J-pop diva Kumi Koda recently announced her engagement to Kenji03 of the rock band Back-On, and revealed that the pair had met earlier in the year when they collaborated on a song. She didn't mention that Kenji03 had previously dated Koda's sister, TV baka (silly) personality Misono, but that qualifying bit of intelligence wasn't what concerned her management. While telling the press that the couple would register their union at the end of December, Koda's spokesperson added that the singer was not pregnant.

It seemed an odd point to make, but as it turns out rumors were already circulating that Koda was with child. She and Kenji03 hadn't been together that long, and these days so-called dekichatta kekkon — marriages precipitated by unplanned pregnancies — are as common among show-biz folk as botox treatments. Then, a couple of days later, Koda wrote on her blog that she was, indeed, several weeks along. The reason she didn't report the happy news sooner was because her doctor said "not to break it just yet, since I was not in my stable period of pregnancy."

Koda said she had been "gifted with a new life," thus preempting in coverage of her announcement the word "dekichatta," which usually connotes a mistake. Some English-language reporters translate the term as the colloquial "shotgun wedding," which, with its image of a hayseed father shoving a reluctant bridegroom into a church, is way off. Dekichatta-kon (as it is commonly shortened to) more likely conjures up the image of a young woman informing her boyfriend she's pregnant and then him shrugging and saying they might as well get married, which isn't a very romantic image. Koda's use of the word sazukari (gift) carries with it the notion of divine serendipity, thus removing sex — not to mention responsibility — from the equation. Other alternative euphemisms include omedeta-kon (auspicious union) and the made-up phrases favored by the wedding industry, "double happy" and "angel wedding."