Here’s a rare and exclusive look at the private Caroline Kennedy, our new ambassador in Tokyo.

She is playfully taking a “selfie” of herself with Vice President Joe Biden and Irish Prime Minister Enda Kennedy when they met up in a Tokyo hotel in recent days.

The three Irish and Irish American dignitaries were hamming it up in a typically playful Irish way.

Caroline has never looked happier, say close friends, than she does in her new job as America’s representative to a great nation.

Famously reserved and shy, the appointment to the land of the chrysanthemum throne has liberated and energized her.

She grew up the daughter of possibly the two most famous people in recent American history, JFK and Jackie Kennedy.

Her reaction was to withdraw, be shy, wonderful in private but often awkward in public, never more so than when she made that abortive run for New York senate.

She lost her brother and several other family members in tragic circumstances, which increased her aversion to the media even more.

“She doesn't have her mother's thing of courting the camera and disdaining it; she's just shy and private,” said a close friend.

But taking the job of Ambassador has liberated her from the American scrutiny. Friends say the pictures of her getting out of the carriage for her official presentation of credentials revealed a new and strikingly happy woman.

And in a land where taking pictures of anything and everything is a national sport she has already shown she’s game for that.

The selfie with Biden and Kenny shows the new Caroline, happy and content in her new position.

As far as her friends are concerned, it couldn’t happen to a better person.