Aaron Platt MA Counseling (La Salle) · MA Sociology (UC Berkeley) · BA Sociology (NYU) Characterological & Psychodynamic Tradition →

Couples therapy in English in Japan.

Online couples therapy for English-speaking couples in Japan. Same therapist wherever you move next.

Schedule a free consultation How I work

Couples therapy in English in Japan is very difficult to find. The mental health infrastructure in Japan is limited even in Japanese; in English, options for real depth work outside Tokyo are almost nonexistent. Online is usually the only practical route.

I work with couples who need to work in English and are living in Japan. The relocation asymmetry: one person with a professional life and social world, one person building from scratch in a country whose language they may not speak. The way that imbalance affects desire, respect, and power over time. The relationship that was holding when everything was familiar and is now under pressure.

Japan has a particular intensity for couples who moved here for one person's career. The country is not easy to enter socially for people who aren't from here. If one person is embedded and the other isn't, that gap is real and it does things.

Moving for one person's career makes the other person's experience of the country contingent on the relationship. That's a specific kind of pressure.

The work

The work I do is relational and pattern-focused. I don't run through intake checklists or assign exercises between sessions. I pay attention to what happens in the room: what you're saying, what you're not saying, the moments when something shifts or goes flat or speeds up. That's the material we work with.

Most people arrive already knowing the story of their situation. They've told it to themselves a hundred times and always land in the same place. What's missing is a different angle, someone watching in real time who can name what's invisible from inside it. That's what I offer. Not interpretation from a distance, but attention in the room, offered as it happens.

I work with individuals and couples. Individual work is usually about finding the pattern underneath the presenting problem, the thing that keeps recurring in different forms across different circumstances. Couples work is about finding what the argument is really about, which is rarely what it appears to be about. Both come down to the same thing: seeing what you haven't been able to see, and from there, actually being able to do something different.

Being in Japan

Japan can be genuinely disorienting for the partner who didn't choose it, or who chose it but is finding the reality different from the expectation. The experience of being permanently outside, of warmth without real inclusion, accumulates. If that's happening to one person in the relationship and not the other, the asymmetry creates its own particular strain.

What couples bring to online therapy

Couples I work with come for recurring conflict, communication problems, infidelity and broken trust, emotional distance, codependency, resentment, sexless marriage, attachment issues, and the strain of major life transitions. Online marriage counseling and relationship therapy in English make it possible to do this work without geographic limits, whether you need a couples therapist, a marriage counselor, or relationship counseling that goes deeper than communication exercises.

How it works

Sessions are online via secure video call. I work with individuals and couples (60 minutes). Before your first session, we have a brief 15-minute call to see if this feels like the right fit for you.

What Clients Say

“I came in thinking I knew what my issues were. I’d been over them a hundred times. But those were just the things I could already see. Aaron helped me notice what I couldn’t, and that’s where everything actually started to change.”

“I didn’t think online therapy could really work. How do you feel a connection through a screen? But I’ve done in-person therapy before, and honestly, I’ve felt more understood by Aaron than by any therapist I’ve sat across from. He listens in a way that’s hard to describe until you experience it.”

“A few years ago I suddenly developed prolonged panic attacks but couldn’t begin to understand what had caused them. Having been in therapy in the past, and being a counseling intern student, I felt I had exhausted my resources trying to figure out “What is wrong with me?” I can honestly say Aaron provides a form of counseling that is difficult to find anywhere else regarding efficacy. Not only has his approach been effective, but he also has provided me a safe space to explore aspects about myself I may not otherwise have felt able to. I cannot recommend him enough as he has helped me feel more myself than ever before.”

“I’d been in and out of therapy for years. Different therapists, different approaches, none of it really stuck. Aaron helped me understand more in a few months than all of them combined. And he talked to me like a normal person, not like all this weird therapy-speak.”