Covering the three-day appearance of the Japanese imperial couple brought with it some special challenges.

We'd been planning our coverage for several months, and after an early visit from the Consulate General of Japan's office and the Japanese Embassy, it became clear that there would be little news from the visit and no chance at all for interviews or contact with Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko.

That didn't mean there wouldn't be tremendous interest in the return trip from the royal couple, who were last here in 1994, and we produced an excellent four-page special section to mark their arrival. The live events, we knew, were scripted and would involve photo and video opportunities more than meaningful news stories.

"In this kind of set-piece environment we arranged — after Secret Service vetting — to put specific photographers in specific locations at specific times and let the action come to us," said Multimedia Editor Seth Jones. "Besides, once our shooters were inside the media pen — commonly required to be there two hours before the emperor arrived — we couldn't move until after the royal departure."

The only public event was the visit to Kapi'olani Park for the couple to view a shower tree that then-Crown Prince Akihito planted in 1960. The Japanese advance team spent quite a bit of time trying to find the exact tree planted 49 years ago and still weren't sure they found the exact match, but chose one they thought came closest to the pictures they had from that time.

Lead reporter Michael Tsai waited three hours for the royal couple to arrive and watched as they spent 15 minutes shaking hands before being whisked off. But he found those in the crowd excited to be part of the proceedings.

"My take on the event, and on the visit as a whole, was that it perhaps represented something more to local Americans of Japanese ancestry, whose experiences growing up in Hawai'i were unique in the history of U.S.-Japanese relations," Tsai said. "That history included the import of Japanese laborers to work the plantations, to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, to the political rise of returning AJA war heroes and beyond."

Local News Editor David Butts received an unusual request from the Japanese consulate the day before the couple arrived. The consulate had asked that we not publish the time of the emperor's arrival at Kapi'olani Park for security reasons, insisting that we disclose only that it would be held in the afternoon. It didn't seem fair to list such an ambiguous time for the mostly elderly crowd expected to arrive the next day.

"How can you hold a 'public event' without telling the public the time of the event?" Butts said. "I made the decision to publish the time, and the event went smoothly with hundreds of residents and tourists in attendance."

We provided live stream video of the Kapi'olani Park event and the wreath-laying ceremony at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl. Tsai updated all the events, including the noon luncheon at Washington Place with Gov. Linda Lingle and the 50th-anniversary dinner that night of the Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. The Associated Press covered the couple's trip to the Big Island the following day, including visits to the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel and Parker Ranch.

All in all, the coverage garnered more than 100,000 online page views, 50,000 each the first two days of the visit. Our videos topped 7,000 streams and our live stream video attracted several thousand visitors.

Not bad for a newsworthy event that produced no news.