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April 24, 1999
KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
YAMAGATA, Japan -- She paints a detailed portrait of her
loving, rustic family life, but none of it is true.
For nearly two hours, "Irene," a slim, brown-haired
Filipina with a weak smile, a faraway gaze and a designer purse,
described her brokered marriage to a Japanese farmer twice her
age, a union that has produced two children.
"My in-laws accept me," the 30-year-old woman said
as her 6-year-old daughter tinkered with a portable video game.
"They are happy to have my support. None of the other Filipinos
who've moved to my town to marry have suffered a divorce."
As soon as she has departed, psychiatrist Norihiko Kuwayama
revealed the unhappy truth.
"This couple is a speechless pair," Kuwayama said
of Irene and her Japanese farmer-husband, who have been married
for 13 years. "They have no family life. Every night, Irene
works in a bar selling drinks and waiting on customers, and I
worry about who will take care of the children."
Kuwayama, 36, who helps run a hot line to help rural brides
cope with their troubled marriages, said that at one point Irene
went back to the Philippines and left one of her children behind.
"The husband didn't seem to care," he said. "We
were surprised when she came back."
The couple has not had sex since Irene became pregnant with
her youngest child, Kuwayama said.
Here in the snow-capped, rugged mountain regions of northern
Japan, rural, rice-growing towns are shrinking as young men and
women abandon the rigors of farm life for the anonymous freedom
of Japan's giant cities.
Japanese custom affords no such freedom to the family's oldest
son, however. According to rural tradition, the eldest male must
stay to care for his aging parents and inherit the family land.
The situation has led to a shortage of eligible women in
rural villages.
"More women are working now, and don't want to stay
in the village," said marriage broker Setsuko Takano, whose
tiny village of Shirataka has seen most of its young women leave.
"Last year, we had only 127 babies in this town,"
said Takano, who doubles as the local tailor. "At that rate,
we'd have to close the schools soon. The very existence of the
town itself is facing a crisis."
So Shirataka and dozens of other hamlets throughout Yamagata
prefecture have encouraged families to spend more than $25,000
each to import brides from China, South Korea, Thailand and the
Philippines. In 1997, the Japanese Justice Ministry issued 274,000
residency visas for foreign spouses of Japanese citizens, an
increase of 30 percent in five years.
But according to psychiatrist Kuwayama, of the more than
1,000 marriages arranged for Japanese men and foreign women in
his prefecture, fewer than 1 percent are happy.
The women who come from poor Asian nations are attracted
by the relative prosperity of Japan, by far Asia's most prosperous
economy even after years of a crippling recession. Many said
they would feel guilty about walking out of their bad marriages
because of the large amount of money their husbands' families
paid to bring them to Japan.
The money they earn in Japan helps ease the poverty of relatives
back home, and if their husbands divorced them, most of the women
would be forced to leave Japan -- possibly without their children.
As Irene put it, "I was 17 years old and I thought it
might be fun and exciting [to marry a Japanese]. After four months
here, I got pregnant. I didn't marry for love. But if I got married
to a Filipino man, it might have been worse. In the Philippines
it's hard to find a job."
Even when a man and woman are compatible, Japanese xenophobia
sometimes gets in the way.
Nipapon Umetsu, a bright-eyed Thai woman with two young children,
said she gets along well with her Japanese husband, whom she
met when he visited Thailand. But she doesn't feel welcomed by
local residents and says she suffers discrimination at the plant
where she works.
"When we make a mistake, they are very hard on us, but
when a Japanese does something wrong, they are easily forgiven,"
she said. "The villagers look at us like we're different.
They never talk to us. Sometimes I feel like they're looking
down at me."
Communities in rural Japan, where families have often lived
together for five or six generations, are not especially welcoming
to outsiders, even to Japanese who grew up in other parts of
the country, Kuwayama acknowledged.
"But these foreign wives don't speak the language and
get married to a stranger with no information and no love. So
it's a very stressful situation."
Exacerbating the domestic problems, residents admit, is the
fact that many of the Japanese husbands are still subservient
to their mothers.
"Honestly speaking, the men themselves are not attractive,
that's the problem," said Takano, the marriage broker.
© Copyright 1999, The Salt Lake Tribune |
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