Forty-five years spent living in the Kobe area as the American wife of a Japanese businessman must change a person. Yet Winnie Inui, 68, still welcomes visitors to her suburban home in Ashiya, Hyodo Prefecture, with a blanket of felicitous concern ("Enough tea, dear?") and a flair for storytelling that remains true to her Boston Irish roots.
A poet and a founder of the Kansai branch of the Association of Foreign Wives of Japanese, she recently spoke about her nearly half-century in Japan.
Winnie Flanagan was working at a bank in Boston during the day and studying French at night when she first met Tsuneo Inui, then a student at Harvard Business School, in 1964. Although charmed by this man who sang exotic songs in Japanese to cheer them up when his car became mired in a snowdrift, she didn't seriously consider the idea of marriage and life in far-off Japan, but after he returned to Japan in June 1965, he and Winnie pursued a courtship by mail.