Japanese pop star Ayumi Hamasaki is going to divorce her Austrian actor Manuel Schwarz after just a year into marriage.

Hamasaki told fans that she had initiated the split, explaining that she felt unable to keep the promise she made to Schwarz, who lives in Los Angeles, that the pair would live together in America. “Since the Tohoku disaster, I have had the feeling that I don’t want to be apart from Japan,” she wrote. “As a result I have been spending more and more days away from him.”

“We spoke about this and we thought we could maintain our relationship by travelling to see each other, but at some point, physical distance becomes emotional distance,” she explained. “When I thought about our future, I realized I couldn’t see myself returning to the state of mind I was in when I agreed to live in America.”

The couple met each other when filming Hamasaki’s Virgin Road MV (Schwarz as lead actor) in August 2010. They tied the knot in Las Vegas on January 1, 2011.