Empress Michiko (美智子; born Michiko Shōda [正田 美智子 Shōda Michiko], 20 October 1934) is a member of the Imperial House of Japan who has been the empress emerita of Japan since 1 May 2019. She was the empress of Japan as the wife of Akihito, the 125th emperor of Japan reigning from 7 January 1989 to 30 April 2019.

Michiko married Crown Prince Akihito and became Crown Princess of Japan in 1959. She was the first commoner to marry into the Japanese imperial family. She has three children with her husband: Naruhito, Fumihito, and Sayako. Her elder son, Naruhito, is the current emperor. As crown princess and later as empress consort, she has become the most visible and widely travelled imperial consort in Japanese history. Upon Akihito's abdication, Michiko received the new title of Jōkōgō (上皇后), or Empress Emerita.

Michiko Shōda was born on 20 October 1934 at the University of Tokyo Hospital in Bunkyō, Tokyo, the second of four children born to Hidesaburō Shōda (正田英三郎, Shōda Hidesaburō; 1903–1999), president and later honorary chairman of Nisshin Flour Milling Company, and his wife, Fumiko Soejima (副島 富美子, Soejima Fumiko; 1909–1988). Raised in Tokyo and in a cultured family, she grew up receiving a careful education, both traditional and European, learning to speak English and to play piano and being initiated into the arts such as painting, cooking and kōdō. She has an older brother Iwao, a younger brother Osamu, and a younger sister Emiko. She is the niece of several academics, including Kenjirō Shōda, a mathematician who was the president of the University of Osaka from 1954 until 1960.

Shōda attended Futaba Elementary School in Kōjimachi, a neighbourhood in Chiyoda, Tokyo, but was required to leave in her fourth-grade year because of the American bombings during World War II. She was then successively educated in the prefectures of Kanagawa (in the town of Katase, now part of the city of Fujisawa), Gunma (in Tatebayashi, the home town of the Shōda family), and Nagano (in the town of Karuizawa, where Shōda had a second resort home). She returned to Tokyo in 1946 and completed her elementary education in Futaba and then attended the Sacred Heart School for Junior High School and High School in Minato, Tokyo. She graduated from high school in 1953.^{[citation needed]}

In 1957, Shōda graduated summa cum laude from the Faculty of Literature at the University of the Sacred Heart (a Catholic university in Tokyo) with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature.

Since she came from a particularly wealthy family, her parents were very selective about her suitors. There had been several contenders for her hand in marriage in the 1950s. Biographers of the writer Yukio Mishima, including Henry Scott Stokes, report that Mishima had considered marrying Michiko Shōda, and that he was introduced to her for that purpose sometime in the 1950s.

In August 1957, she met then-Crown Prince Akihito on a tennis court at Karuizawa near Nagano. The Imperial Household Council formally approved the engagement of the Crown Prince to Michiko Shōda on 27 November 1958. At that time, the media presented their encounter as a real "fairy tale", or the "romance of the tennis court". The engagement ceremony took place on 14 January 1959.

The future Crown Princess was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, but she was still a commoner. During the 1950s, the media and most persons familiar with the Japanese monarchy had assumed that the powerful Imperial Household Agency would select a bride for the Crown Prince from the daughters of the former court nobility, or from one of the former branches of the Imperial Family. Some traditionalists opposed the engagement, as Shōda came from a Catholic family, and although she was never baptized, she was educated at Catholic institutions and seemed to share the faith of her parents. It was also widely rumoured that Empress Kōjun had opposed the engagement. After the death of Empress Kōjun in 2000, Reuters announced that she had been one of the strongest opponents of the marriage and that, in the 1960s, she had driven her daughter-in-law to depression by persistently accusing her of not being suitable for her son. Death threats alerted the authorities to ensure the security of the Shōda family. Yukio Mishima, known for his traditionalist position, said at the time: "The imperial system becomes 'tabloidesque' in its move toward democratization. It's all wrong—the idea (of the Imperial Family) losing its dignity by connecting with the people."