91-year-old Nakamura Nobuko, a Japanese woman who dearly loved her Vietnamese husband, pioneering agriculturist Luong Dinh Cua (1920 – 1975), is certain that her love for Vietnam helped their love blossom.

Nobuko met and fell in love with Luong Dinh Cua, a renowned agriculturist who later became a groundbreaking farmer.

“Since 2011, I haven’t returned to Japan. I’ll be living here until I die. Some thousand people, including my kids, keep asking me why I chose to stay in Vietnam for good though I’m still of Japanese nationality. My answer is simple: as a married woman I stay where my husband was,” she shared in Vietnamese.

An everlasting cross-border romance

Nobuko’s reminiscences are depictive of Cua as a witty, loving man who nurtured an immense love of science and a burning dream of a pure and good society.

In Oct 1945, when World War II ended, 23-year-old Nobuko and Cua, then an expat student in Fukuoka, tied the knot. Cua was too poor to buy his new wife a gift for their wedding.

In the autumn of 1945, after late Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh read the Declaration of Independence, Cua shared his elation with his country’s new-found independence with his wife.

The young man declined several offers for postgraduate courses in the US as well as the opportunity to work with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and instead joined the country’s resistance war. In 1952, he took his family back to Saigon and moved to the north two years later.

Nobuko then fully understood the struggle of the Vietnamese farmer when she and her husband stepped out of the laboratory and into the paddies and lived in destitution during the country’s most dire times.

The Japanese woman stayed in Hanoi to translate and read the Japanese news bulletin for the Voice of Vietnam. On behalf of the radio station, Nobuko wrote handwritten letters to reply to Japanese audiences, thanking them for their encouragement.

When Vietnam was reunified in 1975, Cua, Nobuko, and their children were planning to move to the south, where Cua dreamed of establishing the Southern Agriculture Center. Two days before their departure, Cua had a heart attack and died in Dec 1975 at only 55.

Nobuko wrote in her diary that she came to understand and respect her husband even more when she saw long queues of students and hundreds of farmers waiting to bid their final farewell to him at his funeral.

Nobuko and her five children then decided to move to HCMC, Cua’s hometown, where she worked at the External Relations Office. Of their five children, three followed in their father’s footsteps to work in the agriculture sector.

“Everyone says that if Cua and I had lived in Japan, his career would have thrived and we would have been rich. But Cua wouldn’t be happy if he stayed in Japan. Since I moved to Vietnam, and had a blissful 30-year marriage with him, I feel I’ve been on top of the world,” Nobuko smiled.