Indeed there are arranged marriages in Japan even today. I don't want to say that the marriages are loveless. I think there is a lot of commitment. Also, Asia has its extremes. According to Men's Health, Koreans have more sex than anyone else in the world, about 4X a week, while the Japanese are nearly last at 30X a year, or 2 or 3 X per month. It makes me want to visit Korea
I think love is there, but we wouldn't necessarily recognize it as such. W's parents seem pretty close to me now that they have retired. There are a lot of obstacles to Japanese couples being intimate; they sleep with their kids, and even after that ends, houses are not at all soundproof; and many couples live with elderly parents. Hourly "love hotels" are popular, but those are I guess for unmarried couples.
There is the issue of fate. W believes that wide tendencies in life are fated and can be divined by talented fortune tellers. So a given year will be lucky or unlucky. Many things in life that she could take responsibility for she chalks up to fate. I am patient with her on this to a point. Certainly life has its ebbs and flows, and I don't have a much better system for predicting these than she does. However, I do think we a people could take more responsibility for our actions, instead of blaming fate for our shortcomings. If we were to divorce, I'm sure that she would say it was fated. And she may be right, in the sense that perhaps no amount of effort could save us. I think she is making no effort, but that is another matter.
