The long-running variety show "Welcome, Newlyweds!" (ABC TV/TV Asahi, Sundays at 12:55 PM), hosted by Takashi Fujii and Sakura Inoue, will feature a couple on May 17th: a husband who visits a real estate company to look for a place to live in Akihabara, Tokyo, and his wife, who happens to be the employee in charge. The show will present a "story straight out of a manga" in which the husband, intending to find a house, ends up finding the wife instead.
One day, the husband found an apartment that was "a 5-minute walk from the station and 5,000 yen cheaper than his current one," and excitedly visited a real estate agency. The person who became his agent was his current wife. Upon investigation, they discovered that the apartment was for students only and they couldn't rent it. The wife gradually began to feel that she wanted to "support" her husband, who had come to Tokyo alone from Hokkaido and talked about his dreams.
A week later, my husband contacted me again. He thought they would finally be able to live in Akihabara, but the owner lived overseas, so his company couldn't give permission, and the contract was off. Moreover, my husband had already submitted a request to vacate the apartment they were originally living in.
When his wife, worried, checked on the tidying situation, the photos sent via LINE showed a completely messy room and, for some reason, a piano placed in the entryway. When she brought it up, he started singing and playing the piano over the phone, asking, "Would you like to listen?"
However, the wife couldn't leave her husband, who had moved to Tokyo alone from Hokkaido and had no one to rely on, alone. Having moved to Tokyo herself at the age of 20 and spent her days going back and forth between work and home, she began to see her husband, who spoke to her about anything and everything, as a cute younger friend. As the move-out date approached, the wife finally suggested, "If you have no one to rely on, why don't you live with me at my place?" It was an extremely unusual development, between a person in charge and a client, and a person of the opposite sex who had just met.
The two went out for a meal before moving in together and had a thorough discussion about the boundaries between men and women. However, the husband admitted to having some anxiety, saying, "It's my first time staying at a girl's house. I had some bad thoughts." So the solution he came up with was to live in a "caterpillar-like" state, with the zippers of his sleeping bag all closed and his hands and feet bound.
Thus, their cohabitation began in the 1K apartment where his wife had been living. For the first time in the show's history, their home was completely recreated in the studio to show the kind of relationship the two had at that time.
Living together is like a school trip where conversations flow easily every night. The husband gradually becomes aware of his wife, but as promised, he tries to maintain his composure by curling up like a caterpillar in his sleeping bag. However, that only lasts three days. Looking at his wife beside him, he reaches his limit, thinking, "Oh, she's so cute, what should I do?" and pleads, "I can't take it anymore." To his surprise, his wife replies with encouragement: "Hang in there! Endure it!" The wife, on the other hand, was wondering how her husband could get off track when he was supposed to be fulfilling his dream of living in Akihabara.
However, three weeks later, the husband finally confessed, "The more I looked at you each day, the more I fell in love with you." The wife, feeling that he loved her as a person and not just as a customer, accepted, asking, "Shall we be in a proper relationship instead of just being customer and employee?" At that moment, the husband replied, "Of course!" and unzipped his sleeping bag himself and hugged his wife. After four months of dating, the two got married in January 2026.
"I was looking for a house, but I ended up finding my wife. It's like something out of a comic book," said the husband, who then played and sang a song he had written for his wife on the keyboard. "Thank you for saying you love me," "Thank you for seeing all of me," he sang, expressing his gratitude to his wife for accepting his clumsiness. When the song ended, his wife responded with a teary-eyed smile, "Thank you too." However, the husband then declared, "There's something else I want to tell you."
