Praveen Lama and Kazuko Tanikawa have lived in a bustling shopping street in Tokyo's Kita Ward since July 2003, when the Nepalese married his Japanese wife after a long-distance love affair that lasted several years through e-mails and phone calls.

Tanikawa, with her mother and aunt, runs Marue Kanpou Pharmacy Co., which her grandfather started some 80 years ago, while Lama, vice president of the Nepalese Association in Japan, is busy promoting his tea importing business.

Their first encounter was in 1991, when Tanikawa traveled to Nepal and asked Lama, who ran a travel agency in Katmandu, to be her guide. Their relationship grew closer when Tanikawa, who was involved with a nongovernmental organization in Nepal in the 1990s, asked Lama, who was educated at an American school, to translate Nepalese documents into English for the NGO.