Getting married in Japan Part 2: Chosing the venue

I am sorry to have kept you all waiting, here comes the second installment in my tremendously popular "getting married in Japan" series and this time I am going to focus on how to pick the correct venue.

As I have previously laid out, we did chose to not do any Japanese wedding thingy ruling out all temples and such questionable areas, and adding to that that neither of us are religious and particularly wanted to have a church wedding, that's the path that we had laid out for us as we pursued option two "Trying to manouver through the whole planning with at least a trace of dignity".

For some strange reason, it seems like a magazine entitled "Zexy" (classy) have an extremely dominant hold of the wedding planning market here in Japan and with alarming frequency (I think it's monthly, but that's alarming enough) they put out a magazine with a list of possible venues with prices, pictures and all that kinda stuff in there. The magazine is slightly larger than the Tokyo phonebook but has a little more color and pictures at least. Not to mention the additional "Japan resort Wedding" and "Overseas Resort Wedding" specials that they also seem pump out with the same alarming frequency.

We quickly realized that we had a three main categories to chose from; the restaurant wedding, the hotel wedding or the wedding facility wedding. The restaurant wedding seemed nice, on paper, but some quick calculations showed that the cost would be pretty horrid unless we could find a restaurant with exactly the same space as the planned number of guests. Also, adding to that, if a separate venue would be picked for the ceremony, would add all kinda logistic problems to the whole deal. The Wedding facility wedding initially looked pretty nice, but after looking at some estimates and discovering some of the hidden costs in there, as well as the mild degree of tackiness (hey, everything's pink!) that this option would mean pretty quickly made us discard this idea as well.

So, as some of you have figured out, we decided to go with the Hotel Wedding option, and I think I will dive deeper into the hazards of that in the next installment!