Hugs: My Japanese Husband's Love Language
I shunned embraces for decades due to a mixture of grief and shame, but when I met Hiro, I was awestruck by the multi-layered practice.
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Hugging ended when I turned 14.
January of 1980 marked not only my birthday but the ninth anniversary of my father’s first heart attack. He had been cursed, perhaps genetically, with coronary artery disease, and nearly the entire 1970s decade witnessed his accelerating deceleration. Heart attacks grew in frequency, surgery followed surgery, and he was forced to retire without either a pension or insurance in 1977 (when he was 35). We then moved out of our apartment on the Hudson River and into a ramshackle Victorian further up the hill in Nyack, New York.
Friends of the family worked for months to renovate our new home. They replaced century-old plumbing and wiring, boarded up filthy fireplaces, and painted every last room on all three floors. Perhaps because I knew nothing of the financial crisis that brought us there, I reveled in the new house. My brother and I had the coolest bedroom— an aerie on the top floor tucked under the eaves—that had once been a maid’s room.
By the dawn of 1980, however, my father relocated to the sunroom on the first floor. In a narrow space surrounded by windows looking out on the intersection of Jefferson and Third, more family friends placed a hospital bed and an oxygen tank. My father remained there, hugless, until his passing on May 5th of that year.
The combination of my irrepressibly, if closeted, homosexual puberty and my very repressed sorrow also dovetailed perfectly into my own hugless state. Two factors were at play: My erections caught me by surprise with their erratic suddenness, and I quickly learned that my grief, frightening in its seeming infinity, could gush forth at the slightest touch. Shunning embraces, therefore, struck me as wise.
Some of those fears had abated by the time I began my coming-out process at age 21 in 1987. I welcomed affection from my friends, buoyed by their acceptance. But after graduating college the following year, my move to Japan—ostensibly for one year to stave off my graduate school panic—pushed me back into two different closets.
Within a week of my arrival, I was asked to either conceal my sexuality or risk being fired. So hugs got a closet of their own, too.
I had studied Japanese language and culture for three years before that, and I knew that hugs didn’t fly in a place where bows were more common than handshakes. I acclimated, bowing even when speaking to people on the telephone. I managed to fit my sexuality’s closet with a revolving door so I could be gay on weekends. However, even my fresh-meat syndrome sex came (pardon the pun) with an urgent physicality that precluded hugs. Men wanted to touch me, sure. But cuddles were not part of the hookup vernacular in the late 1980s and early ‘90s in Tōkyō.
My first long-term relationship in 1992 occurred when I allowed someone who said he loved me to live in my apartment rent-free. At the end of those eight months, it took just twenty-four hours with a Japanese man visiting from his home in Canberra to a) realize that the hugless freeloader was manipulating me and b) remind me of genuine affection. From the moment Masa from Canberra and I met, there were hugs as we introduced ourselves, hugs as we walked along Tōkyō Bay, and hugs—so many hugs—when I started crying about the relationship. With those tears came the awareness that I needed to evict my manipulator. (Those tears also triggered my grief for my father at long last, together with the grateful realization that the grief had its bounds, reinforced by more hugs from Masa.)
After that catharsis and the ensuing breakup/eviction, I spent a year without anyone enfolding me in their arms, even though I slowly improved my relationship skills. I briefly dated three sexy, funny men, all of whom remain friends to this day. Then an accidental first date—it was meant to be a group outing—turned into something special when one person, Hiro, showed up.
Perhaps it was the publicness of the outing that blinded us to its date-like qualities: We met in Asakusa and walked our way to a festival and back, surrounded by the perennial Tōkyō crowds. Although there had been no hugging on that date, Hiro instead displayed an even better expression of his affection. To keep from losing me in the crowd—which would have taken significant effort because I stood six-and-a-half feet in height and weighed just under three hundred pounds—Hiro snagged the hem of my coat in his gloved hand and followed in my happy wake.
Hugs commenced during the second date. I invited Hiro to my home on a Friday, two days after we met. And yes, the horizontal preliminaries took precedence, since my friends had only recently convinced me to try a first date without intercourse, and waiting until the second date represented a significant achievement. Still, when Hiro woke beside me on Saturday and spent the day at my side, he posed a question: “Can I hug you?”
Hiro was, and still is, an excellent hugger. Never content for touch-and-go affection, he locked his arms around me and held on. Although that behavior surprised me when we first intertwined in my apartment’s tiny entranceway, I realized I had been waiting for it. Waiting for the person for whom physical embraces were not a duty to be dispatched.
I also realized that Hiro viewed hugs as a private effort. After our romantic partnership passed the one-year mark, during which time I had finally abandoned my apartment far outside of Tōkyō for one much closer to him within the city proper, Hiro led me back to Asakusa, the site of our accidental encounter, to queue for our first temple visit of the New Year. On the eve of 1995, his destination was Sensōji, the oldest Buddhist temple in Tōkyō, where Kwannon, the bodhisattva of mercy, is enshrined.
As is tradition, the temple’s precincts are closed until midnight, at which point the great bell there is rung for the final, 108th, time—once for each of the human frailties that block our path to nirvana. The crowd was orderly and hushed, straining to hear the bell’s toll. Hiro stood so closely to me I could feel the buttons on his pea coat grate against the zipper of my down jacket. Our gloved hands touched and broke apart, touched and broke apart, and I bent my neck to bring my lips closer to his ear. “It is customary, you know, for couples to kiss at the stroke of midnight.”
His eyes grew round with surprise, and he shook his head with a tight vehemency. “Not here! Too many people!”
I chuckled knowingly, but after our visit was complete—prayers said, offerings made, amulets acquired, and fortunes read—we crushed against each other in a taxi. Hiro unwound his scarf and, together with mine, folded them across our adjoining laps. His ungloved left hand brushed against my ungloved right and, confident that the driver wouldn’t catch wise, he wove his fingers amid mine.
During our five years together in Japan, he traveled with me to the international airport in Narita five times. Two of those five were for trips I took alone: the visit to my family in New York just a month beyond our first date and a business trip to Budapest during the spring of 1997. For both of those flights, Hiro stood beside me at the top of the stairs leading down to passport control and bowed his farewell. When I returned from Budapest, however, I called Hiro from the transfer in Munich to make sure he met my flight—I otherwise doubted I could get back to my apartment under the gift-heavy weight of my luggage. Hiro met me in the arrivals hall with a vast smile and an even vaster hug. Something had clicked within him, and his reticence regarding public displays of affection evaporated.
The final Narita visit came in January of 1998. Headhunters had courted me for a job in Seattle’s suburbs. Although my decision to take the job was conditioned on Hiro’s promise to find a way to join me—he eventually applied for and received a student visa—I needed to travel on ahead without him.
I dreaded that Narita farewell. Hiro and I had just embarked on our fifth year together the preceding November, and I knew with a profound certainty that Hiro’s was the heart where I would always feel at home; I would grieve our parting. The student visa plan hadn’t been formulated at that point, and all Hiro knew he needed was to save up money. Both of us, therefore, entered unknown territory.
Perhaps I had hoped to keep tears at bay when I invited three friends to join us for the airport visit on a frigid, bright January day. But that plan was to no avail. A soft weeping began as the five of us approached the same passport control staircase. But when I stopped and waited for Hiro to bow to me, my head already lowered, Hiro reached out and took me into his arms. From within the hug, his tears mingled with mine as I progressed from weeping to sobbing, shuddering as I gasped, my throat constricted .
Since our second date, his embraces signified many things: love, first and foremost, but also safety and commitment, desire and acceptance, and joy, shared joy. On that January day in Narita, however, the long, tight hug brought our sorrows and uncertainty together. Tears continued to river down my face as I relinquished my work visa at passport control.
After Hiro visited Seattle for two weeks in May of 1998, when he and I toured potential colleges, he began his student visa application. He arrived in November, and maybe because of the gloom of the Pacific Northwest winter, maybe because of the adjustment of living together full-time, maybe because of culture shock, and most likely because of all three factors combined, the hugs went on hiatus.
A surprising remedy presented itself, however. I had found a group called the Northwest Bears in a listing in the Seattle Stranger. In Japan, I had only ever identified as a chubby and Hiro as a chubby chaser, but I suspected the bear community might welcome us both. We attended their Christmas event, complete with a renegade white elephant exchange. (I won a used videotape of Titanic, which I promptly re-gifted at a Seattle Lesbian and Gay Chorus holiday party—I have never liked Leonardo DiCaprio.)
Among the bears, however, Hiro’s hugs reemerged, and, thankfully, he shared multiple hugs with me that evening, too. As we drove back to our apartment, I noted how glad I was to be back in on the hug action.
“You don’t really get to hug people in Japan,” he said. I nodded as he continued. “I have always been pretty good at guessing how much people weigh, just by the look of them. But when I hug someone, I get to confirm my guesses.”
I laughed, knowing how I had benefited from his calculus.
Fast forward to November of 2011, and the eighteenth anniversary of our first date. Hiro and I had been living in Burnaby, British Columbia, since 2006. He’d run out of student visa options in the United States, and it was my turn to adapt: I got a student visa for Canada (to study graphic design, one of my passions). Canada offered Hiro a work permit. Under Canadian law, Hiro could be considered my common-law spouse because we had shared an address and bank accounts.
Our anniversary was somber, however. Hiro had recently received a surprising diagnosis of Type II diabetes. One of the symptoms of his disease was a drop in libido. Add to that the fact of a diagnosis of my own. In 2009, I had been told I suffered from morbid anxiety. But my prescriptions (Topiramate and Ziprasidone) were chosen to buffer my libido despite other, far from pleasant, side effects. None of Hiro’s medications helped him in the sex drive regard.
The hugs, therefore, were among the first casualties of our dwindling intimacy. Given the mental fog my medications had created, I barely noticed. In the confines of my psychiatrist’s office, I eventually (and irrationally) wondered if Hiro’s fading interest in sex (and hugs) was symptomatic of something darker than diabetes. Did he want to leave me?
But inertia carried us forward until June 26, 2013. When the Supreme Court ruling for US v. Windsor, invalidating section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, was read out, I suddenly had a wedding to plan. And Hiro had a green card application to complete.
The authorities issued Hiro’s green card in 2015, a few days before our second wedding anniversary, two months before we moved back to the Seattle area. And in October of that year, a psychiatrist at Group Health agreed to revise my diagnosis. I hadn’t ever been morbidly anxious. The nine years in Canada, without a permanent residency status, without a permanent home, without job stability—my income from freelance translation was unpredictable—had fostered a situational anxiety. My new doctor helped to wean me from my awful medications. I could also say that our marriage, which resolved anxieties that were less about our relationship and more about where we could, together, live, deepened our intimacy, but such a statement would be facile.
Our first years in Tōkyō saw us build a relationship founded on cross-cultural hugs. Neither of us ever completely abandoned that intimacy, despite the doldrums in the 2010s. And when the Covid-19 pandemic began, working from home encouraged a new hug pattern. Every day, for multiple times each day, Hiro and I stopped whatever we were doing and came in for the hug clench. As was true at the very beginning of us, our embraces were long and deliberate. They reset my endorphins, reminding me of the stability of our love and commitment, and they always ended with shared smiles. They still do.
Each week, The Queer Love Project publishes an original essay. Want to submit your essay and add to our growing archive? Find our submission guidelines and more here.
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This is so moving, thank you! ❤️
Lovely!!! Love is love ❤️ and so very delighted for your long happiness 🏳️🌈