Asia | The sun, the moon and the ponytail

A long-delayed royal wedding reveals awkward truths about Japan

Women are still badly treated, politics is out of sync with the people and the monarchy is dwindling

Starry eyed
|TOKYO

PRINCESS MAKO and Komuro Kei were undergraduates when they first met in Tokyo back in 2012. Mako was drawn to Kei’s “smile that is like the sun”. Kei saw Mako as “the moon watching over me tranquilly”. The couple began dating and kept in touch while Mako studied abroad; in 2017, they got engaged.

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline “The sun, the moon and the ponytail”

COP-out

From the October 30th 2021 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Discover more

Tsubasa Ito teaches his son Koya how to play baseball in Nagoya City, Japan

Fathers are doing more child care in East Asia

About time, too

A Saiga antelope walks on a prairie outside Almaty, Kazakhstan

Ice Age antelopes surge back from the brink of extinction

Even better, these peers of sabre-toothed tigers can help with carbon capture


An illustration of a man in a suit (Prabowo Subianto) with four speech bubbles of barying sizes that read: "SIR!".

Indonesia’s Prabowo is desperate to impress Trump and Xi

The new president’s first foreign tour was a shambles


Is India’s education system the root of its problems?

A recent comparison with China suggests that may be so

Meet the outspoken maverick who could lead India

Nitin Gadkari, India’s highways minister, talks to The Economist

The Adani scandal takes the shine off Modi’s electoral success

The tycoon’s indictment clouds the prime minister’s prospects