Buck stops hair in Prince William’s samurai dress-up
The Duke of Cambridge has endured many small indignities during his tour of Japan, but the samurai baldness wig was where he drew the line.
Prince William was at the studios of NHK, Japan’s public television station, where for an hour he gamely made a fool of himself for the pleasure of his hosts and the hovering media.
There was the NHK mascot, a fanged, walking, human-sized television set with whom the prince bantered. There was the samurai costume in which he resembled a character from a lost Monty Python sketch.
But confronted with the wig, designed to reproduce the shaved scalp of a samurai, the prince – who needs no help in that department – declined.
‘‘If I put this on, my brother would never let me forget it,’’ he said. ‘‘I seriously can’t.’’
It was left to British ambassador, Tim Hitchens, a man so cerebral he writes
Men daubed in colours sing religious songs as they celebrate Lathmar Holi at Nandgaon, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. poetry in Japanese, to take the fall.
It is a hard balance to strike for a prince on tour – between good humour and dignity, tomfoolery and standoffishness – and over the past few days William has not always got it right.
His trip to the Fukushima region, stricken by the 2011 nuclear meltdown, was seen by many Japanese as a ploy by Shinzo Abe, the nation’s prime minister, to put a positive spin on that disaster.
The meal of Fukushima delicacies with which Abe entertained William was reminiscent of when then agriculture minister John Gummer fed his daughter a beefburger for the cameras to assuage fears about mad cow disease.
But as the samurai wig moment demonstrated, William has his limits, and an instinct for avoiding complete humiliation.
Seated in an Aston Martin, an event promoting British ‘‘innovation’’, he was asked by a photographer to lean sexily
Pretty in pink:
out of the window, ‘‘James Bond-style’’. Conscious the comparison might not be flattering, he politely declined.
But the issue of the royal scalp kept arising. At the innovation exhibition, he was seated with a group of Japanese schoolchildren who had coloured in pictures of the prince in colourful robes.
As instructed, William scanned one of them into a smartphone, and the image popped up on a large wall screen, animated in three dimensions – a luridly clad, swaggering cartoon prince. ‘‘Who’s that good-looking guy?’’ he asked.
The next time a drawing was scanned, the image on the screen shifted to a view from above, and zoomed in on the top of the cartoon prince’s head. To his evident pleasure, it was thatched with luxuriantly thick fair hair.
‘‘What’s happened here?’’ he asked the children with ironic puzzlement. Two older ones laughed a bit too hard.
Pope Francis kisses a baby, during a special audience with members of the confederation of Italian co-operatives, in Paul VI hall at the Vatican.