Empress Masako

At 60 years old, Empress Masako has this physical status:

After graduation Masako moved back to Japan, where for six months (April to October 1986) she studied law at the University of Tokyo to prepare for the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs's entrance examination. Out of 800 applicants only 28 passed; Masako was one of them, along with two other women.

"She was assigned, first, to the oddly named Second International Organizations Division which deals with Japan's relations with international agencies, such as the OECD, a club of 30 rich countries committed to free trade and development. Her assignments included dealing with the OECD's environmental affairs committee ... by all accounts she acquitted herself well—her command of spoken languages, so rare in Japan, was a huge advantage—and was popular with most of her workmates." During her free time, Masako attended cooking classes to, according to interviews with her instructor, "be able to cook proper Japanese dishes when she was entertaining [foreigners]."

Two years later, in 1988, Masako was chosen by the Ministry to be sponsored for two years' postgraduate study overseas with full pay, just as her father Hisashi had been years earlier. Masako "desperately wanted to go back to Harvard to do her master's". According to her former Harvard adviser Oliver Oldman, she "tried to re-enroll to work towards ... a Juris Doctor. However, Harvard's bureaucrats would not give her credit for her study-time at the University of Tokyo." Therefore, Masako enrolled in her second choice, studying International Relations under Sir Adam Roberts at Balliol College, Oxford. However, for unclear reasons Masako did not finish her thesis and instead returned to Japan in 1990.

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