COUPLE KEPT APART

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31502, 17 October 1967, Page 2

COUPLE KEPT APART

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) JOHANNESBURG, Oct. 16. An elderly white South African who married a young Japanese woman two years ago said today that he was “at wit’s end” because he could not find a country where both might live.

Laurens Wiessner, aged 72, said he married Miki Koo, aged 30, a Tokyo hairdresser, in 1965. He said Japan refused him a permanent residence permit, and he has been able to visit his wife only occasionally on a temporary visitor’s permit Mr Wiessner said South

Africa would not accept the couple because Japanese were regarded as non-whites for marriage purposes, although in other circumstances they were treated as whites. He said the South African Consul in Tokyo warned him before his marriage that the couple would not be allowed to live together as man and wife in South Africa.

Plans to settle in Swaziland, Britain’s last African possession, which will receive independence next year, were stymied because they would have had to fly from Japan by way of South Africa and the Johannesburg Airport did “not have transit facilities for a white man with a Japanese wife.” Later British authorities in Swaziland refused a residence permit, he said. Mr Wiessner said ha now

commuted between Johannesburg and Tokyo, staying with his wife as long as his temporary permit lasted, then returned to South Africa to apply for a new permit Each trip cost him more than SUSI4OO in air fares. Mr Wiessner is a wealthy artist whose paintings are well known in South Africa. He said he owned South African gold shares and if the Japanese authorities gave him permission to settle in Japan he would sell the shares and invest the money in Japan by building an apartment building.

Mr Wiessner met Miss Koo during a visit to Tokyo two years ago and married her seven months ago after an engagement lasting two months. He returned to South Africa last month to complete a number of paintings.