The Prince of Wales was accorded in Tokyo one of the rarest honours that Japan has in its power to bestow: dinner with the elusive Crown Princess Masako.

The Princess has all but given up carrying out official duties, and her public appearances are limited to a handful of occasions a year. Yesterday, however, Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall had dinner with Crown Prince Naruhito; and there, standing at his side to greet them at the front door of their home, was Princess Masako. The Japanese reporters who gathered outside to observe the occasion could not remember the last time she had turned out to entertain foreign royalty.

Her absence from the public scene has generally been put down to illness — an “adjustment disorder”, as the Imperial Household Agency put it; depression as everyone else had it. A former diplomat, Masako married the Crown Prince in 1993 and struggled to conceive a child. After fertility treatment, and a miscarriage, she gave birth in 2001 to a daughter, Aiko, who as a girl is ineligible to ascend to the throne.

The problem of the succession was resolved when Naruhito’s younger brother had a son, but Masako’s public appearances have, if anything, become rarer.

Last night, however, she looked remarkably well for someone suffering from an “adjustment disorder”. Dressed in a pale pink suit, she was all smiles as she welcomed Charles and Camilla to a cosy private dinner at their temporary residence within the Akasaka Detached Palace, a modest white bungalow that fits in well with the modesty and lack of grandeur of the imperial family. As they posed for the photographers, Charles chatted and joked with her in a positively animated matter, all the more notable considering that the two of them had never met before. One can only hope that dinner was as much fun.

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