The Empress of Japan's battle with social anxiety

Here's a rather sad, and remarkable, story about the Empress of Japan's apparent battle with social anxiety. It seems she developed it after being demeaned and humiliated by the courtiers in Japan, and made to feel like a commoner. She was even unable to speak for seven months, so small did she feel. She says she dreamt of having a 'cloak of invisibility' so she could escape their disapproving eyes.

Reminds one what a problem social anxiety -or TKS as it is known there - is in Japan:

Sad, tormented life of the Empress who dreams of an invisibility cloak

Empress Michiko of Japan has spoken of the “sorrow and anxiety” she experienced as the first commoner to marry into Japanese royalty, and of her fantasy of donning a magic coat of invisibility to escape the constraints of life within the Imperial Family.

Her remarks give a remarkable insight into a woman who has suffered repeated nervous breakdowns as a result of bullying criticism first from her mother-in-law, the late Empress, and later from rightwing traditionalists dismayed at the “modernising” of the world’s oldest hereditary monarchy.

Seated alongside Emperor Akihito, at a press conference before a visit to Britain later this month, the Empress spoke of the sense of inadequacy and self-doubt that has haunted her and the prayers she whispers in times of pain and stress.

“After I married I experienced difficulties in my new life every day amid many demands and expectations,” she said in a prepared answer to a question submitted by foreign journalists. “I never expressed it in terms of the word ‘pressure’. I just felt sad and sorry for not living up to people’s expectations and demands.

“I feel the same way even now. Much of the time I find it difficult to be confident in my decisions. It has been a great challenge to get through each and every day with my sorrow and anxiety.

“When I am sad and concerned about things, I don’t know how to cope. So sometimes I pray or whisper a childish magical charm. I also feel an affinity with the many other people who live wordlessly under sadness and anxiety. Perhaps this is an illusion, but I regard it as a boon, and take solace and encouragement.”

The Empress was born Michiko Shoda in 1934, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist who met the then Crown Prince Akihito over a game of tennis in a fashionable summer mountain resort. When they married in 1959, in a Shinto ceremony followed by a horse-drawn procession based upon those of the British royal family, it was a source of excited delight to many Japanese. But it dismayed rightwing traditionalists and members of the old – and now disempowered – Japanese aristocracy.

Akihito’s policy of presenting the image of an ordinary couple who danced together, played with their children and dressed fashionably, enraged those who believed in a dignified and unapproachably remote Emperor, the direct descendant of the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu Omikami. Former aristocrats, who were deprived of their lands and titles after the war, regarded her as having robbed their daughters of a place in the imperial family.

It has been reported that Michiko got on particularly badly with her mother-in-law, the Empress Nagako, a formidable figure of the old aristocracy who looked down upon the commoner princess. Powerful Shinto priests also focused their resentment of Michiko on her family’s Catholicism and on her own education at Sacred Heart Catholic school.

Akihito was tutored and mentored by a number of Christians, leading to speculation that the imperial couple may harbour crypto-Christian sympathies. Courtiers dismiss this, insisting that Michiko was never baptised and is not a believer. In her remarks this week, she did not specify what kind of prayers she utters in times of stress.

Michiko suffered a nervous breakdown after a whispering campaign in the press in 1963 and again in 1993 when she lost the power of speech for seven months. Since then she has had recurrences of shingles and two months ago suffered intestinal bleeding – all, according to courtiers, caused by stress.

Her unhappy history has been repeated, in part, by her daughter-in-law Princess Masako, who has also been treated for depression after clashing with the courtiers of the Imperial Household Agency, which regulates the lives of the Emperor’s family.

At the time of her marriage, Michiko was celebrated for her poise and beauty. Now she is a thin, strained-looking, but still elegant woman who is unable to travel freely outside the vast grounds of the Imperial Palace.

This week she recalled a Japanese folk story about a coat of invisibility. “If I wore it, the imperial police officer might say, ‘Go and enjoy yourself, but be careful’!” she said. “I would practise walking through a crowded railway station. Then I would go to Kanda-Jimbocho [an area of Tokyo famous for its bookshops], and spend much time browsing as I did in my student days.”