Palace life puts strain on Japan's princess

The Japanese crown princess, Masako, has been made ill by efforts to crush her personality, her husband prince Naruhito suggested yesterday in an unusually outspoken attack on the straitjacket culture of the imperial household.

Explaining why his wife will not join him on a trip to Europe this month, the heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne said the pressures to conceive a son and adjust to the cloistered palace lifestyle had been too much to bear.

"For the past 10 years, she has tried very hard to adapt herself to the imperial family," Naruhito told a news conference. "In my eyes, she appears totally exhausted from it."

(snip)

Yesterday, he went a step further by admitting the conformist pressures of the imperial court had a negative impact on his wife, an Oxford-educated multilingual diplomat who was obliged after marriage to become a demure housewife walking several steps behind her husband.

"It is true that there were moves to negate Masako's career and her personality, which was influenced by that career," Naruhito said.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/japan/story/0,7369,1213734,00.html

This is Princess Diana redux!

:-(

The palace drove her mother-in-law to a nervous breakdown in the early 1960s. I guess the lesson to be learned here is: don't marry into royalty.

It's still just as baffling to me now as it was then, that she would sacrifice so much of the freedom and mobility that she had known in her life up to that point, all for a stuffy, forgotten existence inside of what amounts to little more than a ridiculously over-glorified prison. Royal or not, it now appears to have been a dreadfully ill-informed decision on her part, and a shame.

His speaking out to frankly about the suffocating atmosphere of this particular monarchy will hopefully bring about change. I guess it is still difficult for me to understand why these people don't just go ahead and live the way they see fit instead of making themselves miserable trying to conform to 1000 year old antiquated customs. Other monarchies have done it and survive. And the comparison to Diana isn't appropriate, I don't believe. She certainly had much more freedom than Masako has, though her marriage was in trouble almost from the beginning. It didn't prevent her from doing the charity work she loved. It would seem this princess was expected to do nothing but stay in her gilded cage and produce male heirs. Very sad, and her husband, as the future emperor, should do more to relieve the pressure that is on his wife.

This kind of story has been circulating for years now.

Princess Masako's unhappy. Unfortunately, so are millions of regular Japanese. Maybe this kind of story is just designed to convince millions of housewives that even royalty can lead arduous lives.

Whatever. As someone who had served in the Japanese diplomatic corps, Masako-san knew what she was signing up for when she agreed to marry the prince. And for what it's worth, serving in the diplomatic corps doesn't exactly give one a lot of leeway to live a fun, uninhibited life.