Why having an international marriage is easier now than ever

The other day, my boss said, “Mike I don’t know how you do it, being married to someone from another country, with the language barrier. Communication is hard enough for married people from the same town and background. It has to be tough!”

It’s hard to address that kind of comment or compliment when you’re biting into a burrito on a work lunch. Later, having digested it, the statement I mean, I truly believe it is easier to have a relationship like mine (with someone from another country and culture) than it ever has been in the past. In my case an American mutt in the Midwest, making a life here with a Japanese wife.

You must have that personal time to be who you really are

Personal space can be created quite easily from the coldness of computers and the internet. No matter what size your home his, I think that you can create personal space from having separate computers. It sounds terrible doesn’t it, but it does work. Juri can research her own interests, such as crafts, Japanese news and celebrities and comedy. If you think Youtube and internet videos were just a way to waste time, but don’t provide real value, you are very wrong. It is new to us and many others over the past year and a half that Juri can watch uninterrupted streaming Japanese TV programs in short and long clips. This simple flash video technology gives her her own Japan space. It’s relief from the exhaustion of being someone else all day. She has to play the role of an english speaking teacher in real life, but at home, she can go back to Japan and laugh at Japanese comedians, see popular dramas and of course read blogs or email family and friends in her own language.  As I’m writing this, she’s in that space right now, just as if she was 5,000 miles away at home. Twenty years ago, she might be able to acquire a good book collection, or a video cassette library of Japanese movies, but this isn’t the same as connecting to her culture in real time with the Internet. Almost as good as being there.

Finding a group of your own kind to connect with

Finding a support group is easier. Every organized group, including the Japanese societies that exist in any locality have some sort of online presence. It might just be a mention in an article, or a phone listing, but more likely there is a little website for the organization. This means that finding a group of like minded people is easier than ever. You can find people around you with a short search on the web such as “St. Louis” + “Swedish organizations”. You must appreciate how creating your own island of your native people is valuable to a person who is away from their home. In our case, belonging to and volunteering with the Japan-America society, we go to more events and meet more Japanese people in a few months than we would grow to know over a decade, if this was 1960. Fifteen years ago, to find them, we’d have to luckily stumble across a flyer advertising an event that we could go to or meet someone who already knew about it. Now, anyone can subscribe to multiple online calendars getting notices via email of upcoming activities within a cultural group, from festivals, to nights out for beers or a dinner party.

Family Connections

Along with a personal space and time, Juri has the benefit of email, an efficient postal system between the US and Japan, and the ever valuable Internet Relay Chat. Replaced by Yahoo Chat, which was an important tool for the two of us when separated by the Pacific, Skype is now Juri’s tool of choice to see mom and dad weekly or daily. Skype gives a simple high quality audio and decent video chat that her and her mother and father can use for free. It’s common for Juri to fire up the computer at 5:30 in the evening after work and catch her parents online cooking breakfast and ready to say hello before they head to work. Her dad also will log in at his work and chat if time permits well into our dinner time and before bed. During family gatherings when Aunts and Uncles visit, the chat line is open and we can all say hello. To be able to see your family and talk to them through a computer and having that live video is absolutely priceless.

As I mentioned before, it was Yahoo Chat that worked best, but Skype provides a near perfect audio feed, so from being upstairs and eavesdropping, the voices often sound to me like her parents are her visiting the house. Surely 10 years from now, TV screens will be larger and the video feed, beautiful and fast, clear as a home movie. For now, Juri can connect with home, even having the arguments and fights that she normally would have with parents and brother. Trust me, I’ve seen them.

Access to products formerly out of reach

In some ways, it’s unfortunate because it makes hunting for unique gifts harder, but we are exposed to all kinds of cultural artifacts and common items just by visiting certain aisles of a supermarket, or even a Target store these days. You also have the World Market, which 40 years ago, might cater to a completey different group, but now seems to fit your average design conscious citizen looking for a new kitchen set or an exotic hot sauce. We don’t have a China or Asia town where I live, but we still have places we can go. Retailers have found that providing goods from other countries is another way to stand out and to keep shoppers interested. Consumers can tap into new tastes and decorative ideas. People like my wife, are able to see products from their home country and can comment on them whether good or bad. It might seem weird, but if she sees a really bad knockoff Japan product, we can laugh about it and use that experience to learn or reminisce. That poorly crafted knockoff sitting on a store shelf somehow provides value or appreciation of home, bringing home closer for that moment.

These are just the places that might be around town, depending on the area you live. But again with an internet connection, you can access all kinds of niche stores selling the items that you might miss, such as cooking spices, snacks, utensils and wares that you would just have to go on missing if it were 1957. If Juri wants to cook something she’s used to having, most of the items can be found. Probably everything but perhaps the rarer vegetables.

Ever since we met, we’ve had really good communication, so my bosses comment somehow went over my head, as if he was talking about problems other people have. For us, mostly it’s smooth. Whatever magic that is between Juri and I, be it a mixture of the right patience for one another and ourselves, or the simple knowing that we have outlets to be ourselves and little ways to retreat, we are making it work day by day, just like any international couple from the last century would. It’s easier for us I think than it has been for others because of our historical examples we can call up, and hopes toward the future. Come to think about it, the hope may be the real reason. If you can find hope in your life you conquer and live through anything.

May 8, 2007 at 12:31 am | family, interesting, Japan, nostalgia | No comment