Early Life and Education
Born in Tokyo, Japan, she was originally named Masako Owada (小和田雅子, Owada Masako?). She is eldest daughter of Hisashi Owada, a senior diplomat, and former President of the International Court of Justice. She has two younger sisters, twins named Setsuko and Reiko.
Masako went to live in Moscow with her parents when she was two years old, where she completed her kindergarten education. Upon returning to Japan, she attended a private girls' school in Tokyo, Denenchofu Futaba, from elementary school through her second year of senior high school. Masako and her family moved to the United States, and settled in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts called Belmont, when her father became a guest professor at Harvard University and vice ambassador to the United States. In 1981, she graduated from Belmont High School, where she was president of the National Honor Society. Masako enrolled at Radcliffe College.
Princess Masako holds an A.B. magna cum laude in Economics from Harvard College and attended but did not finish the graduate course in International Relations at Balliol College, Oxford University. Her senior thesis advisor at Harvard was Jeffrey Sachs. She also studied briefly at the University of Tokyo, where her father taught, in preparation for the entrance examinations at the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In addition to her native Japanese, she is fluent in English and French, and is said to be of conversational standard in German, Russian, and Spanish.
Read more about this topic: Crown Princess Masako
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“In the early days of the world, the Almighty said to the first of our race “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread”; and since then, if we except the light and the air of heaven, no good thing has been, or can be enjoyed by us, without having first cost labour.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse’s good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“Casting an eye on the education of children, from whence I can make a judgment of my own, I observe they are instructed in religious matters before they can reason about them, and consequently that all such instruction is nothing else but filling the tender mind of a child with prejudices.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)