met a woman he could talk to about something real, not one of these daughters of the right families who take shopping tours to Paris." [FONT=Times New Roman, Times New Roman, serif][...] [/FONT]Over time, Owada's friends say, she too fell in love, but cautiously. "I don't think there is much doubt in her mind that she loves the Prince," says a Harvard friend. "The question was never him. The question was the palace." [FONT=Times New Roman, Times New Roman, serif][...] [/FONT]
In January, the whole country came to a stop when the Crown Prince and his would-be bride held their first, and so far only, press conference. There was no chance there would be surprises, since under palace rules questions were submitted in advance. Nonetheless, by her very demeanor Masako Owada made news. [FONT=Times New Roman, Times New Roman, serif][...] [/FONT]
"I'd be telling a lie if I were to say that I do not feel a sense of sadness on leaving the Foreign Ministry, where I have been working for close to six years," Owada told the crowd of reporters. But she was won over, she said, when the Prince told her, "I will protect you with all my power throughout my life." It was unclear whom she needed protection from, but many believe those words were a signal to both the Imperial Household Agency and the Japanese press that if they tangle with the new Princess, they will be tangling with the Prince. The message was out: There would be no digging into her past life, no carping from old-line families whose daughters were passed over and none of the harsh treatment by the Imperial Household Agency that led Empress Michiko to a near nervous breakdown and a miscarriage a generation ago.
Curiously, the press conference has emerged as a sort of national Rorschach test. Many older Japanese said they were shocked by Owada's forwardness. Miss Owada, they complained, had breached imperial etiquette by repeatedly stepping in to add a few words to Prince Naruhito's comments. [...] Akira Hashimoto, a senior executive of Kyodo News Service who went to school with the Emperor when he was a child, also suggested Owada has a bit to learn. [...] To become a true princess, she must "give up her endeavor to build up her own character" and should "find a way to express herself simply with her smile." [...]
In contrast, many younger Japanese, particularly working women, were thrilled to see a future empress offering direct, savvy answers, even opinions. "She said the very maximum she could say," one of her colleagues and friends at the Foreign Ministry said. Owada's account of how she deliberated between job and marriage was particularly satisfying to many of her friends, because they knew it would infuriate old-line families and pro-imperialists. "To them, her view, her feelings should not be important," a former colleague said. "She was saying it was the deciding factor."
Yet another group -- Owada's American friends, who knew her as a bright, witty and outspoken young woman -- had a different reaction. Some said they were shocked by what they saw. Sitting in her perfect dress, bowing at all the right moments, her gloved hands folded just-so in her lap, she "had turned into something different, almost robotic," said a friend who knew Owada well at Harvard. "You would hardly recognize her. I saw this and said to myself, 'It's over.' " Last month, these friends noted that after Owada received the official engagement gifts from the palace, she posed a bit awkwardly in her kimono for the cameras. They could not remember ever seeing her in a kimono. [...]
Agreed. There was so much controversy over the visit that the Crown Princess and Princess made to the Netherlands in the past that I don't think she'll be "allowed" to go again.
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