Royal Uproar Bad News for Japan’s Prince

Any well-bred young woman toying with the idea of marriage to Japan’s Crown Prince Naruhito must have had second thoughts after the lurid London press allegations about Princess Diana’s marital problems.

“It Ain’t Easy Being a Princess,” read the cautionary headline in one Tokyo weekly magazine. The message: Joining the royals can drive nice girls to tears and despair.

The palace drama starring the reportedly feuding Prince and Princess of Wales has found a ready echo in the Japanese press, muzzled for months from speculating on whom, and when, bachelor Naruhito will wed.

Excerpts from “Diana: Her True Story,” the book by Andrew Morton that triggered the frenzy in the British press, have been liberally quoted in Japanese weeklies feasting on scandal about dazzling Princess Di.

One magazine trumpeted its acquisition of “exclusive advance publishing rights” for a translation of “Diana: A Princess and Her Troubled Marriage,” a biography by Nicholas Davies.

A Tokyo television network sent a film crew to London to join in the media scrutiny of the 11-year marriage of Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, and 31-year-old Diana.

Clearly the British royal scandal has proved a godsend to Tokyo’s newsmongers, frustrated by a media blackout--imposed at the request of the Imperial Palace--on 32-year-old Naruhito’s quest for a bride.

The short, shy-looking Naruhito, heir to an imperial line that tradition traces back to the sun goddess Amaterasu, said in his 20s that he wished to marry by the time he was 30.

It never happened, despite headlines linking him at one time or another with the daughters of various prominent Japanese families and even, briefly, with American actress Brooke Shields.

When Naruhito’s 30th birthday came and went in 1990, the tabloid press began to examine what had gone wrong.

One plausible theory was that no eligible modern-minded young woman could face the idea of entering the fussy, tradition-bound Imperial Court and saying goodby to a normal life of relative privacy.

Always in the background is the sad case of Naruhito’s mother, Empress Michiko, the daughter of a wealthy miller who underwent a striking physical transformation after she married then-Crown Prince Akihito in 1959.

The nation’s heart sank as the charming commoner princess grew gaunt and somber as rumors swirled of her subjugation by the old empress, Nagako, behind the impenetrable wall of the moated Imperial Palace. There were hints of a nervous breakdown.

Such gossip is anathema to the fiercely protective courtiers of the Imperial Household Agency. They sought total secrecy for their highly delicate search for Naruhito’s bride.

The agency prevailed upon Japan’s main media organizations earlier this year to set ground rules on how the prince’s search for a princess should be covered.

The resulting blackout, virtually an imperial gag order, has been in force for months with no sign of an engagement.

Unfortunately for the palace, all the pent-up media energy seems to have boiled over into sensationalist coverage of the British royal court turmoil, which could in turn further complicate the Tokyo matchmaking.

One weekly published a long list of young women royals who, like Diana, appear to have found it difficult to lead a life ruled by stuffy protocol in the unblinking gaze of the scandal-oriented tabloids.

Japanese women’s magazines, meanwhile, concocted features mixing their obvious sympathy for Diana and her allegedly troubled, lonely life with the results of reader polls on what nice girls should look for in a perfect marriage--things such as intimacy, mutual respect and family bonding.

The message is clear: Steer clear of the aristocracy.

Naruhito himself is well aware of this.

“I think anyone would have second thoughts,” he said earlier this year. “The palace is a difficult place to enter because in some ways it is still backward.”