Episode 7 Newly-married life

The work was interesting, with no complaints.

After overcoming the fierce opposition of my wife’s family, we became husband and wife.

As I have mentioned several times earlier, my wife Hatsuko grew up in a fourth-generation matriarchal family. For generations, the eldest daughter has taken a husband to carry on the Hashimoto family name. This became a problem when Hatsuko and I were getting married.

I am also the eldest son, and my younger sister is my only sibling. As I mentioned in the second episode of this series, the Ukigawa family originally called themselves Ukegawa, a family name that has been passed down through generations as carpenters. Therefore, I had no intention of changing my family name to Hashimoto.

I knew from the beginning that Hatsuko’s family would be against our marriage. In fact, we met with fierce opposition, especially from her maternal grandmother. Still, I could think of no one else but Hatsuko as a partner to share my life with. I could not compromise on this. I thought there was no other way but to persistently talk this over with her family to have them understand how we felt. 

These feelings we had at the time may not be easily understood by young people today, but it was something we could never compromise.

So we turned to Akira, Hatsuko’s father. I thought that since we were both men, he would understand my thoughts. So I met with him when he was away from Tokushima on a business trip, asking him to convince Hatsuko’s grandmother. 

He is also an adopted son-in-law. For him, this must have been a difficult issue to deal with.  According to what I later heard, he was so distressed that he lamented, saying “I don’t want to go home.” Nevertheless, he accepted my wishes, and Hatsuko and I were finally able to get married. Even now, I still feel I cannot thank him enough. Besides, as I will explain later, the Hashimoto family, including Hatsuko’s maternal grandmother, provided tremendous support for us during the start-up period of JustSystems.

The wedding took place in Takamatsu City. We had no particular connection to the area, but it is located between our homes in Niihama and Tokushima, respectively. Besides, since my supervisors and colleagues at Nishishiba Electric were also attending our wedding, Takamatsu is just the halfway point, taking into account the location of Himeji City, where Nishishiba is located.

After all these twists and turns, we became a formally wedded couple and moved our new home from a dormitory in Nishishiba to company housing. It was 1975 when Hatsuko left Takachiho Burroughs (current Nihon Unisys) in Tokyo and came to Aboshi in Himeji City. 

However, the company housing seemed to have been built right after the war and was already run-down. The toilet was a vault type, so-called “pit toilet”. It was so old that my colleagues got together to repair the interior when we moved in. Although it came with a garden, I was not interested in vegetable gardening. To prevent the weeds from growing and bothering the neighbors, I sprayed herbicide early on.

Hatsuko had said she wanted to leave this house as soon as possible, so she was overjoyed when she won the raffle for prefectural housing.

After all, our honeymoon in Aboshi lasted about four years. My hobby in those days was cars. I bought a Honda Civic and used to drive it on mountain roads on my days off. I also enjoyed my work designing ship-related systems and had no complaints. So I had no idea that I would decide to become independent one day, and that this would change our lives dramatically.

It all started when Hatsuko got a new job in Himeji. Sometime after we got married, she went to the local public employment security office and applied for a job, specifying “computer programmer” as the type of work she wanted. That midnight, we received a telegram, which said that she was offered a job. It was for a Toshiba computer agency. This was the beginning of our lives in the world of computers.

With Hatsuko (left) before our marriage