Imperial Couple and Commoners to Celebrate their Wedding Anniversary Together

According to their concept of an imperial family that “lives with the people, sharing their joys and sorrows”, Empress Akihito and Empress Michiko are going to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary in April together with a hundred Japanese commoner couples who mark their golden wedding anniversary this year.

There is certainly good reason for the imperial couple to celebrate this day as it marks their success in making the very romantic love dream, that they had both shared before their marriage and that had, at the time, moved the whole nation, become reality in hard everyday life. Michiko’s mother-in-law, the Empress Nagako, a formidable figure of the old aristocracy, looked down upon the commoner princess, treating her with haughty contempt. Michiko, the first commoner to ever marry into the imperial family, suffered a nervous breakdown after a whispering campaign in the press in 1963, and, again, in 1993. In 2007, she confessed that even after so many years had passed she found it still “difficult to be confident” in her decisions and that it had been “a great challenge to get through each and every day” with her “sorrow and anxiety”.

On the other hand, her troubles seem to have paid off, at least as far as the happiness of her spouse is concerned. On his 70th birthday, the monarch said that in his marriage to the Empress he had found “profound happiness” and that he was “grateful that in all situations the Empress had wholeheartedly supported” him in “his position and official duties” and had been “an affectionate companion” for him “who calmed his spirit”.

Read an article on the upcoming event here at the Mainichi Daily News, and the thread at TRF here.

Filed under Japan
Tagged Emperor Akihito of Japan, Empress Michiko of Japan, Wedding Anniversary.