Tokyo Deco

A telegram arrived in Tokyo bearing grim news. Princes Yasuhiko Asaka and Naruhisa of Kitashirakawa, in Europe on military study, had been involved in a car crash near Paris. Prince Naruhisa did not survive; Prince Asaka sustained serious injuries. The incident, a rare instance of foreign calamity involving imperial family members, attracted significant media attention in Japan.

Much of the coverage focused on Princess Nobuko Asaka, the eighth daughter of Emperor Meiji and the wife of Prince Asaka. Within weeks of the accident, she was preparing to travel to France to support her husband as he recovered. Newspapers followed her departure and journey with close interest. It was 1923, and it was rare for a female royal to undertake a private, unscripted mission—not in service of court ritual or diplomacy, but by her own will.

Nobuko joined Yasuhiko, and the Asakas convalesced in Paris until 1925. Official accounts described the princess as a nurse and wife, yet archival fragments hint at a parallel narrative over those two years. A surviving collection of approximately 3,000 receipts, meticulously preserved in monthly volumes by palace aides, suggests that she developed a taste for Parisian consumer culture, spending generously on fashion, luxury goods, and decorative furnishings. 

It must have been, in all fairness, a compelling time to be in Paris. An aesthetic movement that had begun shaping the city’s cafés, salons, and shopfronts during the 1910s was nearing its crest. Designers and artists favoured clean, structured forms: triangles, circles, zigzags, sunbursts, and stepped profiles. The materials were sleek and reflective, featuring glass, polished wood, metal, and marble. In place of the ornate flourishes of earlier eras came an updated visual language calibrated to a faster-moving world.

Between April and November 1925, the French government staged an exposition in Paris, showcasing the emerging decorative aesthetic known at the time as Le Style 1925. The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes gathered architecture, furniture, fashion, jewellery, and industrial design. The movement would, some 40 years later, be called Art Deco, a name derived retrospectively from Arts Décoratifs. It swept across Europe, and Princess Asaka was among those it captivated.