A Japanese princess is set to be wed, but it’s no fairy tale
TOKYO — Anyone who dreams of being a princess should probably have a chat with Princess Mako of Japan.
On Friday, the agency that manages the affairs of Japan’s royal family announced that the princess, the 29-year-old niece of Emperor Naruhito, would marry her fiance, a commoner named Kei Komuro, on Oct. 26.
It has been a long time coming.
The couple, who first met in college, have been engaged since 2017 — but getting to the chapel has meant running a bruising gantlet of media scrutiny and savage public commentary on Komuro’s fitness to be the spouse of an imperial daughter.
The pressure on the couple has been so intense that the princess has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK, reported.
There will be no royal wedding with usual trappings of pomp and circumstance. Instead, Princess Mako intends to renounce her royal heritage and settle into a normal life in New York, where Komuro, 29, works in a law office after studying at Fordham University.
The engagement has been endlessly and disapprovingly dissected, and her family, citing negative public opinion, has expressed little public support for the match.
The couple’s wedding, originally planned for 2018, was pushed back after news reports that Komuro’s mother owed $36,000 to a former fiance. Some of that money, the press said, had been used to pay for Komuro’s schooling.
The affair led to insinuations that Komuro was a gold digger, an image that
he struggled to shake off.
At the urging of his future father-in-law, Crown Prince Akishino, he released in April a 28-page document explaining the loan, and his lawyer later vowed that Komuro would pay it back. But the damage was long since done.
Japan’s staid royal family is low on star power and has largely avoided the dramas surrounding the British royals.
The family, the world’s oldest royal line, has served only in a ceremonial capacity since the end of World War II, and it tends toward carefully managed appearances and oblique statements.
Princess Mako and Komuro are unlikely to appear with Oprah Winfrey or get a Netflix production deal, as did the world’s most famous royal renouncers, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
Even in the happiest case, Japanese law decrees that women who marry commoners are to be pruned from the family tree. No woman may sit on the Chrysanthemum Throne, which must be occupied by
a man from the male line of succession — currently, only the crown prince and his son qualify.
The same laws that will force Princess Mako out of the royalty also entitle her to official ceremonies marking her departure and a dowry of around $1.4 million to start her new life. Princess Mako will forgo both the ceremony and the payment. She is the first in Japan’s royal family to do so since the end of World War II.
Instead, the couple will register their marriage in Tokyo and retreat later this year to New York, where Komuro recently began work at the Manhattan law firm Lowenstein Sandler and is awaiting his results on the New York bar exam.
Princess Mako, who holds a master’s degree in art museum and gallery studies from the University of Leicester in Britain and is pursuing a doctoral degree at the International Christian University in Tokyo, has not announced her plans, although there has been speculation that she could find work in New York’s art world.