Since Princess Aiko, the Princess Toshi, will soon be wearing her aunt’s tiara it seems like a good time to take a deep dive into the most mysterious of the Japanese tiaras.  Usually Japanese tiaras are pretty straight forward with the Imperial Household Agency releasing the maker and even the price of new parures but this tiara is an exception.  As always with posts about the JIF, I recommend following Prisma/@ImperialJPNfan on Twitter.

We start off with the tiara of Crown Princess Yi Bangja of Korea, who was born Princess Masako of Nashimoto which is a cadet branch of the Japanese Imperial Family.  The tiara was likely made by Mikimoto around the time of her wedding to Crown Prince Yi Un of Korea in 1920.  There was a lot of um…political stuff going on that I’ll let you read about on your own.  Post WWII, they were stripped of their titles, declared stateless, and exiled from Korea.  While we don’t know for sure what happened to her jewelry, it’s a pretty easy assumption that she sold it in order to support herself and her family.  In the European monarchies that were ending at the same time, the first stop to sell jewelry was usually other family members that had not lost their throne or the jeweler who had made it to be sold again.

The tiara was largely forgotten about until the then Princess Nori debuted a similar tiara for her 20th birthday ceremonies in 1990, which were postponed for a year due to the death of her grandfather, Emperor Shōwa.  Since then it’s been speculated that Sayako’s tiara is Yi Bangja’s on a new frame but nothing was ever confirmed.  I’m now leaning toward it being newly made by Mikimoto in 1989/1990 and only being modeled after Yi Bangja’s.  At the time because of the large funeral expenses for Emperor Shōwa, the tiara was paid for out of the daily expenses fund instead of the IHA budget like the other 20th birthday parures.  This led to questions about if the tiara is considered personal property or if it was returned to the IHA after Sayako’s marriage.  Now that it’s been reported that Aiko is borrowing the tiara directly from her aunt, we know that it belongs to Sayako personally and was not returned like the others. Sayako still attends state banquets sometimes but does not wear a tiara and she also didn’t wear one at her brother’s enthronement in 2019 despite the other princesses who had married out of the family wearing them.  

Then there is possibly a third tiara in the mix.  In 2005 and 2007, Mikimoto displayed this tiara first in an exhibition in Bulgaria about Mikimoto and then in Japan for one about tiaras.  The caption says that the tiara was made in 1923/1924 and belongs to the ‘Japanese Imperial Palace.’  Prisma thinks that this is a mistake because it’s very unlikely that the IHA would loan it out and that Mikimoto must have made another similar tiara which is the one being displayed.  I agree that the IHA wouldn’t allow one of their tiaras to be exhibited but now that we know that it doesn’t belong to them I think it’s a possibility that Sayako did loan out her tiara.  

I was more on the side of the tiaras being the same but with the news that Aiko will wear Sayako’s tiara some better pictures have surfaced and I can see differences between it and the other two.  I’m hoping that we get more information about the tiara now that Princess Aiko is going to be wearing it or we at least get some higher quality pictures to compare it to the exhibition photos.  It’s also been reported that Aiko does not plan on borrowing this tiara forever but it’s not clear if that means she will eventually have a new one made for her or borrow a different one from the IHA.