Naruhito

Naruhito (born February 23, 1960, Tokyo, Japan) is the emperor of Japan from 2019. He is Japan’s 126th emperor, and, according to tradition, traces his lineage directly to Jimmu, the legendary first emperor of Japan.

At birth, Naruhito became heir presumptive to the Japanese imperial throne, being the eldest son of Akihito, then the crown prince, and his wife, Michiko, and grandson of the emperor Hirohito. His status was elevated to that of crown prince in 1989 (formally invested on February 23, 1991), following the death of his grandfather and the ascension of his father to the throne.

Naruhito was raised in the imperial palace in central Tokyo and attended Gakushuin University in the city, graduating in 1982 with a bachelor’s degree in history. He enrolled in a graduate program at Gakushuin but interrupted his studies to spend two years (1983–85) in England researching marine transportation at Merton College, Oxford. Naruhito was the first heir to the Japanese throne to study abroad, and, in addition to pursuing his schoolwork, he was exposed to such ordinary activities as doing his own laundry and using a credit card. Upon returning to Japan, he completed part of a doctoral program in Japanese history at Gakushuin in 1988. He maintained ties with the university, becoming a guest researcher in 1992 and teaching the occasional class there.

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Naruhito first met Owada Masako, his future bride, in 1986. He reportedly was quickly attracted to her, but she hesitated at engaging in a courtship. At that time Owada, a commoner, was a diplomat with the government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and she was reluctant to give up her successful career. She finally accepted the now-crown prince’s proposal in late 1992, and the two were married in June 1993 in a highly publicized ceremony that was broadcast worldwide. The couple’s one child, Princess Aiko, was born in 2001.

Naruhito had hoped that the couple would be less bound by the reclusive and traditional strictures of the Imperial Household Agency, and in their first years of marriage he and his wife were able to travel together. However, the increasing pressure for Masako to bear a male heir—especially after the birth of their daughter—and life in the imperial palace contributed to the crown princess’s developing a stress-related ailment, which was publicly announced in 2004. Masako largely stayed out of the public eye during much of that time, and Naruhito continued to travel and make public appearances by himself. There was some discussion in the Japanese government about changing the order of imperial succession to allow Aiko to become empress, but that debate was ended by the birth of a son, Prince Hisahito, to Prince Akishino (Naruhito’s younger brother) in 2006. As a result, the imperial succession would pass to Akishino’s branch of the family after Naruhito.

In August 2016 Akihito made public his desire to abdicate due to his advancing age, and the following year the Diet modified the Imperial Household Law of 1947, which had allowed for imperial succession to take place only upon the death of the emperor. Akihito formally declared his intention to abdicate in December 2017, and the Japanese government began making preparations for the first imperial abdication in some two centuries. On April 30, 2019, Akihito stepped down, and Naruhito became the emperor of Japan at midnight on May 1. That transition marked the beginning of the Reiwa period, as Naruhito’s reign would be known; the official English translation of Reiwa is “Beautiful Harmony.”