International Marriage
International Marriage
Love is Not All You Need
Makoto & Sue
“When I was in primary school, a group of Japanese university students came to visit,” says Sue, an Australian writer and president of the Association of Foreign Wives of Japanese. This first experience with Japanese people led Sue to study Japanese and ultimately decide to go to Japan on a working holiday in 1990.
After landing a first job working in a seedy yakuza-owned money laundering eikaiwa, Sue kept trying to get out and into another eikaiwa school, and after applying every day for a job, she finally received an offer.
Meanwhile, her future husband Makoto, an engineer at a steel company, was facing a choice of either traveling overseas for a homestay, or signing up for an eikaiwa membership. He chose the latter but at first he didn’t use the eikaiwa membership at all. Then, a month before his membership was due to run out, Makoto decided to use as many lessons as possible. It was during that last month and just before he was due to quit the school, that he met Sue with whom he would decide to spend his future.
Was it difficult for the couple to decide to live in Japan? “When we were married in 1997, it was a case of ‘love is all you need,’” Sue explains. “We had stars in our eyes and we didn’t need people telling us that international couples experience problems. We simply didn’t believe we were like that.” But as their relationship progressed, they came to realize that all couples experience problems, and love is certainly not all you need. “It’s love and hard work and honesty and mutual respect and all those other things that are supposed to go with love, but that are often overlooked in the initial rush of passion,” Sue explains.
“About the time our first daughter was born, we went through a very hard time, and neither of us knew whether it would work. However, we both knew that we wanted it to work, not just for our daughter’s sake but for our own sakes, so we set about to fixing our relationship.”
So, how did they go about it? After a pointless session with a white-coated psychiatrist (at a time when counseling in Japan was not the norm), the couple subsequently took charge of the situation themselves and solemnly resolved to be as honest as possible with the other about their feelings. “It was a deep dark truthful mirror time in our marriage, but I am happy to say that we came out the other side of it a much stronger couple,” Sue recalls.
Touching on challenges, Sue says the couple has had a few disagreements about child-raising. “But it has not been anything that you can say it was ‘the Japanese way’ or ‘the Australian way,’” she says. “The reason we fought was because we were both too emotionally charged to see clearly, and so we would stick to our guns and insist we were right. In fact neither of us knew what we were doing! The task of parenthood is nothing you can learn from a book! The key to that and other difficulties was again, honesty, hard work, and talking things through.”
Sue is advice to international couples is “Always remember your first intention – remember who you married and why you married them.”
