International Marriage (国際結婚/kokusai kekkon)

For those who like weddings, one of the attractions of an “international marriage” is the chance to have two ceremonies rather than one. Y. and I were married in my parents’ garden in New Zealand in 1984. There was a beautiful calligraphic message from her 80 year old father for the ceremony
At that time, I hadn’t met anyone from Y’s family. We had met in Europe and come to New Zealand after spending a year together in Turin where she was studying classical singing. After the wedding, Y went back to Japan for a month before starting rehearsals in a production of Rigoletto.

Her father and brother came to New Zealand at the end of 1984. After a couple of days of seeing the sights of Auckland, S, Y’s brother, said to me that his father was a lot happier about our marriage now that he had seen what New Zealand was like. He had been worried that I did not have any money, but he could see that in New Zealand you could be happy without much money.

We moved to Japan in April 1986. After arriving in Tokyo, I went out for a meal with an old friend from university, M. He took me out to a restaurant run by a kamikaze pilot.
It was miles out in the suburbs. We were the only non-Japanese clients. No-one took any notice of us and M said that was a measure of how normal the presence of Westerners had become. He said there would have been a lot of fuss, twelve years before when he had first arrived in Tokyo.
M: “You realize that now Y’s here, you’ll never get her to move away again. Japanese women are like that. However happy and glad to be in other countries they are, once they get back, settled in their home environment, they never want to move again.”
I laughed. Martin had spent only for a few minutes with Y. It seemed incredible that he should be predicting the behaviour of someone he barely knew. Years later, I thought ruefully back on that conversation. It was sixteen years before we lived in New Zealand again.
Y’s family made huge efforts to ease the difficulties as we settled into life in Kumamoto. M’s wife was also from Kumamoto but her family were adamantly opposed to the match, and refused even to meet him when they visited Kumamoto together. We have heard a number of similar stories, sometimes involving the virtual kidnapping of a Japanese spouse and children. I would estimate, though, that such couples are a tiny minority. The difficulties that people in international marriages face arise more from the dynamics of the relationship than from the peculiar factors involved in intercultural relationships.
The extra difficulties involved in such relationships are balanced by the greater importance given to marriage in Japan compared with Western countries.

When we arrived in Kumamoto,there were two groups of women in intercultural marriages. One, called the “Foreign Wives Association” consisted of women who had married Japanese men. The other consisted of Japanese women married to foreign men. We met several families involved with the latter group within the first week or so that we were in Kumamoto, and they were to become some of our closest friends.