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 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 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.
