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The Last War Bride in Yatsushiro
| Article
# : |
11650 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1986 |
2,352 Words |
| Author
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Larry Moffitt
Larry Moffitt, executive director of the World Media
Association, frequently travels throughout the Soviet Union,
meeting public officials and private citizens. Moffitt holds a
master's degree in journalism from the University of Texas. |
Oriental mothers-in-law have a maxim regarding the difference between marriages arranged by the couple's parents and "romance marriage."
A romance marriage, they will tell you, is like a kettle of boiling water over a fire. After the ceremony, the kettle is taken off the fire and the water begins to grow tepid, then cool, and after a time - cold. An arranged marriage is a kettle of cold water which, after the ceremony, is set over the fire and begins to heat to a rolling boil. If pressured, they will throw in however many anecdotal statistics it takes to seize the moral high around.
As convinced as Western young people are that nobody on earth can choose their mates except them, everything in cultural and literary history from Romeo and Juliet to the current divorce rate in California speak in favor of the old way. Romance marriages prevail in North America and, with scattered exceptions, in the industrialized nations of Europe. But they have held sway in those places during only the last couple hundred years or so. The notion of choosing one's own mate is still a minority idea worldwide.
Recent surveys have shown that even young professional women in Tokyo would prefer their parents suggest a candidate when it comes time to marry. Of course, these days many protect themselves with an escape clause - the option of a veto vote. Indeed, in the last few decades, young couples in Tokyo have completely assimilated the U.S. style of dating, holding hands, and standing in the train stations locked in embrace from chin to toes.
In rural Japan, however, it remains a different story altogether. In the small 300-family farming community of Yatsushiro, girlhood home of the former Taeko Sonoda, serious dating is seldom done in high school and the few young people who do hold hands in public do so in the face of strong disapproval from their elders. The choosing of spouses is still very much in the hands of the parents.
In a country too small and crowded to have an isolated "backwoods" in the U.S. sense, Yatsushiro, located in Kumamoto Prefecture on the southernmost island of Kyushu, is a close approximation. Eighty miles across the bay from Nagasaki, this is Japan's backwoods, a place where every resident has lived there all their life. It is exceptional that an engagement would begin any other way than with the meeting of two sets of parents or one set of parents and an elderly matchmaker who travels from one village to another with an album
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