Princess Mikasa — the oldest member of the Japanese royal family — passed away on Friday at the age of 101. The emperor's great aunt had been hospitalised in Tokyo since March after suffering a stroke and pneumonia. The Japanese royal was born as Yuriko Takagi to an aristocratic family in 1923.
She married the younger brother of wartime emperor Hirohito at the age of 18 and became styled as ‘Her Imperial Highness The Princess Mikasa’. She had five children with Prince Takahito — two girls and three boys. According to Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun, she gave birth to her first child in 1944 during World War II.
The she was forced to stay in a shelter with her baby daughter after their house burned down in an air raid. Hirohito -- who served as Japan's commander-in-chief during its brutal march across Asia in the 1930s and 40s -- surrendered in an August 1945 speech, after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Princess Mikasa's husband Prince Mikasa, who died in 2016 at 100, was in favour of the decision to end the war.
But young officers who disagreed would come regularly to the shelter to try and change his mind. Princess Mikasa recalled that the atmosphere was "very frightening" with "heated arguments and tension, as if bullets were about to fly", the Asahi Shimbun said. Having lost their home, the decades that followed were far from luxurious for the princess, who took on domestic duties as the family struggled financially.
"When I was ra.