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Surprise! We’ve got one more Japanese imperial tiara to share before we switch our focus for the month to other imperial diadems. Today we’re looking at one of the sleekest sparklers in the Japanese vaults: the Pearl Sunburst Tiara.

The tiara’s deco-esque style suggests that it’s a twentieth-century creation, and its first wearer appears to have been the country’s current empress, the then-Crown Princess Michiko. She began wearing the tiara and its accompanying necklace and brooch almost immediately after her 1959 marriage to Crown Prince Akihito.

Michiko wore the tiara during the 1960 Japanese visit to the United States; the moving images in this post show her wearing the sparkler while visiting President and Mrs. Eisenhower at the White House. She also wore the tiara and matching brooch when another American head of state, President Reagan, made a state visit to Japan in the 1980s.

Casa de S.M. el Rey

When Michiko became empress, this tiara was set aside in favor of important family pieces like the Meiji and Chrysanthemum Tiaras. Its next wearer was Michiko’s daughter-in-law, Crown Princess Masako, who has embraced it as her primary tiara in recent years. Above, she wears it during the recent Spanish state visit. (More jewels from that banquet over here!)

Image licensed to The Court Jeweller; DO NOT REPRODUCE.

Masako tends to wear the Pearl Sunburst suite of jewels for all white-tie occasions now, including state visits and the annual New Year’s reception (which she regularly attends, although she does not participate in the public ceremonial portion). Above, you can see the way that the design of the tiara is echoed in both its coordinating necklace and its coordinating brooch.

This is one of my favorite pieces from the Japanese imperial vaults — unlike so many of their tiaras, which tend toward the frilly and romantic, this tiara is basically the Chrysler Building in jewelry form. It nicely echoes the innovative, technological side of Japanese culture, and I’m glad we get to see Masako wear it more and more these days.

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To wrap up our month-long celebration of the tiaras worn by the imperial ladies of Japan, we’ve got one of my personal favorites: the family’s diamond honeysuckle tiara.

Prince and Princess Chichibu at their wedding

The tiara has been in the family for at least two generations. Its first documented wearer was Setsuko Matsudaira, the English-born wife of Yasuhito, Prince Chichibu. Setsuko was the daughter of the Japanese ambassador to the United States and Great Britain, and she had major family ties to Japan’s pre-war aristocracy. When she married Yasuhito, the second son of Emperor Yoshihito, brother of Emperor Hirohito, and uncle of Emperor Akihito, in 1928, Setsuko wore the honeysuckle tiara and a coordinating diamond necklace for part of the wedding ceremonies. They represented the imperial family at numerous important occasions, including the 1937 coronation in Britain.

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The Prince and Princess Chichibu had no children, so after her death in 1995, her jewels were returned to the imperial vaults. The tiara reappeared about a decade later on her nephew’s wife, Empress Michiko. She wore the tiara in a more open style, which suggests that it has an adjustable frame.

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Michiko began favoring the honeysuckle tiara after she developed back and neck issues that made heavier tiaras painful to wear. Above, she wears the tiara during the Diamond Jubilee of King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand in June 2006.

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And above, she wears the tiara (with a slight hair malfunction) during a visit to Sweden in May 2007. Michiko has stopped wearing tiaras altogether now, unfortunately, but it’s heartening to see jewels being reused and recycled in the family. It’s becoming more and more clear to me that Japan’s Imperial Household Agency runs a de facto jewelry foundation, which clearly includes jewels that are no longer worn because of the deaths or marriages of their previous wearers. (The IHA, of course, won’t be commenting on that either way.) I’m hopeful that we’ll continue to see many of these jewels reappear on other women of the imperial family in the years to come.