There’s a lot of scoffing and scorn out there for theatrical marriage proposals, but viral videos or hidden cameras are usually harmless. Cheesy and annoying to observers, perhaps, but ain’t no thing between the betrothed. In Japan, however, we are faced with something quite different.
In a new Dutch documentary about the power of, uh, walking, we learn the story of Yasushi Takahashi, a Japanese “GPS artist” who goes by Yassan, who in 2008 traveled 4,349 miles through Japan just to propose to his beloved. But Takahashi wasn’t logging those miles simply to reunite with a long-distance lover. Rather, Takahashi actually quit his job and spent six months trekking the distance, mostly on foot, just so a GPS tracker could record his movements. The result is a marriage proposal delivered via the infantile scrawling of a GPS map.