A Japanese man curious about Crown Princess Masako, the former career diplomat who has withdrawn from public life due to stress, was arrested for breaking into her parents' house, news reports said yesterday.
The princess's commoner mother, Yumiko Owada, stepped briefly out of her home in an upscale Tokyo neighborhood to talk to a neighbor on Tuesday evening and returned to find the 26-year-old man in her living room, Jiji Press said.
She called police who arrested the man, who entered through the unlocked main door.
"I wanted to see the house of Crown Princess Masako," the man told police, according to Jiji Press.
The man may be mentally impaired and was employed at a workshop for people with disabilities. Reports said he was making "incomprehensible" statements to police.
Jiji Press said police decided to release him and question him on a voluntary basis because he did not seem able to handle being in police custody.
Police declined to comment on the reports.
Masako's father, Hisashi Owada, a former top Japanese diplomat, lives mostly in the Netherlands, where he is a judge at the International Court of Justice.
Masako, 41, who spent much of her youth abroad, left her own promising diplomatic career to marry Crown Prince Naruhito in 1993.
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
A team of doctors and vets in Pakistan has developed a novel treatment for a pair of elephants with tuberculosis (TB) that involves feeding them at least 400 pills a day. The jumbo effort at the Karachi Safari Park involves administering the tablets — the same as those used to treat TB in humans — hidden inside food ranging from apples and bananas, to Pakistani sweets. The amount of medication is adjusted to account for the weight of the 4,000kg elephants. However, it has taken Madhubala and Malika several weeks to settle into the treatment after spitting out the first few doses they