Departments
KOKUSAI KEKKON
国際結婚
international marriage
James Michener’s 1954 novel, Sayonara, told the story of Major Lloyd Gruver, a U.S. Air Force officer who falls in love with a Japanese woman. At the beginning of the novel, the straight-laced, all-American Gruver is a skeptic about international marriages. He is perplexed and annoyed by U.S. servicemen who fall in love with Japanese women. Then he meets the lovely Hana-ogi, and he becomes a one-man advocacy movement for the cause of kokusai-kekkon.
International marriages have been a significant social phenomenon in postwar Japan. As the plotline of Michener’s novel suggests, they were mostly limited to marriages involving a Japanese bride and a foreign (usually Western) husband in the early postwar years. The presence of U.S. forces in Japan, and the deep economic disparity between the two countries, made American men especially common marriage partners for Japanese women. Through 1965, in fact, over half of all international marriages that took place in Japan consisted of a Japanese woman and an American man.
The situation is much different today. Marriages between Japanese women and non-Japanese Asians now outnumber the number of Japanese-American pairings. In the mid-1970s, Korean men became the largest group of foreign men married to Japanese women. As China’s economy has grown, pairings between Chinese men and Japanese women have also increased.
More significant, though, is the increasing number of Japanese men who marry foreign brides. By 2000, more than two-thirds of all international marriages in Japan consisted of a foreign bride and a Japanese man. Most foreign brides in Japan are from surrounding Asian countries. The number of foreign brides from South America (many whom are ethnic Japanese) has also increased since the 1990s.