Today, Princess Sayako, the only so-called spinster daughter of the Emperor and "Empress'' of Japan got married, and to of all things/men a commoner. She has therefore lost all her royal titles. And in keeping with conservative Japanese custom, she gave up her job when she was got engaged.

An erstwhile Japanese 'Bridget Jones' type/writer (jaysus I only fuckin hate Bridget Jones) named Junko Sakai tagged women of Princess Sayako's ilk 'loser dogs'. And, of course, she wrote about it.

But 'Princess' Sayako is a loser dog no more. She's a 'winner dog'!

Give me a wiener dog any day of the week, extra mustard, please.



http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationw...ack=1&cset=true

A `loser dog' no longer
Japan's Princess Nori to wed commoner, lose despised spinster label

By Bruce Wallace, Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times. Naoko Nishiwaki of the Tokyo bureau contributed to this report
Published November 14, 2005

TOKYO -- She was the princess without the fairytale romance, the one in family photographs conspicuously without a partner or children. And as she reached her mid-30s, still living with her parents, those who track the comings and goings of Japan's imperial family assumed she always would be the emperor's spinster daughter.

Now, though, those royal-watchers can get out their handkerchiefs to dab tears of happiness. Princess Sayako, known officially by the single honorific Norinomiya and more commonly as Nori, is getting married at last.

On Tuesday, Norinomiya will become Mrs. Kuroda.

In a modest ceremony by royal standards before about 150 guests at a Tokyo hotel, the princess, 36, will exchange vows with Yoshiki Kuroda, 40, a bureaucrat with the Tokyo city government. Friends describe him as a shy man who has a passion for fast cars but carries no baggage from past love affairs--just the sort of person the low-key imperial family prefers.

The princess' marriage is a rare act of downward social mobility. Though the groom comes from a well-connected Tokyo family, he has no royal blood. Once Nori is married, she will officially be a commoner.

But she will be a "loser dog" no more.

The phrase--describing women who chose careers over marriage and now, still single in their 30s, face a life crisis--was coined by author Junko Sakai in her greatly successful 2004 book "Howl of the Loser Dogs." One in four Japanese women in their early 30s are unmarried, and Sakai contends they waver emotionally between relief at their independence and lament for what they might be missing.

Nori was the "last big loser dog," according to Sakai, who counts herself as one.

The princess worked as a researcher at the Yamashina Institute of Ornithology, studying 19th Century European lithographs of birds. And she had publicly defended single, working women in a society where only a few have been able to rise above the station of office help.

Nori and her groom met at college in the 1980s and got reacquainted in 2003 at a tennis party held by the princess' brother, a friend of Kuroda's.

The Japanese media do not pry too deeply into the private lives of the royals and their mates. Kuroda is reported to like cameras and sports cars. He supposedly is not good at tennis. And he will live with his widowed mother until his wedding.

Since their engagement was announced in May, Nori has been preparing for civilian life. She has thrown herself into learning to cook. And she passed her driver's test in October.

Nori also accepted a best-wishes wedding check of $1.2million from the government to maintain "a decency appropriate to her birth."

Now she appears to be settling down, poised to disappear into the anonymity of married life. In a shot that surely reverberated among the legions of loser dogs, Nori quit her job after getting engaged. She will become a stay-at-home wife.

"If I met a man who is 40 and lives with his mother, I would back off a bit," Sakai said. "But the princess lives with her parents too. I think they are just right for each other."