Actress Anna Umemiya appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi) on March 23rd. She talked about how she met her husband, whom she married after only 10 days of knowing each other last year.
She met her future husband on May 14th last year and got married just 10 days later. "I never thought we'd get married," she said, and since they're both divorced, they don't feel the need to have a wedding reception. This New Year's, they went to the Maldives "kind of as a honeymoon." They travel together often, and each time they go, they call it a honeymoon. The Maldives trip was about their ninth honeymoon.
Her husband is an art director. She calls him Yo-chan. "Yo-chan is not exactly healthy either; he's had a stroke and a cerebral hemorrhage," she reveals. When they first met, they immediately started talking about their illnesses. "At the time, I was 51 and he was 59," she says. "Neither of us are young, but we grew closer talking about how many more years we thought we'd live."
She met her husband through a friend. The friend said, "I know someone who would be a good match for Anna." When the friend asked her husband, "Why don't you meet Umemiya Anna?", he responded something like, "I probably wouldn't get along with her. Umemiya Anna is someone who causes a lot of public uproar, isn't she?" She also revealed that when her husband went to view an apartment and asked who lived there, he was told that Umemiya lived there, and he immediately decided not to live in that apartment. "That's how much people were avoiding me," she said. Her husband at the time "didn't even know I had cancer," but after searching online and reading candid interviews and other articles about her battle with cancer, he changed his mind and wanted to meet her.
When she first introduced herself by saying, "Nice to meet you, I'm Anna Umemiya. It's a pleasure to meet you," her husband was surprised that she could even introduce herself. Although he initially had a low opinion of her, he later revealed that his decision to marry her was due to her polite greeting, saying, "I later found out that he decided he wanted to marry me." Now, she feels that having a "not-so-great image at first was actually a good thing."
Since her father, actor Tatsuo Umemiya, passed away in 2019, she occasionally went out with men who invited her out, but even if she made an appointment to meet someone at 6 p.m., she would return home by 7 p.m. She would find about three things she disliked about the person every hour. On the day she met her current husband, her mother and daughter made a bet on what time he would get home. They predicted he would be home by 8 p.m. at the latest, but he returned at 3 a.m. Her family was surprised and asked what had happened. "The next day, I told him, 'There was nothing I disliked about him, I had a great time.'" From there, things progressed rapidly towards marriage.
