“International family therapy” is an emergent field within (or overarching) the field of family therapy. At this stage, it can be described as the collecting and sharing of experiences by family therapists from different countries. Recent publications (7) gather information principally from Western cultures in which systemic family therapy has grown over the past thirty years. Japan is of particular interest to Western practitioners because it is a highly successful, post‐industrial culture that differs markedly from the West. Familiar family therapy interventions often work for unfamiliar reasons, and different goals are often needed in order to respond to apparently similar family problems. An expanded sense of choice around strategies for family life and family therapy that such diversity implies is the primary contribution that this maturing, international family therapy movement can make to family therapy.