Talk about a drawn-out engagement.
Japanese man Yasushi Takahashi traveled through his home country, tracking his path via GPS, so he could write out a proposal — complete with an arrow-struck heart — to his girlfriend.
She, of course, said yes.
Though he quit his job to make the trip in 2008, his home movie of it recently surfaced online. The feat is captured in a seven-minute slideshow of various landmarks that Takahashi visited during his travels (above). Not only is the film’s beginning shot like some sort of classic French new wave film, but his captions—often written in charmingly broken English—are strangely poetic and peppered with emoticons.
For instance, he begins with the vague message: “This is not a ‘record,’ but a ‘document’ that a life with ambition run through a moment,” and then explains “my heart is … adventure to unknown, mass of passion, and love for traveling.” Other gems include: “The road leads endlessly toward the horizon,” “It was snowing in spite of October,” and “I had fresh sea urchin … so good (^ ^).”
This is not the first outlandish, tech-enabled marriage proposal to grace the Internet. And Takahashi is not the first person to use GPS to draw something clever. But it’s raised the bar for the statement proposal.
In fact, you should definitely passive-aggressively bring this up when your boyfriend proposes. Something along the lines of “Yes, the dinner at Chez Panisse was wonderful, and I loved the moonlight walk, but, you know, Brian, some boyfriends travel the length of Japan to express their love for a woman.”