Out of Royalty and Into Marriage

She was the princess without the fairy tale romance, the one in family photographs conspicuously without a partner or children. And as she reached her mid-30s, still living with her parents, those who track the comings and goings of Japan’s imperial family assumed she would always be the emperor’s spinster daughter.

Now, though, those royal-watchers can get out their handkerchiefs to dab tears of happiness. Princess Sayako, known officially by the single honorific Norinomiya, is getting married at last.

On Tuesday, Norinomiya will become Mrs. Kuroda.

In a ceremony modest by royal standards before about 150 guests at a Tokyo hotel, the princess, 36, will exchange vows with Yoshiki Kuroda, 40, a bureaucrat with the Tokyo metropolitan government. Friends describe him as a quiet man who has a passion for fast cars but carries no baggage from past love affairs -- just the sort of character the low-key imperial family and their deeply conservative minders in the Imperial Household Agency prefer.

The princess’ marriage is a rare act of downward social mobility. Though the groom comes from a well-connected Tokyo family, he has no royal blood. Once the princess is married, she will officially be a commoner.

But she will be a “loser dog” no more.

The phrase -- describing women who choose careers over marriage and then, still single in their 30s, face a life crisis -- was coined by author Junko Sakai in the massively successful 2004 book “Howl of the Loser Dogs.” One in four Japanese women in their early 30s are unmarried, and Sakai says they waver emotionally between relief at their independence and lament for what they might be missing.

The princess was the “last big loser dog,” says Sakai, who counts herself among the sorority.

Sayako worked as a researcher at the Yamashina Institute of Ornithology, studying 19th century European lithographs of birds. And she had publicly defended single, working women in a society in which only a small proportion has been able to rise above the station of office help and the ascent of women in the workplace has been grounded by 15 years of economic stagnation.

Instead of regarding single, 30-something working women as trailblazers, many women in their 20s pity the so-called loser dogs. Those who have snared husbands are now labeled “winner dogs,” many content to coast through life on their husbands’ paychecks.

The princess and her groom met during college in the 1980s and were reacquainted in 2003 at a tennis party held by the princess’ brother, a friend of Kuroda’s.

The Japanese media do not pry too deeply into the private lives of the royals and their mates. Kuroda is reported to like cameras and sports cars. He is supposedly not very good at tennis. And he will live with his widowed mother until his wedding day.

“He is even-tempered and earnest,” Yasuaki Kitajima, a fellow car hobbyist, told the weekly Shukan Bunshun. “He never changes no matter how much he drinks. He is a knowledgeable man and sometimes shows deep humor, which makes us grin.”

Since their engagement was announced in May, the princess has been preparing for civilian life. She is learning to cook -- curries and stew, the gossip magazines say. And she passed her driver’s test in October, having spent the summer tooling around the Imperial Palace grounds or practicing on Tokyo streets protected by a phalanx of imperial and Tokyo police cars.

Sayako also accepted a best-wishes wedding check of $1.2 million from the government in order to maintain “a decency appropriate to her birth.”

The wedding is a breath of happy news for the imperial family. Controversy still swirls around its treatment of Crown Princess Masako, a commoner who married into royalty. She has been diagnosed with depression, which her husband, Crown Prince Naruhito, has blamed on the restrictions imposed on the couple by the Imperial Household Agency.

The strains have included pressure on the couple to produce a male heir. With no sign of a brother for 3-year-old Princess Aiko, government panels are preparing to recommend abandoning the tradition of allowing only a male to ascend the throne. The emperor’s cousin has publicly assailed that idea.

Now Sayako appears to be settling down, poised to disappear into the anonymity of married life.

In a shot that surely reverberated among the legions of loser dogs, she quit her job after getting engaged. She will become a stay-at-home wife.

“If I met a man who is 40 and lives with his mother, I would back off a bit,” Sakai said.

“But the princess lives with her parents, too. I think they are just right for each other.”

Naoko Nishiwaki of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.