An article from the Tokyo Shimbun’s “Is Marriage an Impossible Game?” series (International Edition), featuring a man who converted to Islam in order to get married, was published on September 29, 2026, and sparked discussion on 5ch’s News Speed+ board. Since the article is limited to paying subscribers, few posters had read the full text, and reactions were largely based on just the headline and summary. Some in the thread saw it as a natural consequence of the shrinking pool of Japanese marriage partners driving more international marriages, while others questioned the story’s credibility, arguing that given the difficulty of getting a father’s permission under Islamic custom, the account was likely mostly fabricated. The discussion also branched into side topics on religious dietary rules, including whether the fasting was really observed and comparisons with Japan’s own pre-Meiji-era taboos on eating meat.
“It Had to Be Her”: The Man Who Converted to Islam for Marriage — Finding Happiness Beyond Religious Rules and Japan’s Lack of Understanding: Tokyo Shimbun Digital
September 29, 2026, 4:00 PM — Paid subscribers only
<Is Marriage an Impossible Game?> International Edition, Part 4 of 6
Source: tokyo-np.co.jp / Read the original article here
That's happening regardless of whether the pool shrinks. Eldest sons on farms have long had basically only Southeast Asia to look for partners in, and it's much the same for SDF (Self-Defense Forces) members marrying Chinese nationals. On top of that, the acceptable age gap in marriages has narrowed every year — a 5-year difference is now considered pretty unusual — and having comparable income has become the norm too.
In other words, the criteria have narrowed and the pool of eligible partners has shrunk. The only solution left is foreigners.
Doesn't matter to us — we can't get married whether the partner's Japanese or foreign.
Some guys will do absolutely anything to keep the family business going — same deal with eldest sons who inherit farms.
People still ate birds and whales without issue, and even ate four-legged animals under the excuse that it was "medicine."
Momonjiya — founded in 1718 (Kyōhō 3), an 11-generation-old wild boar hot pot (game meat) specialty restaurant in Ryōgoku.
https://momonjya.gorp.jp/
A traditional wild boar hot pot recipe passed down for generations in Ryōgoku. Boar hot pot is known for its deep crimson lean meat and white fat, which is why it's also called "botan-nabe" (peony hot pot) after that coloring. The tastiest cut is the fatty belly meat, which gets richer the longer it simmers. Also be sure to try the venison hot pot, prized for its lean, fine-grained meat, and the bear meat hot pot, with its slightly dark red flesh richly marbled with fat.
Birds are fine. Rabbits too, apparently — since those ears mean they "fly" like birds, which is supposedly why rabbits are counted with the bird counter "wa" instead of a mammal counter.
Same goes for the Unification Church, Soka Gakkai, and the like.
Re: #84
You just can't eat while the sun's up — at night you eat a fancier meal than usual. It's basically just skipping lunch in exchange for a lavish dinner, which is why people can keep it up.
Is marriage really just "desire" though? For any living creature, leaving offspring is instinct — the one and only purpose. "God" is nothing more than a story humans made up.
Basically, in Islam fathers hold a lot of power — they often won't even let their daughter show her face outside the hijab to a man, let alone allow marriage to a non-Muslim man from a polytheistic country like Japan. So the story in Re: #1 is basically fake.
Apparently in Islam, if a man sucks a Muslim woman's breast, he automatically becomes a Muslim too. What a terrifying religion.
No problem at all — from a Japanese perspective, Allah is just one of the countless myriad gods (yaoyorozu no kami). Allah, Yahweh, Vishnu, Amaterasu, and Dainichi Buddha are all the same god anyway. No issue whatsoever.
In a way that's the old-fashioned Japanese family model — as long as the husband works hard enough to support the whole household, there's no problem.
The Katsuya (pork cutlet chain) along the road under Shibuya Mark City — the Dōgenzaka branch, maybe? The other day I thought cooking dinner after getting home would be too much hassle, so I stopped by on my way back from work, and it had closed down…
Every part of me is crying.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
The Tokyo Shimbun’s “Is Marriage an Impossible Game?” International Edition is a six-part series, and this installment is the fourth. Since the full text is limited to paying subscribers, 5ch users could only see the headline and summary, and it’s worth noting that much of the thread’s reaction was speculation built on that limited information. Discussions of marriage-hunting often start from the premise that “marriage between Japanese people is becoming difficult,” but the thread’s observations that farming heirs and Self-Defense Force members’ spouses are often foreign nationals reflect a trend that predates the current low birthrate and aging population and has been seen in certain regions and occupations for some time — it isn’t unique to this article. There were also comments suggesting that under Islamic marriage rules, “women can only marry Muslims, but men can marry women of any religion” — but this actually refers to the practice of requiring a spouse to convert upon marriage, and it’s easy to misread this as a straightforward prediction about religious population growth or decline, which it isn’t.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “<Is Marriage an Impossible Game?> “It Had to Be Her”: The Man Who Converted to Islam for Marriage — Finding Happiness Beyond Religious Rules and Japan’s Lack of Understanding: Tokyo Shimbun.”
