JAPAN: 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 would always 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.
Today 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 metropolitan 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 character the low-key imperial family and their deeply conservative minders in the Imperial Household Agency prefer.
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 the massively 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. 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 small percentage have been able to rise above the station of office help. And those who have snared husbands and coast through life in material splendour on their husbands' paycheques are now labelled "winner dogs".
Nori and her groom first met at university in the 1980s and got reacquainted in 2003 at a tennis party hosted by the princess's brother, who is a friend of Kuroda's.
The Japanese media does not pry too deeply into the private lives of the royals and their mates. Kuroda is reported to like cameras and sports cars. He is supposedly not very good at tennis. And he will live with his widowed mother until his wedding day. "He is even-tempered and earnest," Yasuaki Kitajima, a fellow car hobbyist, told the weekly Shukan Bunshun. "He never changes no matter how much he drinks. He is a knowledgeable man and sometimes shows deep humour, which makes us grin."
Since their engagement was announced in May, Nori has been preparing for civilian life. She has thrown herself into learning to cook - curries and stew, the gossip magazines say. And she passed her driver's test in October, having spent the summer driving around the Imperial Palace grounds or practising on Tokyo streets protected by a phalanx of police cars.
Nori also accepted a best wishes wedding cheque of $1.2 million from the government in order to maintain "a decency appropriate to her birth".
Now Nori 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.