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Outspoken princess now tight-lipped

 
Published July 28, 1996|Updated Sept. 16, 2005

Hostage of hostile courtiers, or royal recluse pining for an heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne?

When Masako Owada, a graduate of Harvard and Oxford universities and fluent in several languages, agreed to abandon her diplomatic career to wed Crown Prince Naruhito three years ago, some hoped she might breathe fresh air into the tradition-bound court.

Instead, Masako appears to have lost her voice.

That phenomenon, linked by many with the royal couple's failure thus far to produce an heir, has attracted a flood of domestic and foreign media attention.

"Who has hidden Princess Masako?" said a headline in the July edition of Sentaku magazine, lamenting her absence on the public scene.

Masako, who resisted Naruhito's pleadings for years before accepting his proposal, might well have feared a rerun of the trials suffered by the prince's mother, Empress Michiko, the first Japanese commoner to wed a crown prince. Conflicts with the conservative courtiers of the Imperial Household Agency, appalled by her efforts to open the cloistered imperial family, were said to have driven Michiko close to a nervous breakdown early on.

Months after Naruhito and Masako wed, Michiko collapsed on her 59th birthday and was unable to speak for seven weeks. Court officials blamed her illness on articles in some magazines depicting Michiko as a "dictator" determined to control palace management.

The 32-year-old Masako, meanwhile, appears transformed by her royal nuptials from a stylish, vibrant and outspoken woman into a demure, if not dowdy, public shadow of her former self.

"What they have in common (Michiko and Masako) is that they are both beautiful and talented and are not the type to feel timid in public," Sentaku wrote. "Why has Masako disappeared?"

The culprits, some royal watchers suspect, are a tradition-bound court and stuffy Imperial Household Agency, keen to protect imperial prestige by keeping secrets safe.

Media also speculate that Masako is suffering courtiers' criticism on another count _ the lack of an imperial heir.

Worried that the world's oldest hereditary monarchy may face extinction, Imperial Household Agency officials are pondering the possibility of changing the law to let a woman ascend the throne.

Meanwhile, life for Masako behind the Chrysanthemum Curtain may be less of a hardship than some suggest.

"She was in a very junior job at the Foreign Ministry. Now she's chatting away with heads of state," said Dianne Takahashi, who has researched the role of women in Japanese history. "You could look at it as a huge promotion, with a lot of free time."