Ayu is engaged...again

Ayumi Hamasaki is engaged again.

Ayumi announced that she is engaged to a man she has known for 6 months, which is more like 5 minutes.

Ayumi's latest victim is a medical student who is rumored to be 10 years her junior.

Is dis tlap? Is dis tlap? IS DIS TLAP? I don't know.

This woman has had as much luck with relationships over the past two years as she's had maintaining her chart relevance - in the wake of having Kumi Koda debuting higher on the ORICON charts with an album which sold less than hers and Namie Amuro just outright slaughtering her album sales.

We joke about Ayu's desperation to get married and poke further fun at her really wanting things to work with a white dude. But this 'quick fix' thing Ayu has been on since Manuel is kinda sad. I can see why Ayu is in a rush to get married. For many women they don't see themselves as having only a biological clock, but a marriage clock which ticks up to the age of 30 - by which point many women would like to ideally be married. But in Japan there is a much greater insistence on a woman being married and settled by a certain age. This rule has been broken by many women in J-Pop, namely Namie Amuro who fell pregnant out of wedlock at a young age, got shotgun married and then divorced. And also Hikaru Utada who got married out of nowhere and then divorced very publicly and is still without child. But it doesn't change that these pressures and perceptions exist and that women feel the urgency to aspire to marriage by a certain age. It seems to me that as Ayu begins to lose her grip on her career that she's beginning to try and clutch desperately at marriage. Undoubtedly with her 7 year relationship to Tomoya Nagase still in the back of her mind - as chances her if she were still with him, she would have been married to him by now.

Ayu is entitled to be happy and with somebody she loves, just as we all are. I just wish it would sink in for more of us that there is no rush to get engaged and that marriage is a journey, not a destination. Marriage shouldn't be something you go into just to tick it off of a check-list. It should be something which you want to happen because it feels right for you at the right time. Regardless of your age. A real man will not look down on a woman who is single at a certain age or overlook her for somebody younger just because. It's unfortunate that there aren't more men within the sphere of these womens lives for them to believe and accept it as a truth.

If Ayu manages to focus on her relationship and give her career a break, then maybe this will actually work for her for this time around. One thing she needs to stop doing is parading her new man around in music videos and album covers. Ain't nobody trying to see this woman release some Love once again shit after Love songs and Love again.