For as long as the Philippines and Japan have been learning how to live with each other, something quieter has been happening alongside the official story. Filipino–Japanese relationships have been figuring things out without scripts, without guarantees, and often without the right words. Much of that work happens in what is left unsaid.

If the public story of Philippine–Japan relations is told through agreements and anniversaries, this is the private one — the part that unfolds at dinner tables and inside everyday relationships.

Love, after all, may be universal, but it doesn’t always look the same.

In the Philippines, love is often loud, shown through words and constant check-ins — someone calling your name from the kitchen, a reminder to eat, a message asking if you got home safely. Love in Japan is often a soft whisper, hardly heard: shoes lined up by the genkan (hallway), a door left unlocked so you don’t have to fumble for keys, dinner waiting even if it has already gone cold.

The work that happens quietly

Between these two ways of showing affection, there is often a pause you don’t quite know how to read. Sometimes it feels warm; sometimes awkward. It’s the moment when one person is waiting to hear something, and the other believes it has already been shown.

In the eight years since I moved to Tokyo with my family, I’ve seen that pause settle into daily life.

When two people grow up learning different ways to show care, affection doesn’t always come easily or with reassurance. More often, it settles into routine — shared meals, quiet evenings, and the choice to stay, even when something feels unresolved, even when you’re not entirely sure why it still does.

And sometimes, the silence lasts longer than intended, leaving one person wondering if they were heard at all.

You notice this most clearly when things go wrong.

Arguments do not always explode; sometimes they simply fade. The conversation stops. But later, the laundry gets folded. The leftover rice is reheated. The day continues. No apology is spoken, but something has shifted. The repair is small, almost easy to miss, but you know it is intended.

This kind of love does not rush to explain itself. It waits. It adjusts. It stays.

Beyond the fairy tale

When Filipino–Japanese relationships get noticed, it’s usually because they sound unusual — or romantic in hindsight. The stories are told backward, edited into something neat.

But lived forward, most of these relationships are ordinary, in the way real love is.

Abby Watabe’s story is often told as a Cinderella tale because of who her husband later turned out to be. Before it was framed that way, it began with a chance meeting in an elevator and an ordinary courtship, without any reason to think the story would ever be retold. Only much later did she learn who he was — the man behind one of Japan’s biggest karaoke chains.

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Told backward, the story sounds magical. Lived forward, it was simply two people finding each other, slowly getting to know one another, and doing the hard work of making the relationship work despite their differences. Love did not arrive as rescue, but as someone who chose to stay beside her.

Even proposals can sound more romantic in hindsight than they felt at the time. Stripped of its glamour, the story of Ivy Almario and Koichi Masaki was really about two people, both widowed, giving love another shot. When Koichi wrote “Let me always be by your side” to Ivy, he meant it as a proposal. To a Filipino ear, the words might sound understated. Yet in the Japanese expression of love, they carry profound meaning: presence, constancy, and the promise of building life together through ordinary days.

These stories are not remarkable because they are grand romances. They are remarkable for showing how people learn to live together without clear rules — about what love should look like, how care is expressed, or when words are expected.

Over time, some of those rules began to settle. Not neatly, not all at once, but enough to change how new relationships begin.

The modern shift

Among younger Filipino–Japanese couples today, the relationship often feels less like crossing cultures and more like sharing one. For online couples like Japino Mickael “Mikasan” Shimizu and his partner Filipino Language major Yuna, languages mix easily — switching mid-sentence, choosing whichever word lands best. The work is less about being understood at all, but more about being understood well.

That ease did not come from nowhere.

For years, while governments talked about normalization, everyday life moved more quietly. Filipino partners entered Japanese households, and Japanese partners entered Filipino ones, each carrying assumptions they did not always know how to explain. Both sides learned to adjust without clear instructions — figuring out habits, boundaries, and expectations as they went. Many built homes and raised families while still unsure, at times, where they stood within the relationship, the family, and the culture around them.

They stayed anyway.

Choosing each other

Still, most Filipino–Japanese relationships unfold without an audience. They happen at school gates, on morning trains, at supermarkets where parents talk about homework, work hours, and what to cook for dinner. No one is trying to prove anything. They are just trying to make tomorrow a little easier than today.

On Valentine’s Day, when love is often measured by what is said or given, it is worth remembering another version of it — the kind that shows up without asking to be noticed, the kind that comes to know you over time.

Between Filipinos and Japanese, love has grown this way — through ordinary days, small repairs, and the steady choice to stay. The unsaid is not the absence of love, but what remains after two people have learned how to live with each other.

Quiet as two pairs of slippers waiting side by side by the door. – Rappler.com

Ricky Aringo Sabornay is a cross-border lawyer who moves between the Philippines and Japan, helping people navigate not just different legal systems, but different ways of thinking. He runs Sabornay Law, a member firm of Uryu & Itoga, where his work sits at the intersection of two legal systems and two cultures that don’t always speak the same language. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

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