Japanese Princess Sayako descended to the rank of commoner and housewife yesterday by marrying a government employee, but for many of the thousands of women watching it was still a Cinderella story.
Although Japanese women seek careers and are settling down later than ever, few families, let alone the emperor's, would talk proudly about their first-born daughter not marrying until age 36.
Perhaps that's why the well-wishers who lined the streets of Tokyo saw the wedding of the emperor's only daughter as a special happy ending.
PHOTO: AP
"I myself had so much pressure [to get married] from my family members because I'm the first daughter," said Azusa Hirai, 31, who tied the knot in April.
Hirai waited more than an hour on the roadside to witness Sayako's seven-minute parade, a modest affair for a princess who turned into a commoner under imperial tradition.
"I was really excited about her wedding," the housewife said. "I had been checking today's weather forecast for a week."
"I think she is different from Princess Masako or Princess Kiko, who married into the imperial family," she said, referring to the wives of Sayako's two elder brothers. "Sayako must have had a lot of tough time because everyone was watching her."
The crowd that gathered on the roadside from the the Imperial Palace to the Imperial Hotel, where she had the Shinto-style wedding ceremony, was not large compared with the wedding parade in June 1993 when Masako married Crown Prince Naruhito.
But about 6,000 people came out on the work day and more than 2,000 lined up to enter their names in the congratulatory books.
Sayako is the youngest child of Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko and the last of their three children to wed. No female royal has married in her late 30s in recent history.
Sayako has married Yoshiki Kuroda, a childhood friend of her one of her brothers.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS