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Masako was a key figure in organizing a team for softball, an activity the school disapproved of as dangerous and unfeminine. The game clearly caught her imagination in those early teenage years. She played third base and was cleanup hitter. She was a tough player: in the batter's box, she stared down the pitcher. When the ragtag group played the teachers, she liked to catch their line drives right in front of her face. Recalls an admiring classmate: "She could do things ordinary girls couldn't -- like hit fungoes."
After winning a tournament and receiving a large trophy, the victors held a party. On such an occasion many teenagers might get sentimental, but her friends say they have never seen Masako cry. Says classmate Sachiko Takamine: "I'm positive she still has her boyish side. She has become an incredible woman with femininity and masculine strength. She now has the appropriate aura for a princess. She has the wisdom to adapt herself to any environment."
Shortly after that triumph, Masako's life changed. Her father accepted an invitation to teach at the Harvard Law School, and the family packed up and moved to the Boston suburb of Belmont. Perhaps because she was challenged by a language that she knew but was not expert at, she became serious, studious and focused. The infielder and the would-be vet gradually receded. Her adviser, Lillian Katz, says Masako "never needed moral support. She knew her own worth, and she knew that she was her parents' pride and joy." Belmont has reason to remember its former high-schooler. Since the engagement, Japanese tourists arrive by the busload to ogle her alma mater and the Owada house.
When the elder Owada's two-year teaching stint was over, his daughter remained in the U.S. and went to Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in economics. Her thesis adviser was Jeffrey Sachs, who went on to advise countries around the world on how to switch from controlled to free-market economies. "She had a certain extra dimension, a real analytical mind," he observes. "Her thesis concerned Japan's trade performance after each shock in oil prices during the '70s and '80s, and how the country paid for fuel by increasing exports. She devised computer work that was sophisticated, especially for an undergraduate."
The Owadas wanted their daughters -- Masako has younger twin sisters -- to "have some solid base to stick to," says an immediate-family member. "The parents wanted them to avoid becoming rootless people. It was simple things, like customs and observing traditional Japanese festivals."
Masako evidently agreed. In 1986 she entered the law department of the University of Tokyo to study for the Foreign Ministry entrance exam. The stocky teenager was becoming sleek and turning heads in a division that is only about 5% female. She passed the stiff exam after just one year -- most people require two years of study, and only 5.3% succeeded in 1986, Owada's year. Even now, Tokyo professionals can be heard to say, "She did what a man can't do," and then hurriedly correct themselves.