TOKIO's Kokubun Taichi announces his marriage through card to fanclub members

TOKIO's Kokubun Taichi announced his marriage on 11 Sep and submitted the marriage application with his wife before he went for the filming of his daily morning programme at TBS "Hakunetsu Life Vivit" on the same day. According to reports, Kokubun's wife is a former TBS employee who is three years younger than him and they met through work 10 years ago in 2005. The couple started dating in May 2008 before Kokubun admitted to this relationship in March 2009 when news of this first appeared in a female's magazine. His wife left TBS at the end of 2010 and the two of them have been living together for some time.

After TOKIO finished the celebration activities for their 20th anniversary last year, Kokubun was said to have discussed with his agency on the topic of marriage and thought that it was good timing to move on to the next stage of his life since he is already 41. Before the announcement, he had arranged for the sending of cards to TOKIO fanclub members to let them know the news first. Although Kokubun had planned to hold a press conference to share the news on the day of his marriage after the airing of his programme, he postponed it in consideration of the ongoing floods in the Kanto and Tohoku regions brought about a typhoon and the people affected by the natural disaster. When interviewed about Kokubun's marriage, fellow TOKIO members offered their congratulations readily.

Here is a list of Johnny Jimusho's artistes who got married in recent years (numbers in brackets refer to ages at the time of the marriage):

June 1994 - Kondo Masahiko (29) & a former company employee (28)
December 2000 - Kimura Takuya (28) & Kudo Shizuka (30)
September 2007 - Inohara Yoshihiko (31) & Seto Asaka (30)
March 2008 - Yamaguchi Tatsuya (36) & former model (31)
October 2010 - Higashiyama Noriyuki (44) & Kimura Yoshino (34)
May 2013 - Kazama Shunsuke (29) & former company employee (35)

Source: Sponichi 1 / Sponichi 2 / Sponichi 3 / Sponichi 4