Royal Courtship: Marry Me, Please, Please, Please, Please -- It's Official, But Prince Had Hard Time Convincing His Bride

TOKYO - Instead of flowers, the crown prince sent emissaries, smooth-tongued persuaders from high government office acting as messengers for the imperial family. The crown prince needs a princess, they told Masako Owada all last fall and into December. Japan needs a princess.

And so today the engagement became official with the unanimous approval of the 10-member Imperial Council, and the prince and his betrothed met the media for their first news conference - seated a decorous arm's length apart.

Said Crown Prince Naruhito, 32-year-old heir to the ancient Chrysanthemum Throne: "I had a very strong and good first impression of her. She is modest but she has her own opinions and she is intelligent. And we had many topics in common and she is fun to talk with."

Said Owada: "He said that he will do his utmost to protect me for his entire life. So I felt I wanted to make him happy, if it was something I could do."

Their "courtship," however, was not nearly as smooth as the press conference. Naruhito would phone Owada-san at her family home late at night and talk of marriage, arguing that it wouldn't be all that bad, becoming the future empress of Japan wasn't the end of the world. So wouldn't Owada-san reconsider just one more time, please?

He had to telephone late because her days at the Foreign Ministry were long, hectic, full of the pressures and international intricacies upon which Owada thrived. The 29-year-old economist -

pretty, a trifle shy, but ambitious, strong-willed and possessed of a penetrating intelligence - was riding the fast lane in Japan's diplomatic corps, one of only a dozen or so women ever to rise to the elite ranks of the foreign service. It was work she loved, work she had prepared herself for all through high school in Japan and Belmont, Mass., all through Harvard, all through graduate programs at Tokyo University and at England's Oxford.

"She knew where she wanted to go in the future," recalled Jeannie Im, a former classmate at Belmont High School, which Owada attended from 1979 through 1981 while her father - now the nation's top-ranking career diplomat - served in the Japanese consulate in Boston. "She knew she wanted to become a diplomat like her father."

Three times she had turned down Naruhito's marriage proposals. Once she went so far as to submit a formal notice of refusal to the Imperial Household Agency, the secretive bureaucracy that manages every aspect of royal family life. That was last Oct. 20.

But the crown prince was persistent. He didn't try to woo her with sweet words of love, not on the telephone.

No, a modern guy, at least by the standards of Japan's imperial court, Crown Prince Naruhito aimed his pitch at Owada's career interests, not at her heart.

It wasn't poetry, it wasn't a proposal to make the heart go pitty-pat. But it was a bottom-line appeal.

Whether convinced by Naruhito's argument or simply too worn down to resist, Owada-san relented. She would marry the prince. She would chuck her job at the Foreign Ministry and commit herself to an extraordinarily circumscribed life of smiling demurely during state banquets, performing elaborate Shinto religious rites and walking a deferential two steps behind her 5-foot-4 husband, whom she must forevermore address as "Your Majesty."

A NATION GOES BERSERK

A real princess. Every girl's dream. But not Owada's dream, never Owada's dream. She thought she had written her own script for life, but now she was dancing to the tune not only of the imperial family but of the Japanese government. Japan needs a princess. You are the one.

When word broke Jan. 6 that Naruhito's quest for a bride was finally over, Japan went hog-wild.

Headlines proclaimed, "Fairy Tale Romance" and "Long-Awaited Happy News!"

Owada's parents seemed less certain that their oldest daughter was making the right choice: "I don't know whether to feel happy," Owada's mother, Yumiko, told reporters.

Crown Prince Naruhito's long pursuit of Owada made her the subject of intense media scrutiny beginning in 1987, when she first made it to the list of potential marriage candidates approved by the Imperial Household Agency. That list included some 60 names, and the prince's handlers could surely have arranged a marriage with one of those women. But Naruhito was headstrong and insisted he would pick his own Princess Right.

Owada's soaring star at the Foreign Ministry made her a role model for many young women in a society where the huge majority of university-educated working women are "office ladies" - running small errands or serving green tea while men cut the big deals.

"At first, for me, there was a feeling of exuberance when the engagement was announced - a career woman with modern ideas was going to the Imperial Palace," said the sole female journalist among more than 100 reporters in the foreign news department of one of Japan's largest newspapers. "But on reflection, I feel a little sad for Owada-san. The imperial tradition is too strong. She will not change anything. She will be changed. She will become the perfect smiling toy doll."

Masako Owada will be only the third commoner to marry into the imperial family. But, like the Empress Michiko, also of commoner stock, Owada is a child of Japan's new aristocracy of wealth, privilege and influence. Her father, Hisashi Owada, as vice minister of the Foreign Ministry, holds one of the most powerful career diplomatic bureaucratic posts in a nation where bureaucrats wield more clout, and are notably more competent and honest, than elected officials.

Her mother is the daughter of a wealthy chemical magnate. Two of her great-grandfathers were Imperial Navy admirals. She has two younger sisters, twins Reiko and Setsuko, 26, one studying in Paris, the other at a prestigious Japanese university.

Sources close to the Household Agency say that some imperial chamberlains had reservations about Owada because she had spent "too much time among foreigners," a suspicious past in the eyes of many Japanese.

She is fluent in English, conversant in French and German and possesses enough Russian to seek directions or order a meal in Moscow. She was born in Tokyo on Dec. 9, 1963, but most of her first seven years were spent in the Soviet Union and New York. The family returned to Japan in 1971. Owada was mercilessly harassed by her xenophobic third-grade classmates in public elementary school because she had lived abroad. In fourth grade, she transferred to a private school where many of the students were daughters and sons of diplomats.

HER PASSION: BASEBALL

Her passion was baseball. When the boys wouldn't let her play, she organized an all-girl team and was accused by one teacher of being "too boyish for a proper Japanese girl." Her sisters sarcastically addressed her as "dear brother."

But so what? What mattered was that she could play third base and smack that ball clear out of the schoolyard while the boys gaped and the teachers frowned. Her heroes were all baseball stars. She dreamed of joining the big leagues. The Yomiuri Giants. The Taiyo Whales. After school she would slip down to Tokyo's Tamagawa playing grounds and watch the Giants practice.

Come 1979, her father was assigned to diplomatic duties in Boston and lecturing duties at Harvard. The family lived on Juniper Road in Belmont, and Owada and her sisters were enrolled in the town's public schools. She gave up baseball for tennis and skiing. She excelled in chemistry, physics, math and German; made friends easily but mostly palled around with other Asian students; friends describe her as too "serious" to bother with dating or boys. In 1981 she graduated from Belmont High in the top 10 percent of her class.

Next: Harvard. Inspired by her father, she had decided on a career in diplomacy, majoring in economics. Her senior honors thesis was entitled "External Adjustment to Import Price Shock: Oil in Japanese Trade."

She graduated magna cum laude in 1985, returning to Japan to pursue graduate studies in economics at Tokyo University. In 1986, she passed the rigorous foreign service exam.

It was during that same year that Masako Owada met Crown Prince Naruhito. Except he wasn't the crown prince - his father held that title while the prince's grandfather, Emperor Hirohito, still occupied the throne.

Owada and Naruhito met at a concert party held for Spanish Princess Elena and exchanged a few polite words. Owada was barely aware of the prince. But the future Son of Heaven was smitten.

It is unclear whether Naruhito actually popped the question during the next year and a half. But he made his intentions clear. Tokyo buzzed with gossip that the prince had at long last found a princess. But Owada had other ideas. She wanted a career, she told friends, she wanted a life where she made her own decisions and took her own risks. The prince was a nice enough fellow, sure: softspoken, scholarly, sensitive, not bad to look at. A good hand at tennis and capable of coaxing the sweetest melodies from his beloved viola.

They shared a love of hiking Japan's volcanic slopes. They shared a love of skiiing, literature and classical music. They did not share love, alas; the love was all one-sided.

UNDER WATCHFUL EYES

Japanese princes are not permitted regular dates. So there was no nervous handholding at the movies; no quiet talk of love over French haute cuisine or even French fries. Naruhito's intense courtship of Owada was played out on the tennis courts of the Imperial Palace or during somber ceremonial dinners with the emperor and empress in attendance.

The press had a field day, naming Owada as the No. 1 candidate to become crown princess.

The crown prince, apparently seeking to impress Owada as an open-minded guy, told a journalist that imperial princesses didn't have to be submissive dimwits.

Owada was unimpressed. She broke off the relationship and accepted a Foreign Ministry posting to Britain, where she earned a master's degree in international relations at Oxford University.

Meanwhile, the Imperial Household Agency cast frantically about for a less independent-minded female willing to marry the future monarch. Naruhito was also under intense presure from his parents.

There were two problems: first, few "suitable" women - meaning attractive, well educated, of pure Japanese ancestry, with no romantic liaisons in the past and, very important, shorter than the 5-foot-4 prince - were willing to accept the tight reins clamped on an imperial princess.

"The life is confining," said one young woman approached by emissaries of the crown prince.

But the real problem was that Naruhito was obsessed with Owada.

Owada returned from England in 1990 and was quickly promoted to the Foreign Ministry's Second North American Affairs Division. For nearly two years, there was no contact with the crown prince.

Then, at the behest of the Imperial Household Agency, a man named Kensuke Yanagiya - a retired diplomat and close friend of Owada's father - arranged a secret, albeit well-chaperoned, meeting between the couple last August. The crown prince spoke his heart. Owada politely sought to switch the subject.

On Oct. 3, Owada agreed to join Naruhito on a tramp through the imperial duck hunting grounds on the Chiba Peninsula. The crown prince proposed. Owada said no.

The crown prince begged her to at least consider the possibility of marriage. Owada demurred at first, but then, a soft touch, she agreed to think about it.

A few weeks later, the Owada family formally notified the Imperial Household Agency that their daughter was not willing to marry the crown prince.

But the palace ratcheted up the pressure.

The prince would call most nights or early mornings. She was summoned to the Imperial Palace, to meet with Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko.

On Dec. 19, at another palace meeting engineered by imperial cupids, Owada finally relented.

It is an old if curious custom in Japan to mark great occasions of state by granting amnesty to tens of thousands of criminals.

So come June, when Crown Prince Naruhito and Masako Owada are finally wed, prison gates across this archipelago nation will be flung open.

The wedding will be a massive occasion of ancient ceremonies.

And then, as the last pipe trills, Masako Owada will bow gracefully and follow her new husband - two paces behind, always two paces behind - into a gilded cage from which there is no escape.