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Oct 26, 2021 · Princess Mako left her Tokyo residence at around 10:00 local time on Tuesday (01:00 GMT) to register her marriage, bowing several times to her parents, Crown Prince Fumihito and Crown Princess...
Nov 14, 2021 · The departure of Mako Komuro, the former Princess Mako, and Kei Komuro, both 30, was carried live by major Japanese broadcasters, showing them boarding a plane amid a flurry of camera flashes at Haneda Airport in Tokyo. Photos posted online showed the couple arriving at JFK Airport.
- ykageyama@ap.org
- Japan Reporter
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Nov 14, 2021 · Japan's former princess Mako has arrived in the US with her new "commoner" husband, Kei Komuro, after leaving the royal family. There was minimal pageantry as the college sweethearts, who wed...
- 1 min
Nov 15, 2021 · Former Japanese Princess Mako, who gave up her royal title, and her husband, commoner Kei Komuro, arrived in New York City to begin their new life there.
- 2 min
- Drew Weisholtz
- Overview
- Fraught engagement
HONG KONG — This royal wedding was an untypically understated affair.
When Princess Mako of Japan, Emperor Naruhito’s niece and the daughter of his younger brother, Crown Prince Fumihito, wed in Tokyo on Tuesday, there was no lavish ceremony, and none of the rites traditionally associated with Japanese royal weddings. In another first, she is forgoing the lump-sum payment of about $1.3 million that female royals receive after they lose their imperial status by marrying a commoner.
The reason: public disapproval of her groom, Kei Komuro, 30, a recent law graduate, because of a financial dispute involving his mother. Rather than spend taxpayer money on the wedding, which was delayed for years amid the controversy, the couple simply registered their marriage at a government office. In the coming weeks, they are expected to quietly leave Japan for a new life in the United States.
The couple’s dramatic exit from royal life has riveted the media in Japan and elsewhere, drawing comparisons to Britain’s Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle. Palace officials said this month that Mako, who turned 30 Saturday, had developed complex post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of being “unable to escape” the attacks on her, Komuro and their families.
Their story has also drawn attention to a looming succession crisis for the Japanese monarchy, which is said to be the oldest in the world. With ascension to the Chrysanthemum Throne restricted to the male bloodline, the family is running low on members — 17 in total now that Mako is married. Neither Naruhito’s daughter, Aiko, nor Mako and her sister, Kako, are in line because they are women. Now the crown’s future rests on the shoulders of Mako’s 15-year-old brother, Prince Hisahito, the only heir of his generation.
Questions about the fate of the imperial family are part of a broader debate about the role of women in Japanese society, said Ken Ruoff, director of the Center for Japanese Studies at Portland State University and the author of “Japan’s Imperial House in the Postwar Era, 1945-2019.”
This is not the first time the princess has gone her own way. Rather than study at Tokyo’s prestigious Gakushuin University, favored by the imperial family and other Japanese elite, she chose the International Christian University in Tokyo. It was there that she met Komuro in 2012, at an event for students interested in studying abroad. (Mako was an exchange student in Scotland and later earned a master’s degree in art museum and gallery studies at the University of Leicester in England.)
Their engagement was announced in September 2017, with the wedding set to take place the following year. But then reports emerged of a dispute between Komuro’s mother and her former fiance, who claimed that she owed him more than $35,000. Critics questioned whether Komuro, whose mother raised him on her own, was fit to marry a princess, and the wedding was postponed.
In August 2018, Komuro left for law school at Fordham University in New York. Last month, he returned to Japan for the first time in more than three years, quarantining for two weeks under the country’s pandemic border rules before he and Mako could reunite.
There was further uproar when he arrived in Japan sporting long hair tied in a ponytail, which critics said was inappropriate for the husband-to-be of a princess. His hairstyle was dissected on the front page of newspapers, photographed from multiple angles.
By Oct. 18, when Komuro met with Mako’s parents, Fumihito and Crown Princess Kiko, at their imperial residence, the ponytail was gone. But public questions persist about the financial dispute, even after Komuro released a 28-page statement in April explaining that his mother had thought the money was a gift and that he would pay to settle it himself.
Takeshi Hara, a professor at the Open University of Japan and an expert on the imperial family, said Mako’s experience echoed those of other female royals. Naruhito’s consort, Empress Masako, a Harvard graduate and a former diplomat, spent years out of public view amid mental health struggles that some attributed to the pressure to produce a male heir. (Naruhito’s and her only child, Aiko, was born in 2001.)
Nov 15, 2021 · M ako Komuro, the onetime Japanese princess who gave up her royal status to marry a commoner, arrived in the United States on Sunday with her new husband Kei Komuro, to begin their new life.
Nov 14, 2021 · Japan's former princess Mako has arrived to her new home in New York, leaving behind the nation that criticised her marriage to a commoner.
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