This week's Cultural Conudrums (a weekly feature by Kate Elwood in the Daily Yomuiri) is about the openess many Japanese have about "dekichatta kekon" (shotgun weddings). I have come across it personally several times myself, and it mystifies me that you might never learn the first name of a colleague's wife, but they'll tell you that they had a shotgun marriage. One of my colleagues mentioned this adn then that his wife was some 12 years younger! To which I responded: " Was she a student of your?" To which he replied, "You can't ask that unless we are drinking!"
Anyway, the author is writing about the western custom of talking about how couples met and how they led to marriage, which can be a bit thornier in Japan:
It appears that there are, however, two sure-fire ways to halt further inquiries into the steps to matrimony. The first is a breezy confession that it was a dekichatta kekkon, which means something like "Whoops-now-we've-done-it marriage," a rather more nonchalant and laid-back way of referring to what is commonly called a "shotgun wedding" in English. To press for the particulars after being informed that an unexpectedly imminent bundle of joy looming on the horizon was at the heart of the marital union would seem to suggest an inappropriately prurient interest.
Pregnancy before marriage obviously happens at least as often in the United States as in Japan, but surprisingly, I hear more Japanese couples announce it casually to acquaintances than I do Americans. Also, my American friends who have gone through this experience and ended up at the wedding altar may acknowledge that a certain unexpected occurrence precipitated the nuptial event, but they still have their equivalent of my parents' borrowed-book sequence, which they tend to place as much or more emphasis on when talking about the steps that resulted in a trip down the aisle as on the reproductive initiative to matrimony.
"She/I got pregnant so we decided to get married" somehow has an unenthusiastic, even depressing tone to it that appears to be less acute when stated in Japanese. It's possible that the 2001 Fuji TV drama that was in fact titled Dekichatta Kekkon starring the popular Ryoko Hirosue as the "dekichatee," if you will, led to more openness. But I remember precisely the first time a Japanese person told me this kind of story, which was 20 years ago. I was standing waiting for an elevator with two Japanese male colleagues, when the subject turned to the recent marriage of one of them.
Without any urging at all, my coworker volunteered the information that they had gotten married because they "had to." At the time, I was quite surprised and also wondered if he was implying that he wasn't glad about the marriage, but in subsequent conversations it became clear that he was quite happy with both his wife and his son, who was born some months later. I now wonder if he found his situation as a newlywed embarrassing and used the dekichatta disclosure as a way of playing down his nuptial bliss.
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