Japan's Crown Prince Blasts Media for 'Fabricated' Coverage of Daughter's Royal Exit

Crown Prince Akishino stood before cameras on his 56th birthday and did something Japanese royals rarely do: he attacked the press. The target was the media's coverage of his daughter's marriage—coverage he said was filled with lies, cruelty, and fabrications that had wounded his family.

Princess Mako, 30, had married Kei Komuro, 30, a lawyer now based in the United States, by submitting paperwork at a local office in October 2021. The act itself was ordinary bureaucracy. But the path to that moment had been anything but. When the couple announced their engagement in 2017, Japan was captivated. Then came the scandal: revelations about Komuro's mother and her financial troubles. The revelation ignited a firestorm. Media outlets pursued the story relentlessly. Internet commenters piled on. Protesters gathered against the wedding. For three years, Mako postponed the marriage while the scrutiny intensified around her.

During those three years, she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. The crown prince, speaking at his birthday news conference, connected the dots directly: the media coverage, he suggested, had contributed to her condition.

"If you read the tabloids, there's a lot of things in there that are fabricated," Akishino said when asked about the link between press coverage and his daughter's diagnosis. He acknowledged that some media criticism deserved consideration, but he was unsparing about the rest. "As for articles on the internet, there are also lots of comments, and some of them say really terrible things. There are people who are deeply hurt by this slander."

The candor was striking for a member of Japan's imperial family, a institution bound by protocol and restraint. Akishino went further, suggesting the Imperial Household Agency—the bureaucracy that manages the royal family's public life—had not done enough to push back against false reporting. The agency did correct some misinformation on its website, he noted, but the response was insufficient. "If you are going to argue against an article, you have to set proper standards and then protest when those are exceeded," he said. He called for the agency to work with the palace to establish clearer benchmarks for when and how to challenge negative coverage.

Mako's exit from royal life was itself a consequence of Japanese law. When she married a commoner, she automatically lost her royal status and left the country to start a new life in New York with her husband. Some royal observers suggested the entire crisis might have been managed differently—that the Imperial Household Agency could have learned from how other royal families overseas handled similar situations, with more strategic communication and less exposure to tabloid fury.

But the damage was done. A woman who had grown up in the imperial household, bound by its traditions and expectations, had been diagnosed with a stress disorder tied to public scrutiny she could not escape. Her father's birthday statement was, in its way, a reckoning: a senior member of Japan's most protected institution naming the cost of a media environment that had spun beyond anyone's control.