[...]
Mrs. Shimazu, the former Princess Suga, has been working as a consultant in the exclusive Seibu Pisa store in the Tokyo Prince Hotel here since the beginning of the month, somewhat to her parents’ surprise.
“I didn't ask my parents’ advice because our positions are so different I felt they wouldn't understand,” Mrs. Shimazu said recently in her apartment. “I did try to inform them just before actually taking the job, but the newspapers got hold of the story, and I was able to get a telephone call into the palace only on the afternoon of the day the evening papers were to carry the story.”
First One to Go to Work
[...]
She said she went to work because she loves decorative arts and wants to “learn through doing.” So three afternoons a week she sits in a corner of the store's Royal Salon, reserved for special customers, dispensing advice on fashion, furnishings and gift‐giving. She is under no obligation, she insisted, to sell merchandise, but gives undecided customers ideas.
[...]
Whatever job she took, Mrs. Shimazu said she knew there would be criticism and some attempt to capitalize on her name. These apprehensions kept her from taking the plunge sooner, although she appeared several times as a guest on radio disk jockey programs soon after her marriage in 1960.
Now her only son, Yoshihisa, is in the third grade and does not require her care during the daytime. And she was getting bored with the daily round of luncheons and exhibitions that took up many hours.
[...]
Brought Up by Governesses
“Until I reached kindergarten age, I lived with my parents,” she said. “Then I was sent to Kuretake Hall, a building within the Imperial enclosure but some distance from the Emperor's Palace, to be brought up by governesses with my sisters.
“In the Imperial family,” she ex plained, “the custom was for male children to be brought up separately, each one in his own place with his own attendants, and for female children to be brought up together, but separately from their parents.”
She found palace life extremely restrictive, but did not actively rebel. “I used to think what's the use of making a fuss, since I can't change things any way,” she said.
[...]
Like her older brothers, the Crown Prince and Prince Hitachi, she went to the Peer's College, an institution now open to all, but originally intended for the children of nobility and high Government officials. (Her older sisters, educated before and during World War II, did not go beyond the Peeresses’ High School.)
In her junior year in college, where she majored in English, an arranged marriage was suggested. She accepted, but with one condition: after a period of courtship, both she and her prospective husband — Hisanaga Shimazu, a classmate of the Crown Prince and scion of a feudal family of Imperial descent, which had ruled Kagashima, in southern Japan for centuries—be allowed to refuse marriage if they found themselves incompatible.
“In my case,” she said, “a non arranged marriage was practically impossible. But I didn't want to repeat the kind of marriage all my older sisters had had to go through—'how do you do’ in the morning and everything decided by the afternoon.”
Relationship Bloomed
The meeting took place, the two young people began dating each other, and their companionship blossomed into marriage.
[...]
Mr. Shimazu is a staff member of the Japan Export‐Import Bank. In the mid‐nineteen‐sixties, he was assigned to Washington, and Mrs. Shimazu accompanied him with their infant son to spend two years as housewife in an apartment in the American capital.
“I didn't have any difficulty adjusting to American life,” Mrs. Shimazu said. “We had been brought up wearing Western clothes, eating Western food as well as Japanese, so, I wasn't surprised or taken aback by anything I found in America.
“The adjustment came, oddly enough, after we returned to Japan. It's difficult to explain. I don't feel myself that have changed, but I have not always been able to shift back into the same old relationship with friends and acquaintances I had before going to America. They never say so to me, but I have a feeling some of them are silently reproaching me for becoming too Americanized.”
[...]
Loath to Embarrass Parents
Referring back to newspaper criticism of her new job, the former Princess said earnestly, “I realize my position and that there are things I cannot do. I have no title, but I am the Emperor's daughter. I don't want to embarrass my parents in any way.
“No one would have criticized me if I'd taken an honorary position or gone into charity work. I grant you that charity work is splendid, that some day I myself may do it, but for now I want to test my own capacities and see how far I can go.”
