Neither Frankie Lafferty nor Saika Kojima ever thought they would wed a foreigner. But nine months after their first encounter in 2004, the two registered for marriage in Sayama, Saitama Prefecture.
Frankie, a 35-year-old English teacher from Ireland, first expected Japan to be completely different from his own country. But since arriving in 1997, he has never felt a big cultural gap with Japan.
It is probably because his first views of Japan from the train as he left Narita airport for Tokyo looked similar to Ireland. He had expected to see a big city like New York, with skyscrapers, but the airport is actually in the countryside. "I was shocked it wasn't strange," he said.