Marc Van Cauteren and Reiko Shinozaki met in Tokyo in 1993 after mutual friends encouraged him to call her during a business trip to Japan.

Marc, who is from a small village in the Belgian countryside and who taught physics at the University of Brussels, had just started a new job that brought him to Japan on a regular basis.

He now works as director of clinical science for the Asia-Pacific region at Philips, developing new technologies to make clinical images of the human body using magnetic fields and radio waves.