Among the women members of the extended Imperial Family in Occupied Japan, Setsuko, Princess Chichibu, stands out, even more so than Empress Nagako, and was popular with the Japanese. She knew English, was on call to meet foreign dignitaries, and was active in charitable. Her husband, Prince Chichibu, one of Hirohito’s brothers, though of poor health (tuberculosis), was second in line to the throne. In contrast to the Imperial Couple, who had seven children to look after, they had no children.

Born Matsudaira Setsuko in 1909 to a diplomatic family, she was taken back to Japan the year following her birth. Her famous father, Matsudaira Tsuneo, from a former daimyo family, steadily moved up in the diplomatic service and Foreign Office. Her mother was descended from the Nabeshima daimyo family. Growing up, Setsuko was educated at the primary level at the British concession in Tientsin, China, where her father was posted as a consul-general. She entered the Peeresses’ School in Tokyo in 1918, age nine, when her father took over as head of the European and American Bureau, Foreign Office. Her mother served Empress Nagako as a lady-in-waiting at court. Setsuko’s high school years, age fifteen to eighteen, were at the Friends School, a Quaker institution in Washington, D.C., while her father was serving as ambassador to the United States during the difficult aftermath of the anti-Japanese Immigration Act of 1924. It was small, private, and co-educational, and she had no choice but to acquire English as a second language. In fact, she was excused from the otherwise mandatory Latin lessons. She remembered the time fondly since she saw more of her father at this time than before or later.

At age eighteen, immediately after graduation in 1928, she sailed back to Japan as the fiancee of Prince Chichibu, whom she had met briefly in 1925 and again in the following year when he returned home from study in England Washington, D.C., upon news of the emperor’s impending death. Though technically a commoner, Setsuko was of high shizoku lineage and in a group of young women considered suitable as imperial brides. The Empress Dowager was determined that she marry the prince. Setsuko was adopted by her high-ranking uncle and married the prince in 1928, shortly before the coronation of her husband’s brother, Hirohito, as Japan’s new emperor. She indicates in her autobiography that she had otherwise wanted to go to a university and study science.

In Setusko’s subsequent autobiography, The Silver Drum, a rare inside story many years later of life within the imperial family, she relates her initial difficulties in mastering court etiquette, in which she was untrained, and focuses on her love and devotion to the prince who was pursuing a military career. She does not reflect, and perhaps was not allowed to, on the prince’s skirmish with Japanese style fascism/militarism in the 1930s and possible involvement in the attempted coup by young officers against the prime minister and cabinet in February 1936. She tells instead of travel to Britain in 1937 to attend the coronation of King George VI, who succeeded to the British crown in the aftermath of his brother Edward’s marriage to an American divorcee.

At war’s end, neither Chichibu nor the other brothers were highly thought of by the Occupiers or considered suitable as a replacement for Hirohito, who was urged not to abdicate. Suffering from tuberculosis since 1940, the prince lived with Setsuko in his villa at Gotemba until his death in 1953. Santha Rama Rau, the daughter of the top Indian liaison official in Japan met the princess and her mother and sister in 1947. As tutor to crown prince Akihito, American Elizabeth Gray Vining, a Quaker, also had occasion to meet her.

Shortly after the end of the Occupation and her husband’s death, Princess Chichibu moved to Tokyo. She was active in the Anti-Tuberculosis Society, the Japan Red Cross Society, the Japan-British Society, and Japan-Sweden Society. One of her most memorable meetings was with Eleanor Roosevelt in the spring of 1953. Princess Chichibu made several trips to Britain, which were well-covered by the media, and in 1969 was made an Honorary dame Cross of the Order of the British empire.