Word: japanized
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Michiko was sent to Tokyo's Sacred Heart School, where the names of the girls read like a roll call of Japan's wealthiest families, instead of to the Gakushuin (Peers' School), which is reserved mainly for the descendants of the blue-blooded kazoku families. Sacred Heart was a congenial place, long on over-politeness. Comments a Sacred Heart graduate: "The aim was to shape us all into spotless and expensive pieces of jewelry, and Michiko got the same treatment as the rest." Though the school was Roman Catholic, Michiko remained a Buddhist...
...rumors spread through the capital, Michiko Shoda suddenly left Japan, on her first trip abroad, visited Europe and the U.S., where she heard Pianist Van Cliburn play his first concert in Carnegie Hall. There were letters along the way from the prince, and, troubled, Michiko wrote her parents: "I don't believe commoners should be united with the imperial family. I doubt if such a step would have good results." To the prince she wrote: "I hope you will let me be a close friend of yours for a long, long time...
...returned to Japan last October, just after her 24th birthday. Akihito deluged her with impassioned letters, telephoned daily. On Nov. 3, on the telephone, Michiko Shoda told the crown prince that she would marry him, if he really wished it. The Director of the Imperial Household Board was dispatched to the Shoda house formally to request Michiko's hand for Akihito. The news was joyfully received by most of the press and public. Editorials took the opportunity to chide some palace officials for cloistering the imperial family, for having tended in recent years to lower a "chrysanthemum curtain" between...
...example of the ability of a Japanese woman to move from the ranks of the common people to the dizzying heights of the imperial throne. But it is a deceptive example. Ever since the peerage was abolished, wealthy industrialist families like the Shodas have become the new peers of Japan, and their daughters are princesses of the realm in everything but the name...
...million women are now wage earners, twice as many as in 1948. There are 26 women in the national legislature, 360 women seated in local assemblies, one woman mayor. In more than 30,000 clubs and P.T.A.s throughout Japan, house wives go in for cooking classes, sewing circles, charity drives. Wives can also be militant, and have often backed their husbands in strikes by bullying shopkeepers into advancing credit, badgering government officials and forming picket lines. The women of Japan are fiercely antiwar, anti-rearmament, anti-H-bomb...