Word: nagako
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DIED. EMPRESS DOWAGER NAGAKO, 97, widow of Japanese Emperor Hirohito and mother of reigning Emperor Akihito; at Tokyo's royal palace. She married Hirohito in 1924 and became Empress in 1926. Born a princess, Nagako reportedly had cool relations with daughter-in-law Michiko, the current Empress and the first commoner to marry a Japanese Crown Prince...
Akihito was born on Dec. 23, 1933, the long-awaited first son of Hirohito and Empress Nagako, who had already produced four girls. In time-honored imperial fashion, the prince was separated from his parents at about the age of three and raised by nurses, tutors and chamberlains. Yet in a departure from custom, at six Akihito was sent to school with commoners in order to broaden him. When the Allies began closing in on Japan during World War II, he and some of his classmates were evacuated to provincial cities...
...couple set up house in the Togu Gosho, the Crown Prince's unpretentious residence half a mile from the Imperial Palace. But reports soon filtered out that Empress Nagako resented the intrusion of a commoner into the family. The situation was exacerbated when, in another break with tradition, Akihito and Michiko chose to raise their children -- Prince Hiro, now 28, Prince Aya, 23, and Princess Nori, 19 -- at home. In 1986 they stepped further into workaday modernity when they took their first subway ride...
...chose to live in a nondescript two-story Western- style house deep inside the palace grounds. Rather than hold court in resplendent formal dress, he preferred to putter around in battered Panama hat and short-sleeved shirt. More than formal dinners, he relished quiet nights at home with Empress Nagako, now 85, a cheerful wife with whom he had two sons and five daughters...
...Emperor has shared his quiet life with Empress Nagako, 80, whom he married, by traditional arrangement, in 1924. A merry music lover who has enjoyed command performances by Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson, Nagako is also a distinguished painter. On walks, the royal couple like to collect plants, which, it is said, he studies and she sketches. Together they incarnate the classical Japanese ideal of mutual devotion...