In a quiet café, the Duchess of Edinburgh listened intently to the ordeal of Ukrainian refugees who were forced to flee their homes after Russia’s invasion.
The duchess has not secretly boarded another train to the war-torn country as she did last year, nor is she volunteering again at a charity which helps Ukrainian refugees near her home, Bagshot Park in Surrey.
Instead, she is thousands of miles away in Japan — a sure sign that wherever one of Britain’s hardest-working royals goes she takes her desire to help the Ukrainian people with her.
Saturday’s engagement in the centre of Tokyo took place during the second day of Sophie’s four-day trip to Japan alongside her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, who joined his wife in the capital after a three-day tour of Papua New Guinea.
The duchess looks at a robot dog with Yumi Takeyama, aged 6, during a visit to Miraikan, the National Museum of Emerging Science in Tokyo
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The Duke of Edinburgh was met by a guard of honour at Port Moresby airport on his arrival in Papua New Guinea
GOVERNMENT OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The couple are growing in prominence in the royal family after the departure of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to America and the Duke of York being stripped of his royal duties. Sophie, 60, has long been considered one of the monarchy’s safest pairs of hands.
She visited the Shibuya Himawari centre, a non-profit organisation that helps Ukrainians who have sought refuge in Japan. The community is small — as of January 1,900 Ukrainian refugees were living in Japan, compared with 255,000 in the UK.
After Russia’s invasion in February 2022, the Japanese government opened its borders to Ukrainian refugees and offered them financial support, but only small numbers came, partly because of the vast distance and cultural differences. About 2,700 did come but many have since returned home.
The centre has been open for three years and has 1,500 Ukrainian refugees on its books, enabling them integrate by teaching them the language, offering them counselling and helping them find work. The charity, which welcomed Olena Zelenska, the first lady of Ukraine, in August, largely helps women and children, some of whom spent the morning painting traditional Japanese calligraphy in the charity’s community centre.
Before having a go at calligraphy, Sophie, who is left-handed, met Daniel Zagorodniy, 16, from Kyiv, who lives in Japan on his own. “Goodness me, that’s a lot for a 16-year-old to cope with,” she said, before expressing sympathy with the worsening situation in Ukraine and telling him his parents, who are still at home, “must be so proud of you”. Her son, James, Earl of Wessex, is 17.
The duchess tried her hand at calligraphy
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Zagorodniy, who spoke to the duchess in English, said he wanted to go to university to study international relations, prompting Sophie to reveal that her daughter, Lady Louise Windsor, 21, is also studying the subject alongside her English degree at St Andrews University, where she is in her fourth and final year.
Downstairs in the charity’s social enterprise café, Kokorogoto, where 15 Ukrainians are employed to learn hospitality skills, Sophie spoke to Iryna Hrybachova, a lawyer who fled in May 2022 with her sister and daughter. “We received a lot of support from the Japanese but we had to start a new life and we had to find new jobs,” she said. She now helps her fellow Ukrainians with their legal claims to remain in Japan.
One of the charity’s founders, Iryna Makovska, 47, said Sophie’s trip to the centre was an honour. “For us, it’s very important because the first year we were in the newspapers every day but now the mass media is not talking about [the] Ukraine situation, so for us it is a great honour that a big VIP is coming to support Ukraine.”
The visit is a reminder of Sophie’s dedication to raising awareness of those displaced and traumatised by war. In recent years she has visited Kosovo, Iraq, Colombia, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, South Sudan and Ukraine, with much of her work focused on addressing sexual violence in conflict zones. She did 257 official engagements at home and abroad last year.
In April last year the duchess visited a memorial to the victims of the Russian occupation of Bucha, Ukraine
ANATOLI STEPANOV/REUTERS
Last year, she travelled to Ukraine and delivered President Zelensky a letter of support from King Charles by hand. After her trip, which Sophie insisted on carrying out despite reluctance from the government, she wrote in The Sunday Times: “Since returning to the UK, many people have said how brave or courageous I was for going. I am neither. The brave people are those who have endured extreme violence and survived.”
On Friday, Sophie and Edward, 61, paid tribute to the late Queen — who visited Japan once, for a six-day tour in 1975 — by planting an English oak sapling cultivated from a seed of the tree she planted during her state visit. A commemorative plaque next to the tree celebrates it as “a symbol of the ever-growing friendship between Japan and the United Kingdom”.
The couple went on to enjoy an afternoon of sumo wrestling in a packed stadium. The sport is more than 1,500 years old, but today’s wrestlers are Japan’s answer to Premier League footballers, with throngs of excited children chanting their favourite wrestler’s name and wearing hair clips with their faces on.
The duke and duchess then swapped their ringside seats for an imperial audience with Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako. The Japanese royals have strong ties to Britain, and both studied at Oxford University. The emperor read history at Merton College while the empress studied international relations at Balliol College.
• The Times View on Naruhito’s visit: Ever-Closer Allies
On Friday, the duke and duchess carried out various engagements separately. As his wife greeted Ukrainian refugees, Edward met Team GB coaching staff and athletes who are in Tokyo for the World Athletics Championships where, on Friday, Amy Hunt, 23, won a silver medal in the women’s 200m. After her win she proclaimed that it was possible to be both “an academic badass and a track goddess”, having graduated from Cambridge University with a 2.1 in English literature in 2023.
The duke then travelled onto Seibi Home, which cares for 94 children who are unable to live with their families. Japan’s welfare system places children in institutional care rather than with foster families. As part of its Mirai no Mori (“future forest”) initiative, the home helps vulnerable children build confidence through outdoor camps and nature programmes.
On the other side of the city, the duchess visited the National Museum of Emerging Science, where she interacted with robots and tested an AI suitcase that doubles as a navigational tool for those with visual impairments.
The duchess with a Keparan robot during a visit to the National Museum of Emerging Science in Tokyo
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The cause is close to the couple’s heart as their daughter was born with esotropia, a condition where one or both eyes turn inward. Louise underwent a successful operation in 2013 and now has perfect eyesight, her mother has said.
After eight engagements between them, Sophie and Edward spent a night away from the cameras on Saturday evening before travelling on to Osaka by plane on Saturday morning, where their tour continues until Tuesday.
AloJapan.com