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Demure, with downcast eyes, displaying a modesty beneath which lies tempered steel, 24-year-old Michiko Shoda last week crossed the blue moat surrounding the Imperial Palace. Behind her lay the roaring, garish city of Tokyo, with huge advertising balloons adrift above the rooftops. Ahead stretched the quiet greenery of the palace grounds, where unpaid volunteers tended the gardens. As her chauffeur-driven car passed through the tall gateway, guarded by policemen with gold chrysanthemums on their collars, Michiko was carried into the secluded "world within the moat" that will be hers next month on her marriage to Crown Prince Akihito, 25. Slim, curly-haired Michiko Shoda is the first commoner in 2,600 years to marry an heir to the imperial throne.
Sun Tribesmen. For Japan's 46,780,000 women, Michiko-san's unprecedented break with ancient tradition is the most dramatic illustration of a change that has come to all of them—the direct result of the crushing defeat of Japan in the Pacific war, the unsettling occupation of the green and pleasant islands by U.S. troops, and the new constitution established by the conqueror, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, in 1946. Since then, strange rents have appeared in the densely woven fabric of Japanese society, ranging from Emperor Hirohito's public disavowal of the "false conception" of his own divinity, and the sweeping abolition of the stiff-necked nobility, to the entirely novel proposition (in famed Article 24 of the constitution) of equal marital status for women. Michiko partook of these changes in the protected society of one of Japan's newly rich families. For millions of other Japanese women it has been a wrenching experience.
Amid the ruins of burned and bombed-out cities, a new generation of young men and women groped for something to believe in. Because the Americans had won the war, everything American was accepted uncritically, from pinball machines and burlesque shows to air conditioning and free thought. Patterning themselves on a sensational, bestselling novel that dealt mainly with free love, many of the postwar generation reveled in the name of the "sun-tribe people," traded in their kimonos for blue denims, flared jackets, skintight toreador pants. In the newly coeducational colleges, pony-tailed coeds and their boy friends claimed the right to experiment with trial marriages. On mountain trails near Karuizawa and in the beach shacks on the Izu shore, schoolboys and girls were found sleeping together. To their horrified elders, the new mambo-garu (mambo girl) was little better than the new sutorippu, or stripteaser, who was rivaling the traditional geisha as a professional entertainer.
Both in bestselling novels and in real life, rebellious married women revenged their husbands' unfaithfulness by taking lovers. The lovelorn columns of the daily papers were filled with unprecedented letters from wives complaining that their husbands were "sexually inadequate." To the dismayed men of Japan it seemed that their women had swiftly shed the centuries-old virtues of chastity, submission and docility, turned overnight into Westernized harpies.