Word: gakushuin
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Michiko was sent to Tokyo's Sacred Heart School, where the names of the girls read like a roll call of Japan's wealthiest families, instead of to the Gakushuin (Peers' School), which is reserved mainly for the descendants of the blue-blooded kazoku families. Sacred Heart was a congenial place, long on over-politeness. Comments a Sacred Heart graduate: "The aim was to shape us all into spotless and expensive pieces of jewelry, and Michiko got the same treatment as the rest." Though the school was Roman Catholic, Michiko remained a Buddhist...
Turning 25, Japan's slender, donnish Prince Akihito downed green tea and bean cakes at a sedate trio of parties (one with his kin, another with Fiancee Michiko Shoda, a third with 60 old classmates at Gakushuin University), tentatively accepted a birthday gift designed to cement the bonds between the budget-conscious imperial family and a local construction firm: an offer to build the foundations and outer shell (cost: $150,000) of Akihito's new, 45-room palace for a kowtowing $27.78. Apparently more concerned with imperial honor than with imperial bargains, however, Tokyo's noisy newspapers...
False Addresses. While the Household Board worked away at its list, Japan's major newspapers set up "special sections" of 30 to 170 staffmen to pry out the favorites. The papers knew that all the eligible girls would be past or present students at the Gakushuin, the Tokyo peers' school. Armed with pocket cameras, reporters followed girls to school, trailed them when they went home at night. One paper smuggled a woman reporter into the school disguised as a student. Another tried to get a list of all girls enrolled-something that is by tradition kept secret...
...girl was 19, and a princess-Aishinkakura Eisei, niece of Henry Pu Yi, the Japanese puppet "Emperor of Manchukuo [Manchuria]," who is now a prisoner of the Chinese Reds. The boy: spectacled Takemichi Okubo, 20, the son of a railroad executive. Both were students at Gakushuin University in Tokyo...
Other Japanese took the example more literally: by week's end, at least seven more young couples (including two classmates from Gakushuin) had already attempted or succeeded in suicide pacts...