The Career and the Kimono

A few months ago, Masako Owada took the elevator to her office on the seventh floor of Japan's Foreign Ministry in Tokyo for the last time. Heading down the dark hallway, she stepped into the cluttered office of the economics section of the North American division and slipped past her battered gray-steel desk. Her telephone directories and a row of books about the semiconductor market were lined up neatly on a shelf above her desk. The phone still bore inky fingermarks -- reminders of the time not so long ago when she routinely put in 15-hour days managing some of Japan's nastier trade disputes with the United States.

On this day, though, the jangling phones went unanswered and her former colleagues were on their feet, waiting for her. They bowed low as she came into view, wearing the power outfit favored by the ministry's female diplomats: a trim blue suit, a bright scarf tucked neatly around her neck. The trade negotiator they once flippantly called "Owa" was now Masako-sama -- an honorific befitting the future Empress of Japan.

Never before in the 1,600-year history of the Japanese monarchy has anyone with a day job married into the royal family. Outspoken, witty in a quiet way, far more worldly and better educated (she is a graduate of Harvard and attended Oxford) than most Japanese men, her career clearly on the rise in the Foreign Ministry, Masako Owada was no ordinary working woman. She was a member of an elite group of Japanese women, path makers occupying jobs that only 10 years ago women were virtually barred from holding.

So when it was announced in January that Crown Prince Naruhito -- the 33-year-old elder son of Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko and grandson of Hirohito -- had finally convinced the 29-year-old Owada to marry him, the question many Japanese immediately asked was: Why did she do it? Why would she choose to come under the thumb of the hidebound imperial household, where she will be expected to keep her eyes downcast and her attitude deferential?

No place was this question debated more thoroughly than in Owada's old haunts in the Foreign Ministry. But as her former colleagues prepared to present her with their farewell gift, the question was momentarily put aside. The gift was a fine calligraphic rendering of the character wa, meaning harmony. In Japanese culture, wa is the way to peace and serenity. To some in the crowded room, the gift seemed both a wish and a warning: that Masako Owada would find a way to change Japan without colliding with the most traditional, the most rigid segment of Japanese society, the palace guard.

On a far less grand scale, this is the tightrope that tens of thousands of Japanese women of Owada's generation have been walking for the past decade. With none of the drama that has accompanied women's movements in America or Europe, they have been making inroads in a country where men, and many women, view career-oriented women with skepticism and sometimes outright suspicion. They have become doctors and lawyers in increasing numbers, and taking midlevel management jobs in the one environment that has been most hostile to their presence -- the big companies of Japan Incorporated.