By Adam Goodheart
How to Marry a Mikado
1. Are You Eligible? During the golden age of medieval Japan, the Heian period (eighth-13th centuries A.D.), there were few hard-and-fast guidelines about who could become empress. It didn't matter much if you lacked beauty, conversational skills or social graces. Before you get your hopes up, you should know that there was one nearly inviolable rule: You had to be a member of the princely Fujiwara clan. Since the last Fujiwara committed hara-kiri in 1945, it's unlikely you'll fit the bill. But y ou do have a second chance�and a third and a fourth and an eleventh, for that matter. That's because the medieval Japanese emperors all had secondary wives or consorts�no fewer than 28 of them in the case of Emperor Saga (who ruled 809-823).
2. Winning His Heart Bronzed, blond beach bunnies leave His Imperial Highness cold. To tickle his medieval fancy, cultivate a more ... indoor appearance. Coat your face with white powder till you're pale as a ghost. Let your hair grow until it tr ails behind you on the floor. Pluck your eyebrows completely and paint them back on about an inch above their original location. Finally, dye your teeth black with a mixture of iron and powdered gallnut soaked in tea. (Don't neglect this�the heroine of The Lady Who Loved Insects, a 12th-century court novel, turned off potential suitors by flashing disgustingly white teeth, "like peeled caterpillars.") When it comes to clothes, cover up. Twelve layers of silk robes underneath your heavy outer costume should be the bare minimum. Actually, physical beauty wasn't much prized in Heian Japan�mainly because noblewomen were rarely seen in broad daylight. In fact, a man would often fall in love after merely reading a woman's beautiful calligraphy, or glimpsing the long sleeves of her pe rfectly color-coordinated robes as they trailed out the window of her enclosed carriage. To further impress your royal quarry with your artistic attainments, you must learn to compose love poetry and play the flute, lute or zither.
3. Nuts and Bolts Once your love interest has decided that you are his one and only�or one of many, as it were�the formal courtship begins. First, he will write you a poem of precisely 31 syllables, in which he will express conventionally romanti c sentiments. You will reply in kind. If your pen manship and poetry please him, he will pay you a nocturnal visit (you'll both pretend that the dalliance is a big secret, though your parents will be in the know). At dawn, he will depart, amid conventiona l exclamations of dismay, and send you a love poem�usually based on images of dewy flowers or trees�later that morning. He will repeat this twice, and on the third visit your family will leave small rice cakes for him in your room, thus signaling their approval of the match.
4.Married Bliss Imperial Heian consorts didn't exactly lead liberated lives. If you do marry the emperor, you'll end up spending almost all your time indoors in semidarkness, venturing out only in an enclosed ox carriage. You'll spend hours engag ed in a fascinating traditional pastime called tsutuzaku to nagamesasetamau �which consists of sitting and staring into space waiting for someone to visit or send you a poem.
WARNING
Admittedly, your typical Japanese autocrat was no Ward Cleaver around the house. All that inbreeding with centuries' worth of Fujiwaras made them a bit, er, temperamental at times. Emperor Yuryaku, for instance, used to amuse himself by shooting courtiers out of trees (what the courtiers were doing in trees to begin with is unclear). But if you're looking for old-fashioned family values, family values don't get much more old fashioned than that.