They Had to Wait 3 Years for the Light to Turn Green

While walking down a street one day in June, 1986, Prince Aya, second son of Japan’s Emperor Akihito, asked Kiko Kawashima to marry him. “I proposed to her when we were waiting for a stoplight to change. I had walked her home after a meeting in the evening,” Aya told a Tokyo news conference after he received permission to wed a commoner. The Imperial Council formalized the engagement of Aya, 23 and second in line to the Chrysanthemum Throne, to Kawashima, also 23 and a student at Tokyo’s Gakushuin University. It is the second time a member of the imperial family has won permission to wed a woman of non-aristocratic background. The marriage of Aya’s father to Empress Michiko in 1959 was the first. Aya will soon resume his studies in zoology at Britain’s Oxford University.

--In other royal news, Buckingham Palace announced that Britain’s Duchess of York, wife of Prince Andrew, is expecting their second child in March. “It is great news,” said the red-haired duchess popularly known as Fergie. A son would be fifth in line to the throne, ahead of Princess Beatrice, born in August, 1988. A girl would follow her sister in the line of succession. The 29-year-old duchess, the former Sarah Ferguson, has said she and Andrew wanted a large family although she found it difficult to combine motherhood with royal duties. She told reporters she hoped the baby, who will be Queen Elizabeth’s sixth grandchild, would be “happy, healthy . . . and a friend to Beatrice.” A spokesman for the family said that although the duchess is in excellent health, she has dropped out of a cross-country motor race set for this weekend. Prince Andrew departs this month on a yearlong stint at sea as a frigate flight commander.

--Alexander M. Haig Jr. called “totally untrue” a report that he would reveal in a book that he was Deep Throat, the anonymous source of Washington Post articles about Watergate written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. “My efforts then and now have been to preserve the presidency, not to tear it down,” said Haig, who was White House chief of staff during Richard M. Nixon’s last months in office. The New York Daily News quoted unnamed sources as saying Haig would identify himself as Deep Throat in memoirs to be published in 1992 by Warner Books.