Love is Stronger than Faith

John SLEDGE & ISHIKAWA Kyoko

Kyoko and John (US) first met in September 1999 at the University of Illinois in the USA in the final year of the MBA program they were both attending. John says, “My first reaction to her was, ‘Wow, that is the tallest Japanese girl I have ever seen!’ ” One day in the fall John overheard Kyoko say she wanted to go skiing. John already had plans to do just that during winter break with a friend, so he invited Kyoko to join them. Kyoko said she would invite some of her classmates, but they all cancelled at the last minute leaving only Kyoko, John, and his friend to hit the slopes for 5 days. “At the end of the trip, I realized Kyoko was a unique and amazing girl,” John recalls.

After returning to their University for the spring term, their interest in each other quickly grew, however little did they know at the time that the road ahead of them was not going to be an easy one. Over the winter break, the pair had been attending job interviews and had both accepted ‘dream jobs’ — his in the US and hers in Tokyo. “We realized it would be difficult for any relationship to last under these circumstances,” John says, “but Kyoko convinced me to continue.”

So, what did the pair do? Kyoko invited John to make his first visit to Japan after their graduation in May of 2000. John accepted and Kyoko and her parents took him all over Japan that summer. “At the end of the summer when it was time for me to return to the US, neither one of us wanted our relationship to end,” John says. “We decided to keep our relationship going as best we could.” Their daily e-mails, weekly phone calls and trips to see each other every 3~4 months stretched their patience and their bank balances for more than two years. “After that time, we really wanted to be together but still could find no way to do so,” John says.

However, fate sometimes works in mysterious ways. Around the spring of 2002, the Tech bubble burst in the US and the company John was working for began bleeding money until one day the CFO announced that everyone in his division would be made redundant. However, not everything was going wrong. Soon afterwards, Kyoko came to visit John and he proposed to her. Kyoko’s response was, “John, I have been ready for a long time to be your wife.” The couple held wedding ceremonies in both countries and after John moved to Japan in January 2003 and studied Japanese for a year, he found a position with a securities trading company in early 2004.

For John, the biggest challenges he has faced have mainly been coping with the transition from American life in Colorado, to building his life in Tokyo. “I was raised in a very rural area in the US, so Tokyo living can be challenging at times,” he says, “in particular having to get used to the typical issues of crowds, small housing, high prices, long commutes and long working hours.”

For Kyoko, the biggest challenge she has faced was her decision to become Christian. Kyoko was born and raised in Japan in a typical Japanese family that was influenced by the Buddhist and Shinto religions. “I was afraid that I may betray my family if I changed religions,” Kyoko says, “however, I became determined to accept Jesus because I saw that John was a strong witness and evidence of Christianity.”