I’m fortunate in that my wife and I have fairly similar tastes in movies and TV shows. We both agree that Modern Family is funny, seeing the Hulk beat up Loki in The Avengers is deeply satisfying, and that the anime Escaflowne is an extremely compelling take on the standard plotline of “boy meets girl, girl falls in love with other boy, and by the way both boys pilot giant robots.”

At the same time, we’re also mature enough to respect each other’s opinions when they do diverge. Unfortunately, not all spouses can agree to disagree when it comes to entertainment, as is the case with the woman in Japan who’s looking for a divorce because her husband isn’t a fan of Disney’s Frozen.

You’d be correct in assuming that website Kikonsha no Hakaba (“The Gravesite of Married People”) isn’t an Internet portal where users share their happy family vacation photos. Individuals who’re having problems in their marriage come to the site to post their troubles and solicit advice, as one anonymous 31-year-old man recently did.

Financial difficulties, and the stress associated with them, are a common cause of marital strife, but between his regular salary and rental properties he owns, the man makes a comfortable annual income of roughly 11 million yen (US $108,900). He and his wife own their own home, have no outstanding debts, and apparently live well enough within their means that the 29-year-old wife has no need to work outside the home.

Like many people around the world, she’s recently become a huge fan of Frozen. Although she initially got into the smash hit musical through a friend, the wife has become so enthralled with it that she’s since made multiple trips to the theatre to watch it over and over again on the big screen.

Although Disney made several tweaks in developing Frozen, the film was originally inspired by The Snow Queen, a story by Danish author Hans Christian Anderson. Disney even gives a nod to this in Japan, where the animated film is titled Anna and the Snow Queen.

As fate would have it, the Frozen-loving woman’s husband majored in Danish literature while in college, even doing a research project on the film’s source material.

▼ Before everyone with an arts degree starts filling out their Japanese work visa application, we should point out that when job-hunting in Japan, the reputation of the college you graduated from is often more important than what you actually studied, and that 10-figure salaries for holders of a degree in literature are not the norm here.

At his wife’s recommendation, the man decided to watch Frozen and see what all the fuss was about. Unfortunately, he only succeeded in the first half.

“It’s an OK movie, I guess, ^but I didn’t really care for it personally.”

Unable to grasp just what made the movie so captivating in her eyes, the man asked his spouse, “Do you really think it’s that good?”

▼ A similar question comes to mind every time I see a pancake restaurant in Tokyo with a 45-minute wait.

The man claims he asked the question offhandedly, with no intention of offending his wife. She, however, took issue with the inquiry, ironically shocked at what she saw as a cold-hearted betrayal by the man who she believed should be her Prince Charming. “If you can’t understand what makes this movie great, there’s something wrong with you as a human being!” she declared.

▼ It seems her recent appreciation of cinema has given her a flair for dramatic dialogue.

Calling your conversational counterpart a defective human being isn’t generally the best way to show you’re receptive towards his or her ideas and beliefs, and since the couple lives in Japan and not Opposite Land, things only got worse from there. In the end, the woman shouted “I want a divorce!” and stormed out of their home.

She’s since been staying at her parents’ home, and by the time the husband posted his story to Kikonsha no Hakaba, a week had passed, with the wife’s parents serving as intermediaries for all communication between the feuding, childless couple.

The sudden development has put the husband in a bit of a quandary. He doesn’t mention any preexisting issues between him and his wife of six years, and he’s understandably resistant to ending what, as far as he indicates, has been an otherwise happy marriage over such a trivial matter.

The issue of trivialness cuts both ways, though, and it’s also no surprise that the husband is now unsure if he can be happy sharing a home, and life, with someone who jumps to such biting rhetoric over his inability to get swept in one particular pop culture phenomenon.

His fellow Kikonsha no Hakaba users, on the other hand, showed far less wavering in how they’d handle the situation.

Get divorced. You don’t want that kind of POS woman raising your future kids. It’s really strange that she’d go hide out at her parents’ house just over that. That’s just weird. Do you think there’s some other reason she ran out that she’s not telling you about? If you’ve got that much money, you should hire a private investigator to look into what she’s been up to. I bet she’s seeing some guy on the side.

The husband responded that his wife hasn’t done anything to make him doubt her fidelity, though, so for now it seems to truly be a simple case of her faithfulness to Frozen. Given the severity of the wife’s reaction, it looks like working out some sort of mutually amicable resolution is going to take a very long time.

▼ Hopefully they can resolve things in less time than it takes to get “Let It Go” out of your head.

Source: Kikonsha no Hakaba

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