The Imperial Household Agency announced his death. Japanese news reports said he had been hospitalized since May, initially because of pneumonia.
Prince Takahito Mikasa was born in Tokyo on Dec. 2, 1915. He was the uncle of the current emperor, Akihito, and fifth in line to the throne.
“Ever since he was a child he has made it a habit to confound the imperial household,” Time magazine said of the prince in 1955.
He was the first member of the royal family to get a driver’s license and was an outspoken advocate of birth control, though he conceded after his fourth child was born, “It is not easy to practice what you preach.”
He became an authority on ancient Asia and was the first Japanese royal to become a professor, teaching history at Tokyo Women’s Christian College. (He was paid $6.40 a month.)
During World War II, he served in the Japanese Army in China under a pseudonym. But he was later critical of the army’s treatment of the Chinese during the Japanese occupation.
In a 1994 interview with the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, he recalled, “I was strongly shocked when an officer told me that the best way to train new soldiers is to use a living prisoner of war as the target of bayonet practice.”
After the war, he opposed his country’s rearmament.
“Let us not believe foreigners who try to tell us there can be any war of righteousness,” he said in 1953, adding, “I make this pacifist confession as a soldier who went to war believing it to be a war for righteousness.”
His brother Hirohito reigned for more than 60 years, until his death in 1989 at 87.
On Prince Mikasa’s 100th birthday in December, The Japan Times reported, he issued a statement thanking his wife of more than 70 years, Yoriko, for her support and saying, “Nothing will change just because I turn 100 years old.” — AP
