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Love betweeen China and Japan

Date: 2006-09-11

"Next, please."

You'd think it was an audition. In a sense it is. The 36 young Chinese women assembled one recent afternoon at a hotel in Heilong Province in rural northeastern China have come to show themselves worthy of their ambition.

The first step is an interview and photo session with a Japanese broker. The final step, for those who go the distance, is marriage to a Japanese man.

Every year, says Shukan Post, some 10,000 Chinese women arrive in Japan as brides.

They have much to gain -- prosperity above all, a comfortable lifestyle scarcely conceivable in the hardscrabble farming regions most of them come from.

They may also have much to lose. The arrest last February of a Chinese bride in Shiga Prefecture after two 5-year-old children were stabbed to death was a particularly horrible reminder of the stresses that can accumulate when one feels alone and adrift in a foreign country.

That incident is still fresh in people's minds, and it comes up at the interviews. "Does it make you uneasy?" one young woman is asked.

"No," she replies. "If my husband is kind, everything will be fine. As soon as I find a partner I want to hurry up and learn Japanese."

The interviews were conducted for Shukan Post by writer Miho Hirai, who describes the women as well-dressed and well-groomed, indistinguishable from Japanese women of the same age. They fill out a form first -- name, age, family background, education, occupation.

The information provided is not to be taken too literally, Hirai hears from a Japanese broker. The high-school education most women claim for themselves is not credible, the broker explains, in a region where children are routinely pulled out of school to help with farm work. "They write what they think the Japanese want to hear," he says.

"Next, please."

The Japanese interviewer addresses the 26-year-old woman seated before him through an interpreter. "Your form says you're a nursery school teacher. How much do you earn?"

"Five hundred yuan a month," she tells him -- roughly 7,500 yen.

"You've written here you want a man who's 45 or under. Would you consider someone a little older?"

The woman ponders. "Well," she says, a little doubtfully, "maybe up to 48."

How much, Hirai wonders, do these women know about Japan? Many of them, she finds, have friends or relatives married to Japanese, so they've heard something, but not much. "I understand the weather is good," says one. No, she's never eaten Japanese food and knows nothing of the culture. Her image of Japanese men? "They work too hard and they always come home late."

Lots of money changes hands in arranged marriages of this sort, the Japanese bridegrooms shelling out as much as 4 million yen for brokerage fees, "miai tours" to China (a miai is a first meeting with an arranged marriage in view), bridal gifts and so on. Hirai has a harder time finding out how much the women pay. Nothing at all, some of them insist, not altogether credibly. Brokers she speaks to say some Chinese families go into debt to make the necessary arrangements.

The potential payoff is symbolized by a spacious, concrete house Hirai visits in a village of earthen-walled, thatch-roofed huts. The family living there has two children in Japan sending money home. They are lucky. The Shiga incident reminds us that not everyone is.

Shukan Post (Sept. 15)




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