Naruhito
Naruhito became Emperor of Japan on 1 May 2019, the 126th occupant of a throne whose traditional line is the oldest continuous hereditary monarchy in the world. Born in Tokyo in 1960 to Akihito and Michiko, he was the first Japanese heir raised by his own parents rather than by court chamberlains, a deliberate break his father made with imperial practice. He read history at Gakushuin University and then spent two years at Merton College, Oxford, studying transport on the upper Thames — the first Japanese heir to study abroad, and by his own account the freest period of his life. He wrote about it afterwards in a memoir unusual for its ordinariness, describing shopping and pub visits. He married Masako Owada, a Harvard- and Oxford-educated diplomat, in 1993 after a long courtship she initially resisted, reluctant to give up her career. The pressure on her to produce a male heir was intense and public; their only child, Aiko, was born in 2001, and Masako withdrew from official duties for years with a stress-related illness. In 2004 Naruhito publicly accused the Imperial Household Agency of denying his wife her personality, an almost unheard-of criticism from within the palace. He acceded after his father Akihito abdicated in 2019, the first Japanese abdication in two centuries, which required a one-off law because the Imperial House Act made no provision for it. His era name is Reiwa. The role is purely symbolic under the postwar constitution, which defines the emperor as the symbol of the state with no powers of government. He has made water security and disaster resilience his public themes, and the succession remains unresolved because women cannot inherit.
- Lived: 1960 CE – ?
- Nationality: Japanese
- Roles: Emperor of Japan (2019-present)
