Full text of Princess Mako’s statement on the occasion of her wedding postponement

(The following is a translation by The Mainichi of the full text of Princess Mako’s statement regarding the postponement of her wedding to Kei Komuro released by the Imperial Household Agency.)

Up until now, the two of us have been proceeding with preparations for the various ceremonies associated with our wedding and our married life while consulting each other, our parents and other related parties. However, in that process, we have come to realize that there is not enough time to make the proper preparations for carrying out the various ceremonies and planning our life after marriage before our planned autumn wedding.

I would like to look back on the events up until now. In May last year, our engagement was reported by the news media at an unexpected time. While we were perplexed by this turn of events, because we had solidified our wish to marry, we deemed that we should not draw out the ambiguous situation and decided to announce our unofficial engagement much earlier than we first planned. I am extremely thankful for all of the well wishes we received from many people upon the announcement of our unofficial engagement. Following the announcement, we scheduled the various ceremonial rites to be carried out and made the plans public in November 2017.

However, I think many things were carried out too quickly. We should have carefully considered if the speed at which we did things was truly appropriate, but concerning the announcement of our unofficial engagement, as well as the associated matters following it, we made the choice to move forward anyway.

Currently, we would like to meet the life milestone of marriage in a more favorable fashion. Also, in order to do that, along with the two of us more deeply and concretely considering our marriage, we would like to take sufficient time to make appropriate preparations both leading up to and after our wedding as much as possible. If it had been under ordinary circumstances, I believe accomplishing this task before the unofficial announcement of our engagement would have been desirable, but that things did not go that way originated in our immaturity, and we are doing nothing but reflecting upon our actions.

Based on this flow of events, as a result of repeatedly consulting with our parents and other related parties, at this time, we have decided that our future wedding and those ceremonies associated with it will be postponed until the year after next, after a series of ceremonies that are extremely important to the Imperial Household have been concluded without delay and that we secure enough time to carry out the necessary arrangements for our wedding and related events.

In having to make sweeping changes to an already decided schedule, we have caused great trouble and a burden to fall on those who have readily cooperated with our wedding, and we are very sorry about that.

I have informed Their Majesties the Emperor and Empress of my wish to postpone the various ceremonies associated with my wedding. Their Majesties graciously respected our feelings.

We would like to consider the postponement of our wedding at this time as a good opportunity that provides us with time to plan for the start of our new life together, and we would like to spend this time until our wedding with great care.