The Girl from Outside

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Demure, with downcast eyes, displaying a modesty beneath which lies tempered steel, 24-year-old Michiko Shoda last week crossed the blue moat surrounding the Imperial Palace. Behind her lay the roaring, garish city of Tokyo, with huge advertising balloons adrift above the rooftops. Ahead stretched the quiet greenery of the palace grounds, where unpaid volunteers tended the gardens. As her chauffeur-driven car passed through the tall gateway, guarded by policemen with gold chrysanthemums on their collars, Michiko was carried into the secluded "world within the moat" that will be hers next month on her marriage to Crown Prince Akihito, 25. Slim, curly-haired Michiko Shoda is the first commoner in 2,600 years to marry an heir to the imperial throne.

Sun Tribesmen. For Japan's 46,780,000 women, Michiko-san's unprecedented break with ancient tradition is the most dramatic illustration of a change that has come to all of them--the direct result of the crushing defeat of Japan in the Pacific war, the unsettling occupation of the green and pleasant islands by U.S. troops, and the new constitution established by the conqueror, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, in 1946. Since then, strange rents have appeared in the densely woven fabric of Japanese society, ranging from Emperor Hirohito's public disavowal of the "false conception" of his own divinity, and the sweeping abolition of the stiff-necked nobility, to the entirely novel proposition (in famed Article 24 of the constitution) of equal marital status for women. Michiko partook of these changes in the protected society of one of Japan's newly rich families. For millions of other Japanese women it has been a wrenching experience.

Amid the ruins of burned and bombed-out cities, a new generation of young men and women groped for something to believe in. Because the Americans had won the war, everything American was accepted uncritically, from pinball machines and burlesque shows to air conditioning and free thought. Patterning themselves on a sensational, bestselling novel that dealt mainly with free love, many of the postwar generation reveled in the name of the "sun-tribe people," traded in their kimonos for blue denims, flared jackets, skintight toreador pants. In the newly coeducational colleges, pony-tailed coeds and their boy friends claimed the right to experiment with trial marriages. On mountain trails near Karuizawa and in the beach shacks on the Izu shore, schoolboys and girls were found sleeping together. To their horrified elders, the new mambo-garu (mambo girl) was little better than the new sutorippu, or stripteaser, who was rivaling the traditional geisha as a professional entertainer.

Both in bestselling novels and in real life, rebellious married women revenged their husbands' unfaithfulness by taking lovers. The lovelorn columns of the daily papers were filled with unprecedented letters from wives complaining that their husbands were "sexually inadequate." To the dismayed men of Japan it seemed that their women had swiftly shed the centuries-old virtues of chastity, submission and docility, turned overnight into Westernized harpies.

Police Guard. Prim, convent-bred Michiko Shoda had no part in any such shenanigans. But, just as in the eyes of many Japanese women she is the most successful symbol of their emancipation, so has she to some extent become a symbol of the hated modern world to Japanese traditionalists--mostly men over 30. Some of the kazoku (noble) families make no secret of their chagrin that their own blue-blooded daughters were passed over as a bride for the crown prince. A court lady angrily describes Michiko Shoda as "that little upstart." Recently, as a guest at an exclusive dinner party, Michiko's millionaire industrialist father sat in embarrassed silence while kazoku guests addressed each other loudly over his head, complaining at the way things were going, and blaming all their troubles on the nouveaux riches and the "postwar millionaires." Ultranationalists threatened to "wipe out" the entire Shoda family. The police, aware of how often in Japan assassination has been a means of political or emotional protest, keep the Shoda house under constant guard.

The diehard traditionalists strongly believe that every marriage should be arranged. To them, a wedding is not a loving union between individuals but a solemn bond between families. To pacify this powerful group, the Director of the Imperial Household Board appeared before the Japanese Diet and solemnly insisted that the royal marriage was prearranged and "not a tennis-court romance."

Even those imperial officials most anxious to break with the rigid past recognize the danger of fatally damaging the institution of royalty itself. Court ladies declare that Michiko "will always be regarded as 'the girl from outside.' " Old women giggle that the Shodas come from the Kanto Plain, the proverbial home of "high winds and nagging wives." An elderly businessman tells his friends: "Enjoy the royal wedding; it is the last one you will see in Japan."

The Malady of Silliness. What is vanishing in Japan is the good old days when women lived by the precepts of the 17th century Onna-Daigaku (Great Learning for Women). A sample: "The five worst maladies that afflict the female mind are indocility, discontent, slander, jealousy and silliness. The worst of them all, the parent of the other four, is silliness." The duty of a wife was simply to produce children--sons, not daughters. For 250 years under the Tokugawa Shoguns, Japan's population was kept stable largely by female infanticide.* Of the girls permitted to live, those who became prostitutes in order to support their parents were praised for filial piety. Every woman trod the Path of the Three Obediences: to her father before marriage, to her husband when she was wed, to her son if she became a widow. "The Japanese wife needs no religion," ran the saying. "Her husband is her sole heaven."

The hapless wife had not only to keep house, bear children and submit to her mother-in-law's tyranny, but also try desperately to hold her husband against the competition of "pillow" geishas, concubines and casual prostitutes. The tea ceremony, the fan, the kimono, flower arranging, the obi, the intricate hairdo, the beautifully mannered deference--all became subtle weapons of allurement. The kimono was cunningly cut to reveal the nape of the neck, a feature that to Japanese men seems more erotic than bosom or thigh.

At its best, this training in submission and subtlety produced the kind of woman who has moved men of the West as well as of the East to rhapsody. Carried away, a writer in the Encyclopaedia Britannica described her: "She is entirely unselfish; exquisitely modest without being anything of a prude; abounding in intelligence which is never obscured by egotism; patient in the hour of suffering; strong in time of affliction; a faithful wife; a loving mother; a good daughter; and capable, as history shows, of heroism rivaling that of the stronger sex."

But history also shows that Japanese women strongly resented being turned into mindless dolls who could achieve nothing except by yielding gracefully, as the bamboo bends before the gale. There have been few Joan of Arcs or Molly Pitchers in the annals of Japan. Even the brilliant Lady Murasaki, who wrote the famed Tale of Genji early in the 11th century, felt it necessary to conceal her accomplishments. The only heroic-sized woman known to the Japanese is the legendary Empress Jingo, who supposedly conquered Korea in A.D. 200--but Koreans indignantly assert that absence of records proves she never existed. Until 1923, Japanese law declared that "women, children and mental defectives shall not be associated with political activities."

The Quake. It was no accident that this repressive law was modified in the year of the great Tokyo earthquake. A current Japanese joke says it took an earthquake to start the emancipation of women, and the atom bomb to set it going again. The 1923 temblor destroyed 60% of the city, killed 143,000 people and ruined many of Tokyo's upper and middle classes. In its aftermath, the educated daughters of these families (education for women dates from the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century) discarded their kimonos, bobbed their hair, donned Western dress and became sales clerks, elevator operators, bus conductors, teachers, journalists, lawyers, even company presidents. Bluestocking females campaigned furiously for women's suffrage and human rights.

This emancipation lasted scarcely ten years. The rising militarists, in destroying so much else, clamped down on women, and reasserted male superiority. But once Japan had plunged into war with the U.S., it was these same militarists who insisted that woman's place was in the factory. Even geisha girls were rounded up for munitions work, and housewives organized into "patriotic" associations to sew uniforms and make bandages. When the war ended in humiliating defeat, the men were totally discredited, and the young women ripe for transformation into mambo-garu--generally to the distress of their mothers, who had already forgotten that, as "daughters of the earthquake," they too had once been all for emancipation.

Teacher! Teacher! On Oct. 20, 1934, while the militarists were firmly in control, a daughter was born to Businessman Hidesaburo Shoda and his wife Tomi. and became the newest member of a harddriving, alert family of samurai origin. Her father and grandfather operated the prosperous Nisshin Flour Milling Co.; one of her uncles would become president of Osaka University, another a professor of geology at Tokyo University, a third a professor of physics.

The baby, unusual in that she had curly red hair, became the family pet in the high-gabled, ten-room Tokyo house where the Shodas still live. She was named Michiko (Beautiful-Wisdom-Child), was always neat and obedient, slept with her arms wrapped about a toy Teddy bear. Michiko early exhibited the family drive. At elementary school she was usually the first to answer any question, raising her hand and vigorously crying: "Sensei! Sensei!" (Teacher, Teacher). At home the daily routine was calm and cultured. Michiko had tea and cakes at 3 p.m., studied, dined at 6, then joined the family again at 8, while her mother played Chopin.

The Shoda house was not damaged in the fire-bombing of Tokyo during the war, but five of the company's flour mills were gutted. Others had to close down from lack of supplies; still others were converted to make vitamin pills and airplane parts. In March 1945 the Shodas moved out of battered Tokyo and returned to their ancestral home in the village of Tatebayashi on the wide, windy Kanto Plain, one of the nation's greatest rice-producing areas. Michiko's ability to speak English and play the piano amazed the village children; her keenness in class annoyed them. They teased her, called her names and pulled her long, reddish hair. Michiko flew at them in a fury, slapped some and wrestled on the ground with others.

In her two years in the country, Michiko filled out and glowed with health. She also picked up a trace of the local bei-bei dialect (Tatebayashi people tend to attach bei to the end of every phrase--the bei means no more than a reiterated "uh" does in English). Later, when she was interviewed on television after her engagement to the crown prince, Michiko amused some viewers with her faint Tatebayashi accent.

Michiko was an eleven-year-old girl in 1946 when the Emperor publicly disclaimed his divine origin. No longer did schoolchildren have to bow low before an unveiled portrait of the God-Emperor, whose dynasty was so ancient and unique that it did not even have a last name. For the first time in 2,600 years, an Emperor of Japan went among the common people--not just to drive in state through "dead cities" where everyone was compelled to avert his face from the imperial countenance, but to visit factories and chat with workers. A shy, scholarly but retiring man, Emperor Hirohito was clearly miserable in the folksy role, could seldom think of anything better to do than jerkily raise his battered felt hat, as if trying to hang it on a peg just out of reach.

Michiko was sent to Tokyo's Sacred Heart School, where the names of the girls read like a roll call of Japan's wealthiest families, instead of to the Gakushuin (Peers' School), which is reserved mainly for the descendants of the blue-blooded kazoku families. Sacred Heart was a congenial place, long on over-politeness. Comments a Sacred Heart graduate: "The aim was to shape us all into spotless and expensive pieces of jewelry, and Michiko got the same treatment as the rest." Though the school was Roman Catholic, Michiko remained a Buddhist.

Scholastically, she was at the top of her class. A tremendous organizer, Michiko was elected president of the student governing committee and began to be called sotsu-no-nai, which roughly means "perfect," but also has a snide connotation of being a little too perfect, too ladylike, too obedient to the rules. A professor once said with a touch of asperity: "Michiko-san, your only defect is that you have none." She appeared taken aback by the remark.

She loved her summer vacations at the mountain resort of Karuizawa, where the Shoda villa lies within sight of the smoking crater of the Asama volcano. Michiko lived in tennis shorts, was on the courts nearly every day, enjoyed dropping into the little village shops for rice balls and noodles--a passion that absorbed nearly all her monthly allowance of $2.78. The reddish tinge had vanished from her hair, but she seemed ashamed of its persistent and un-Japanese curliness, and confessed that her childhood nickname had been "Temple-chau," after Shirley Temple.

The Matchmaker. The Shoda family gave thought to Michiko's future, and there is evidence that she formally met selected prospects at a miai, or a meeting arranged with a view to a possible match. One candidate is said to have been the son of a soap-company president; reportedly he backed away, declaring Michiko's personality "too cold." Michiko seems to have been drawn to a Japanese diplomat and was disappointed when he was sent to a post in Europe. He wrote her long, graceful letters dealing mostly with the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, at a time when she was reading Steinbeck and Faulkner. Asked Michiko crossly: "Does he think I am still a child?"

The Shodas could aim high for their daughter, since by 1955 the family Nisshin Flour Milling Co. was the largest in Asia, with current sales totaling $93 million a year. Michiko joked with an uncle: "If Crown Prince Akihito were only a little taller, I might fall in love with him." Michiko (5 ft. 3 1/2 in.) had several times seen the crown prince (5 ft. 5 in.), who also vacationed at Karuizawa, but had not yet met him.

The meeting took place on an August day in 1957. Michiko, then 22, had grown into a young woman who moved with fluid grace, spoke in the soft, cultured tones of a Sacred Heart graduate, had quick, attentive eyes and a slow, demure smile. She radiated a maidenly appeal rather than sexiness, and there was the fascinating impression of a number of locked doors lying behind her reserved manner.

The two met on the Karuizawa tennis courts, where few players relished the prospect of facing the crown prince, an indifferent player, and having to choose between winning or clumsily contriving to lose. When players were shy of coming forward, the prince sometimes had his omnipresent chamberlains drum up opponents. Such a summons, impossible to refuse, was given to Michiko Shoda and a twelve-year-old boy. They breezed through Akihito and his partner, 6-1. "Wonderful!" cried the prince to Michiko. "You have overwhelmed me!"

Tutoring in Love. The prince's tutor, Dr. Shinzo Koizumi, who had watched the game, told Akihito he had given a "miserable performance," but agreed that Michiko was "a really nice young lady." From that moment, there is strong evidence that the crown prince was in love. He produced his camera, took snapshots of Michiko. Later he sent her prints of the pictures and exhibited one of them as his contribution to the imperial household's annual art show. Last summer at Karuizawa they were together again. Michiko carried the prince's tennis rackets for him. When he finished a set she would bow and dry the perspiration from his face and neck with a towel.

They played together against the Shah of Iran and his partner, and won. Exulted Crown Prince Akihito: "We beat that Persia all right!" At a small house party the prince asked his ever-present chamberlain to leave the room, and while he was away, Akihito danced with Michiko. He insisted on staying until 11, and joined Michiko and the others in singing Auld Lang Syne. Says Michiko-san of the imperial family: "I feel really sorry for them. They are so confined. I wish they could get around to parties more and meet people who are not Gakushuin" (i.e., from the Peers' School).

Dr. Koizumi, the tutor, loomed importantly in the burgeoning romance. A brilliant man, with a face badly burned when he rescued some survivors trapped in a blazing building after a B-29 bombing raid, Koizumi had lost a son in the war. He is a former president of Keio University, and a political liberal; his appointment as supervisor of the prince's education eleven years ago created a stir because he, like Michiko Shoda, is a commoner. He lectures Akihito on government and economics, but feels that his primary responsibility is to train the young man to be an Emperor capable of "sharing the joy and sorrow of the people." He was very responsive to the prince's desire to choose a bride by "personality rather than heritage."

Inside the Cocoon. What sort of an individual is the crown prince? Dr. Koizumi has supplied a remarkably candid summing up: "He is by no means an exceptional young man. But he will do. He is sincere, takes his responsibilities seriously, and he is a good thinker even if the process is sometimes painful. He is the product of his upbringing. Like other members of the imperial family, he has lived a cocoonlike existence, with little knowledge of people and events in the outside world. He has too many servants but he lives simply. His great handicap is that all his life things have been spoon-fed to him, including education. He is an excellent horseman, a good swimmer, and very good at table tennis. He smokes moderately and drinks little. I think he has a good capacity for alcohol, but as he is the crown prince, it is perhaps just as well that he does not drink too much."

In his twice-weekly meetings with the prince, Dr. Koizumi often read aloud from Harold Nicolson's biography King George the Fifth, for, like many Japanese liberals, he feels that the imperial family must reign, but not govern, much in the manner of the British royal family. The prince proved especially fond of anecdotes detailing the homely, comfortable existence of Britain's rulers--such passages as "King George preferred a quiet evening at home, when he could read aloud to the Queen."

Dr. Koizumi was distantly acquainted with Michiko Shoda before she met the crown prince, and subsequent investigation, he said, "showed her to be far better than anyone." In fact, her name had been included on the first, very large list of prospective brides that had been drawn up by the imperial household, but it had been excluded--with all other commoners--from the small, final list. But there was no longer doubt where the prince's inclinations lay.

As rumors spread through the capital, Michiko Shoda suddenly left Japan, on her first trip abroad, visited Europe and the U.S., where she heard Pianist Van Cliburn play his first concert in Carnegie Hall. There were letters along the way from the prince, and, troubled, Michiko wrote her parents: "I don't believe commoners should be united with the imperial family. I doubt if such a step would have good results." To the prince she wrote: "I hope you will let me be a close friend of yours for a long, long time."

She returned to Japan last October, just after her 24th birthday. Akihito deluged her with impassioned letters, telephoned daily. On Nov. 3, on the telephone, Michiko Shoda told the crown prince that she would marry him, if he really wished it. The Director of the Imperial Household Board was dispatched to the Shoda house formally to request Michiko's hand for Akihito. The news was joyfully received by most of the press and public. Editorials took the opportunity to chide some palace officials for cloistering the imperial family, for having tended in recent years to lower a "chrysanthemum curtain" between the throne and the people. One newspaper boldly declared: "Michiko-san may be a commoner, but it is the crown prince who is getting the best of the bargain."

Dr. Koizumi met as usual with his pupil the day after the betrothal was announced. As they began their lessons, the elated crown prince unconsciously spoke up: "It is really fine!" Dr. Koizumi echoed him: "It is really fine, is it not?" And they smiled at each other.

Some Changes Made. Michiko-san makes an inspiring example of the ability of a Japanese woman to move from the ranks of the common people to the dizzying heights of the imperial throne. But it is a deceptive example. Ever since the peerage was abolished, wealthy industrialist families like the Shodas have become the new peers of Japan, and their daughters are princesses of the realm in everything but the name.

For other Japanese women the gains have been less spectacular, but in their limited horizons, more revolutionary and of greater significance. Even in the rural districts, where women still work 14 hours a day, and man is still treated as danna-sama (the master), there is change. Explains a countrywoman: "The farm wife is quite willing to work just as hard as before, but she wants to be treated like a human being." Girls are no longer sold to textile factories by their parents--now the factories try to lure them by "guaranteeing a husband before you are 30." In the richer farm areas, many households are installing modern kitchens, bathroom plumbing and washing machines that are ending centuries of drudgery.

Six million women are now wage earners, twice as many as in 1948. There are 26 women in the national legislature, 360 women seated in local assemblies, one woman mayor. In more than 30,000 clubs and P.T.A.s throughout Japan, house wives go in for cooking classes, sewing circles, charity drives. Wives can also be militant, and have often backed their husbands in strikes by bullying shopkeepers into advancing credit, badgering government officials and forming picket lines. The women of Japan are fiercely antiwar, anti-rearmament, anti-H-bomb.

In the cities, freedom has gone further. The average girl of any class is taller and stronger than was her mother at the same age. She wears earrings, permanents her hair and paints her nails, smokes, wears a wristwatch, Western dresses, nylon stockings and high heels. She may live in an apartment house that has also radically changed Japanese life. Formerly, a wife was chained to her home, not only by her duties, but by fear of fire if the wood-and-paper house was left unattended. Rice cooking used to take an hour before serving; now the housewife merely fills an electric rice cooker (cost $10) and turns a switch.

Luxuriating in her new ability to go about by herself, to movies or coffeehouses or department stores, the city woman derides the old system, thinks that Michiko Shoda is mad to want to live the stiff, formal life of the imperial family.

Carrying the Male. But there remains one enormous roadblock on the path of female emancipation: the Japanese man. Few husbands will take their wives out for an evening. Their usual excuse is that their employers, for business reasons, insist that they attend numerous geisha parties, where much of the nation's business is still transacted. In the geisha houses, the jokes and sake drinking have not changed in a thousand years. Tipsy politicians and businessmen play such children's games as "scissors, paper, rock" or the passing of lighted tapers until they go out, to determine who must drink penalty cups of sake. When not being pinched or fondled by male guests, the modern geisha sings, plays the samisen or unexpectedly breaks into a rumba, spins a Hula Hoop or blows a saxophone.

Even the men unable to afford the geisha house often will not go home to their wives, but stay downtown in all-male sake bars, lingering over a single drink, or in pachinko parlors playing pinball machines. "Why do they do this?" asks a girl indignantly. "Because they want their wives to think they are big shots. They want the world to believe they are out chasing women. An average Japanese wife is ashamed if her husband comes home at 6 or 7 at night. The neighbors will then say he must be only a humble clerk."

Japanese businessmen are slow to hire educated girls for decent positions. A girl college graduate says bitterly: "Yes, I can get a job in business, all right: serving tea to the office help." The Japanese male is proving skittish about marrying the emancipated female. He wants an old-fashioned girl just like the girl who married dear old Dad: thrifty, a good cook, plain rather than pretty, cheerful, obedient, and with "just enough spunk to make life interesting."

Despite the new freedom, the Japanese girl has a terrible time meeting a man socially; and when she does, etiquette forbids her probing his family background and prospects. Even among the most emancipated there is a gradual drift back to the miai, or formal meeting preparatory to an arranged marriage. But there is a big difference: instead of parents' having the final say, the young men and women have obtained a reasonable veto power, and, after a miai, will often see each other for several months before making a decision. Says an observer: "A lot of things are changing in Japan, but if I were asked to predict which institution will prove more durable, the go-between or the geisha, I would say the go-between."

Private Wedding. It was for this reason that the imperial family felt compelled, in face of the facts, to insist that the marriage of the crown prince and Mi-chiko-san had been arranged. Last week, as that marriage drew near, Michiko Shoda appeared to be approaching her nuptials with the supreme poise of a young woman confident of her worth. On April 10 Michiko and the crown prince, alone except for a Shinto priest, will be married in an "inner sanctuary" of the blue-moated Imperial Palace. There will be no spectators, no witnesses. The priest will wave a sacred branch above their heads to purify them. The crown prince and Michiko will each take nine tiny sips of sake, three sips at a time, exchanging cups thrice, in the ceremony called sansan-kudo (three-three-nine).

Years ago Mrs. Elizabeth Gray Vining, the American Quaker who tutored Akihito during his childhood, said to Dr. Koizumi: "She who marries the crown prince must be a girl of spirit who will not be a doormat; she must not be someone who will be easily overwhelmed." Michiko Shoda, standing straight and slim beside her devoted prince, seems precisely that girl.

* At birth, the midwife had ready a piece of wet paper; if the father approved, she would stifle the unwanted infant.

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