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In October 1986 she met her fate at a reception given for Spain's Princess Elena in Tokyo. It was a typical ceremonial trade-off: young women were invited to amuse the pretty Spanish royal and also to be reviewed by the bachelor crown prince. Naruhito liked Masako-san at once. Shigemitsu Dando, a former Supreme Court justice and longtime adviser to the imperial household, confided to his diary that "she was very graceful but also cheery and ! outgoing." Four meetings were arranged, and the imperial watchdogs began a routine background check over three generations.
There were problems with Owada. Her grandfather was linked to Chisso, the firm responsible for major chemical dumping first detected in the '50s that led to the death or crippling of thousands. He was not connected to the company at the time but later, as the firm's president, was involved with the settlement of lawsuits. Second, Owada did not seem that interested in an imperial future. Furthermore, she may have had a boyfriend or two. And then there was the press, which caught on to Naruhito's interest almost at once. The Owadas were besieged. Masako-san was tough with reporters, often demanding their business cards, and even slamming her hand against photographers' lenses. As celebrities before her have learned, retaliatory action doesn't do much good. By the time she flew off to Oxford in 1988 for two years' study assigned by the Foreign Ministry, a reporter had rented a room across the street from her house for snooping purposes, and 50 of his colleagues were clamoring around her at the airport.
As it happened, her future husband had just finished two years at the same university. For Naruhito, who speaks English almost as fluently, Oxford was a liberation. Though he did have minimal security protection, he was for the first time in his young life on his own. A wine fancier, he could walk into a liquor store and pick his own bottles. He could go to the laundry and make a fool of himself by letting suds flood the floor. When the winter turned harsh, he could tape his own windows or suffer the consequences. He made good use of his experience, writing a thesis on the Thames as a commercial highway during the Middle Ages. Later, he was to write a book on his English experience, illustrated with his own photographs that caught the charm of a very different land.
The gossip goes that on his return he pursued at least two other eligible young women. But it was always really Owada. The prince wanted no other, and the imperial household had persuaded itself that her grandfather was blameless in the Chisso disaster and that any dalliances Masako-san may have had were unimportant. She, meanwhile, was laboring at the ministry, scrupulous about providing up-to-date information and taking pains with the phrasing of documents so as not to nettle other parties to a negotiation.