The Falling Curtain

As the slender young woman in the ivory-colored dress stepped out of the limousine in front of the Tokyo palace of Crown Prince Akihito, it was all that the police could do to restrain the 8,000 cheering teen-agers from mobbing her. "Suteki! Suteki!" the teen-agers cried --"Glorious! Glorious! Our future Empress!'' Michiko Shoda, 24, daughter of a flour magnate, and the first commoner in at least 15 centuries to be betrothed to the heir to the Japanese throne, had come with her parents to pay a ceremonial call on the young prince. After the usual formalities, the prince's tutor delicately suggested that the older generation withdraw to the garden. Gaily the prince seized Michiko's hand and led her on an inspection tour of the palace. For the first time since they met on a tennis court 15 months ago, Crown Prince Akihito and his fiancee found themselves alone.

Only the day before, the ten members of the Imperial Council, all solemn and tense except for a smiling Prime Minister Kishi, had met to go through the motions of approving a bride who would be qualified to be Empress of Japan some day. As if to convince the council that the long (seven years) and expensive (nearly $1,000,000) search for a princess had not been a waste, the Director of the Imperial Household declared that while the Crown Prince's wishes had been considered, it was the Imperial Council who had in the end found "Miss Shoda the most suitable." So as not to lose face, everybody solemnly accepted this version and formally approved the marriage. An hour later, Michiko and her parents were at the Imperial Palace to pay their respects to the Emperor and Empress, and Akihito, dressed now in ancient court costume, went off to the three Shinto shrines on the palace grounds to tell his ancestors about his betrothal. Michiko herself went on TV to tell the Japanese people what she liked about the prince. "A clean, sincere man," she said, "whom I know I can trust."

"I Do Not Believe." Michiko was not always so sure about her feelings for Akihito ("I do love him," she told a friend. "His sincerity won me over.") Perhaps she was aware of the grueling education in protocol and punctilio that lies ahead. Always the sensible girl, who once earned the nickname "Antelope" because of her bouncy, athletic ways, she was valedictorian of her class and president of the students' committee at Tokyo's University of the Sacred Heart (though she is not a Roman Catholic). She wrote her thesis on The Forsyte Saga, insisted on typing every one of the 100 pages herself rather than spend any of her meager ($2.78 a month) allowance on a typist. As recently as last summer, she wrote her mother: "I do not believe commoners should be united with the imperial family."

But the prince, hampered though he was by not being allowed to see Michiko alone, turned out to be an insistent suitor. As the Imperial Household combed through the dossiers of hundreds of candidates, he ardently phoned and wrote the girl he had already selected. Finally Akihito got his way.

Silk & Sake. Just as a "lucky day" was chosen for the engagement, so another "lucky day" will have to be chosen for the marriage. In the meantime, the Emperor and Empress will exchange gifts with the Shodas--a sea bream, the fish of good fortune, as well as sake and silk. Akihito will present his future wife with a jeweled sword to protect her chastity, and the Emperor will bestow on her the Grand Cordon of the Imperial Order of the Sacred Crown, the highest decoration given a woman in Japan. Finally, the young couple will exchange love poems, written on pink paper and enclosed in boxes made of willow.

But for all the ritual, Akihito's betrothal was hailed in Japan as the imperial family's greatest leap toward democracy since Hirohito threw off the myth of imperial divinity in 1946. Not only was the engagement "a triumph of youth and love." said Foreign Minister Aiichiro Fujiyama, it had "shattered court conventions." "The prince," said the Japan Times, "has set a seal on the democratization of Japan." For Akihito. who has long rebelled against living behind a "chrysanthemum curtain," there will be other seals to set. When he was only three, he was, as tradition decreed, taken away from his parents and sent to live in a palace of his own. In the two-story palace now abuilding for him and his princess, at a cost of $650,000, there will be bedrooms for the children he expects to have. At least three.

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