Word: masako
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...generate more than $1 billion worth of consumer spending, including grannies showering gifts on their grandkids. Doctors have predicted a mini baby boom, as parenting-resistant youth, who have given Japan one of the lowest birth rates in the world, decide to do their own procreating, inspired by Princess Masako, 37, and Crown Prince Naruhito, 41. But the happy news also brought its share of confusion. Had Masako delivered a boy, everyone could have comfortably celebrated the presumed safety of the 2,700-year-old imperial line. Only a man can be monarch of Japan. It has taken Naruhito...
...model of a Japanese housewife. When Naruhito was born, Michiko banished the wet nurses and the royal couple raised him, and their other two children, themselves. The young prince continued the modernization effort, becoming the first royal to study overseas (at Oxford) and choosing to wed the Harvard-educated Masako, a civil servant at the Foreign Ministry whom he met at a reception. Naruhito attended the delivery and held the baby in his arms moments after the birth. "We might see a picture of Naruhito changing a diaper," says Ken Ruoff, American author of The People's Emperor, about...
...Shortly after Masako's pregnancy was announced, there was a flurry of discussion about changing imperial laws to scrap the requirement that a male take the throne. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi himself said he thought it was a good idea. But last month, a leading Liberal Democratic Party politician, Taro Aso, said such discussion was premature. "We are not at a point where we can assume that no boys will be born in the future," Aso said. Of course, that was before the birth of the princess. The next round of royal debate has begun: Can Japan tolerate an Empress...
...with the law or tattle on one another in the tabloids. They hike in the mountains, ice-skate, pray at temples and cut ribbons at children's hospitals. Naruhito seems like a nice, serious guy, but he doesn't exactly set young girls' hearts aswooning. There was hope that Masako would rattle the gilded cages, but she has faded into royal anonymity. These are, frankly, the world's dullest monarchs...
EXPECTING. PRINCESS MASAKO, 37, wife of Naruhito, heir to the Japanese throne; in Tokyo. According to the Imperial Household Agency, the Princess is "showing signs" that she is seven or eight weeks pregnant. It will be the couple's first child. The palace blamed Masako's 1999 miscarriage in part on media scrutiny...