kokuhaku
Watch any Japanese drama or anime with a romantic plot thread, and a love confession or “kokuhaku” scene will inevitably crop up. I wanted to know whether this was just an on-screen phenomenon, or if it happened in real life, too, so I set out into Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood to meet some couples and ask them about how they got together.
Recently, I was talking about relationships with a Japanese friend who is studying here in the UK, and she asked me: “you don’t have kokuhaku here, do you?”
I knew what kokuhaku is – it’s the declaration that marks the beginning of a relationship, the point where one person says to the other “I really like you, will you go out with me?” So at first, I thought it was a bit of a funny question. I mean, we do that in western countries too, right? Declare our feelings, ask and get asked out? Well…yes. But maybe it’s not quite the same.
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