Japan's Takahito Mikasa at 100: A Prince Among the Jews

Prince Takahito Mikasa, the oldest living member of the Imperial House of Japan and uncle of the current emperor of Japan, turns 100 today, Dec. 2, 2015. At the age of 20, Prince Mikasa received authorization from his older brother, Emperor Hirohito, to form a new branch of the Imperial Family, essentially emancipating him from the formal duties of the court. (The Imperial House of Japan is the oldest continuous hereditary monarchy in the world.) Since then, Prince Mikasa has immersed himself in scholarly works related to Near Eastern civilization, in the course of which he became a frequent visitor to Jewish communal events in Tokyo and reportedly learned to speak perfect Hebrew. (No celebrations are planned for his centennial, “due to concern with his age.”)

While serving as a junior cavalry officer in the Japanese army during World War II, Prince Mikasa was posted to China, where—as Masao Mori wrote in the preface to a 1991 Festschrift for the prince—he encountered (and was impressed by) the “zeal and devotion of the Christian missionaries from the West, who worked deep in the isolated regions of China,” as well as “the rigorous military discipline shown by the Communist army of China and their intense passion for the revolutionary cause. Since then, Prince Mikasa became extremely interested in the source of such devoted passions.”

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