Kujo Sadako was born in 1884 in Tokyo; her father was the nobleman Kujo Michitaka and her mother Noma Ikuko, one of his concubines. She grew up with a foster family in then-unspoiled western Tokyo, playing outside and developing the healthy tan which earned her the nickname of “The Black Princess” (upon her later engagement, photographs of her at this age were suppressed). Upon returning to her father’s family, she attended the Peeresses’ School, where she stood out among her meek, retiring classmates for her energy and willfulness. Among her teachers there were Shimoda Utako, Ishii Fudeko, and Tsuda Umeko.

In 1899, she was unexpectedly selected as a candidate for Crown Princess, in place of Fushiminomiya Sachiko, who had been considered the perfect option (not least by the current Empress Haruko) until her health problems came to light; Sadako’s robust health as well as her noble background made her a promising option. She was engaged to Crown Prince Yoshihito in early 1900 and married to him that May at the age of fifteen; he was five years older. Her former teacher Shimoda Utako told the newspapers “She has no particular points in her favor, but neither are there any marks against her as Crown Princess.” Early married life was not easy, from Yoshihito’s would-be dalliance with a beautiful baroness to the strict etiquette and restrictions of life within the Imperial Palace.

In 1901 Sadako gave birth to her first child, Prince Michi (later the Showa Emperor Hirohito), making her the first empress to bear an imperial heir in a hundred and fifty years. She was to bear three more sons, two in rapid succession and the last in 1915. All four, according to custom, were fostered away from babyhood on. Sadako struggled on and off with depression, not helped by the retirement of various favorite teachers such as Shimoda and the death of her sister Kazuko, although at least by this time Empress Haruko had come around to favoring her daughter-in-law.

In 1911 her father-in-law the Meiji Emperor died and Prince Yoshihito became the Taisho Emperor, making Sadako Empress. Like her mother-in-law she occupied herself with raising silkworms, and furthered her education through a range of visiting tutors, from the educator Noguchi Yuka to various dubious spiritualists; she also put time and money into charity work, particularly for Hansen’s disease patients, and helped sponsor the nine hundred Siberian-Polish child refugees whom Japan hosted in 1920 through the Red Cross. In addition Sadako supported the Takinogawa Gakuen school for children with disabilities, founded by her former teacher Ishii Fudeko.

The Taisho Emperor had never been in good health since suffering from meningitis in early childhood, and from 1921 on he became increasingly disabled in body and mind. In addition to caring personally for her husband and trying, mostly without success, to involve herself in politics, Sadako reacted by throwing herself into religious belief; always a devout Buddhist, she also dedicated herself to Shinto study and practice with a focus on Japan as the land of the gods and of ancient tradition. She frequently clashed with her modern-minded son Crown Prince Hirohito, who became his father’s regent during his last illness, and with the placid Crown Princess Nagako; Sadako made their marriage conditional upon the Crown Prince correctly performing the yearly Niinamesai ritual, which he did after six months’ practice (given to writing waka poetry to express her feelings, she produced 44 poems while staying up all night to see that the ritual was concluded). However, she got along much better with Princess Setsuko, the wife of her second son, whom she had personally selected and with whom she shared a name character (although Setsuko’s characters were changed upon her marriage to avoid confusion).

Upon the death of the Taisho Emperor in 1926, Sadako became the Empress Dowager at the age of forty-two (it was she who was responsible for bringing his birth mother, the former concubine Yanagihara Naruko, to his bedside). According to her youngest son’s wife Princess Yuriko, she wore either black or purple for the rest of her life, and made a daily practice of reporting the latest events to her deceased husband’s altar.

During the war, Sadako insisted on remaining in Tokyo rather than evacuating for safety, continuing her Shinto practice and urging her son the Emperor to observe its traditions specific to Imperial rule (apparently when the Emperor visited her to persuade her to evacuate, he was so nervous that he vomited beforehand and spent the following day in bed). To compensate for the wartime shortages, she took the lead in planting and cultivating vegetable gardens within the Imperial Palace (“after all, I grew up on a farm!”). She died of heart disease in 1951 at the age of sixty-seven, to be given the posthumous name of Empress Teimei.

Sources
Ishii
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0007.103/--imperial-images-the-japanese-empress-teimei-in-early?rgn=main;view=fulltext (English) Interesting article focusing on photographs of the Empress