Getting Married in Japan Epilogue – The Wedding Night

With the start-up of the "buying a house" series, I also thought that I should add a little epilogue to this immensely popular series of posts on the subject you probably are most interested in; the wedding night...

Our wedding was booked several months in advance at the hotel and included in all the fees was also one night’s stay at a wedding suite so we wouldn’t have to worry about going back home on our wedding night. Basically our wedding night after the reception was over turned out something like this:

1. When checking into our room after the ceremony, we realize that the wedding suite that had been booked 3 months before had two separate small beds!!!


2. After the wedding, we had booked in massage for both of us at the hotel salon and Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman had to tell the therapist "just let him sleep" when I fell asleep during the massage and started snoring loudly and flailing my arms and legs, making her job quite difficult...
   
3. Since we hardly had the time to eat anything during the actual reception we realized how roaring hungry we were at around 11pm and went down to the convenience store in the hotel and pigged out on fried chicken, rice balls and other delicious convenience store fare!
4. Then we curled up in one of the small beds and snuggled the night away...

Getting Married in Japan Part 13 - The Soundtrack

I know I promised to actually close down this series of posts, but just because of that I obviously remembered some other things that I thought I should mention.

One very important thing for the wedding and reception was to put together a soundtrack for all the events and happenings during the reception and wedding ceremony. Considering that me and Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman has quite different taste in music, this required some quite hard negotiations and give-and-take.

For the main "wedding song" for the entrance of the bride, we chose to have the duet song "You're the One" with Shane MacGowan of the Pogues fame and Moya Brennan, partly because it's a really great song that I like with a really good type of "The Beauty and the Beast" contrast in the voices of Shane and Moya which I thought was quite fitting with me and Mrs. Sunshine (yes, she would be the Beauty) and I also really wanted to fit in the full blown boozer Shane MacGowan somewhere in the wedding soundtrack.

Considering all the events and stuff that took place during the wedding, a quite extensive soundtrack had to be put together, here's the full list and for your entertainment you can try and see if you can figure out which songs were chosen by me and which were chosen by Mrs. Sunshine:

Love Story -Taylor Swift: Entry of Guests
Worlds On Fire - Erasure: Entry of Guests Cont.
Celebration - Kylie Minogue: Entry of bride and Groom
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun - Cyndi Lauper: Cake Cutting
Gotta Feeling - Black Eyed Peas: Bride and Groom temporary leaves for "image change"
Dancing Queen - ABBA: Re-entry and handing out of small gifts
Together - Thermostatic: Re-entry and handing out of small gifts Cont.
The Joker - Fatboy Slim: Champagne glass pyramid
When You Say Nothing At All - Ronan Keating: Gifts to Parents
New beginnings - Universal Poplab: Bride and Groom exits
Finally Found - Honeyz: People leave the room

I really wanted to put Front 242 and Tiamat in there somewhere, but it proved a bit too challenging... At least I could put in Close with the Mobile homes in the "profile video".

(Couldn't find the Thermostatic and Universal Poplab songs, but linked to other stuff by them so you get the vibe)

Getting married in Japan Part 12: Balancing the Cultures

So now finally I will put an end to this series of sensational posts about getting married in Japan with a thoughtful and insightful summary. As you might have figured out if you've read the posts up until now everything ended happily and well but with a fair share of challenges leading up to it. If anyone finds themselves in a similar situation or just out of general curiousity have a question just leave a comment here or send me a mail.

One of the things that we early on decided when we made the decision to have the wedding in Japan, was to not have a "typical" Japanese wedding and to make sure that Swedish culture and customs ere also properly represented. With this I don't mean a strongly traditional Swedish wedding reception/dinner (hey, I hardly know what that means), but a modern relaxed one, mirroring the modern Japanese wedding form we had chosen.

We wanted to have the wedding reception reflect both of us and also to have the foreign guests visiting Japan not feel too lost and give the Japanese guests a reason to let their hair down and be perhaps a little more relaxed than custom otherwise would regulate. Yeah, so that was the plan and in theory it was a great concept... But this approach was severely tested against reality.

Basically what happened was that each evaluation was performed according to something like the decision tree here:

I think you understand what the results of this mostly ended up as... For basically each item there existed a Japanese custom and when weighed against the Swedish/Western custom the Japanese turned out stricter and was therefore given priority... Despite our intent of having our two cultures reflected in the reception I very soon started to feel the scales weighing in very very heavy on the Japanese side and for a time there I was almost giving up.

But in the end, I think the balance turned out very good, we did have the toastmaster Japanese style, but having a foreign friend leading it in English made it more informal, we did have the obligatory gifts but we snuck in some Swedish stuff in there that made it stand out among other things. But having the balance right turned out to be one of the most difficult things during the planning.

Getting married in Japan Part 11: The name game

Ok, I know that I promised that I would soon tie up this series and move to the next exciting series called "Buying a house in Japan", but as I looked at my earlier post, I just realized that I should also mention some of the excitement that came in the bureaucracy that we went through at the City Office when registering our wedding.

The whole process went basically fine when we were at the City Office, all the paperwork seemed to be in order and we had decided that Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman would take my Swedish family name (not the Japanese) as her name. During the time of form filling this went perfectly fine and we met with no objections from the poor clerk working the weekend shift.

When Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman a few days later went to the City Office to pick up the documentation on the legal registration of the wedding she noticed that they had added both my Japanese and Swedish family name to her, without properly telling her. Obviously she complained and tried to convince them that legally in Sweden it's two separate names and that the primary name was my Swedish family name so it should be perfectly fine that she only got that. This stirred up some considerable confusion in the office and they decided that they needed to call the Swedish Embassy and have them confirm that what Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman was saying was true.

Quickly thereafter she called me and told me of the situation, and me in turn, worried that they might reach some incompetent temp staff at the embassy who would give them the wrong information, quickly called them up and asked the person in charge to make sure she was the one taking the call and that she would give them the correct information...

In the end, the embassy managed to convince the City Office that our way was completely acceptable they grudgingly agreed to remove the Japanese family name from her records, but it was quite annoying... But in the end, I'm sure that our name problems pale in comparison with what other people has endured; Japan is very poorly equipped to deal with names that don't clearly fit in the Japanese system...

Getting married in Japan Part 10: The REAL wedding

Please let me start this post with a stunning revelation; all my previous posts about the wedding and the preparations has been blatant lies!

Ok, I admit I just wrote that to shock a bit; we actually did have a wedding ceremony, reception and so as I've laid out in my posts, so it's not a lie in that sense. But the real formal legal wedding actually took place a few months before the ceremony... You see, in Japan there is a complete separation between the legal wedding and any ceremony; the wedding is registered in the city office and if you have any image of this carrying with it some form of ceremony or flair, think again. In Japan, it is a pure bureaucratic form filling exercise.

Me and Ms. Sunshine went on a Saturday to the Itabashi city office to register our wedding. On weekends the "office" consists of a small reception behind a heavy metal door in a gray corridor. Looking very much like a small janitor office than anything else. The person manning the desk also doesn't seem particularly excited about being there working on a weekend and is even less excited when people show up and he actually has to do any work. Ok, to be fair, the guy was nice enough but the utter lack of enthusiasm for his work kinda oozed out of him.

So, we filled in a few forms, the gray dude pointed to where and what we should fill in, looked over the papers and finally at the end he said, very unenthusiastically "congratulations" and reluctantly agreed to take a picture of us in the gray corridor holding up the document.

The formal wedding reception was held with only me and Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman in attendance sharing a small bottle of champagne and some cheese standing outside the office in the subway entrance since it was raining a bit outside. No speeches were held and no relatives sang for us at that day... The picture is an actual picture of the corridor where we legally tied the knot.

We did have a small debate later on which date to celebrate as our real wedding anniversary but we both pretty quickly agreed that compared to the wedding ceremony and reception with family and friends, the form filling exercise in the gray corridor paled in comparison... I know some people make quite an effort to have both the legal wedding registration and the ceremony at the same date but we didn't really want to have to stress with that running around the place.

With this, this exciting series is now drawing to an end, the next post will be some closing thoughts on how everything went, but if anyone has any questions or stuff they want me to mention feel free to leave a comment and I'll do my best to answer that.

Getting married in Japan Part 9: The Seating Order...

I think that putting together the seating charts in a western wedding is quite challenging in how it strive to mix the guests up and alternate ladies and men to make sure everyone has a good fit in terms of seating partner and meets new people.

In one way the Japanese wedding is more straightforward; you got those six guy friends from your college baseball team? Sure! Whatever, just put them together at a table and let them entertain themselves, you don’t have to think about mixing in ladies or other guests. Seating the families is not that much of a problem either although I found it a bit puzzling (still do actually...) why the closest family members get seated at the tables furthest away from the main table of the newlyweds.

So to say that seating charts is a big issue in a Japanese wedding would actually be a lie, in theory it's quite simple since it's just a matter of squeezing in groups of friends together and mix up whatever stragglers you have at some loser table. But... since a Western wedding usually mixes guests up a bit and I, stupidly, thought it could be fun to try and implement a little of this practice at our wedding since our wedding by itself is a mix of cultures. Ms. Sunshine wasn't aggressively against the idea, in theory, but progressively as we tried to piece things together it turned out that some groups of friends would be next to impossible to separate or risk inducing terrible culture shock injuries.

In the end, what happened was that some of the larger groups got broken out into sub-groups and placed, trying to alternate men and women at least a little bit. In the end it turned out to be quite futile and some of the comments on the seating I received was:

From the group of consultant colleagues I split up under the stupid assumption that since they meet every f**king day anyway it would be more fun to split up a little at least and meet some other people: "(Whiny voice) f**k Salaryman, why can’t we just sit together?!"

From a friend who specifically had requested to be seated next to some hot chick and whom we placed next to a friend of Ms. Sunshine, known for her slightly loose morals assuming that it could be a good combination: "(Whiny voice) f**k Salaryman, why did you place me next to that woman- man-thing who just kept drinking, not eating the food and speaking in a loud voice when people were giving speeches?" (Ok, this was a slight miscalculation since I had been led to believe, by Ms. Sunshine, that this girl was of considerable hotness in addition to promiscuity and being a masseuses as profession, but turned out to look slightly transvestitish and being generally loud..).

From a friend I had placed next to a person with a common interesting in cooking, in response to a question from me whether they talk anything about food: "f**k Salaryman, there hardly was any time with all the events going on all the time”

I get one thing that is more simple at a Japanese wedding, but I guessed I dropped the ball completely on this one! In the end, it was a lot of work for nothing, we should have just gone with the groups from the beginning!

Coming up, one of the last installments in this series; the actual wedding...

Getting married in Japan Part 8: The "Events"

As I have alluded to in several of my previous entries, Japanese weddings are usually pretty eventful affairs with a tight schedule to keep. This obviously makes the previously discussed toastmasters job a lot more difficult, but it also puts higher demands on preparation before the wedding since everything has to be carved in stone before the event kick-off...

Now, I'm of course talking about major events such as the "profile video" that need to be scheduled in, but also keeping in mind that Japanese people are far from spontaneous in formal events such as a wedding reception, all the speeches need to be agreed upon and put in the schedule. That a Japanese friend or relative would spontaneously decide that it would be nice to do a brief improvised speech is basically unheard of. Friends and relatives basically need to be intimidated with violence or bribed to agree to take on this task... One of Ms. Sunshine's friends agreed only after she had been reminded how Ms. S. had given a speech at her wedding quite a few years earlier and how it was time to return the favor...

There are plenty of "standard" events such as speeches, the profile video, cake cutting etc. that are common with western weddings, but the Japanese take this one step further with the tight management of time (our schedule was down to the minute...) and reluctance to have any prolonged time of downtime where nothing exciting is occurring. This makes the wedding a very very nice market for the hotels and sites arranging the wedding since they can sell in pretty interesting "events" to strategically place at the wedding, for a hefty price. Let me give you an example that can help you to perhaps visualize how a typical event would look like:

The bride and groom has departed the room a little earlier and now the guests are enjoying the food and perhaps actually having time to converse a bit with the person next to them. All of a sudden the lights go out and a spotlight focuses on the door which are opened by some hotel peon, revealing the bride and groom holding a bottle of fluorescent liquid of some exciting color. The toastmaster announces something in the vein of "now the newly married couple will share a little of the love they have for each other with all the guests". The couple goes to each table of guests and pour a bit of the liquid into some vase already placed on the table and "light" up each of the tables, when all tables have received their little share of the "love" the couple goes up to stand by the main table. The toastmaster follows up "now the couple will together, as husband and wife, go on and create a new family and love and cherish each other". Now the couple poor the liquid into a large vase already filled with a clear liquid and as they do that the liquids react and the vase glows brightly with a new color. Cue the smoke machine and soundtrack emphasizing the amazing event that just took place...

I think you can get the gist of the general corniness of these events and both me and Ms. Sunshine were in full agreement that we did not want to resort to this type of events... However, for a while it was a bit dangerous since we had an calm period of ~10min in the agenda that "needed" to be filled with something. But at the last minute, an artistically gifted cousin on the Japanese side agreed to sing (under severe threats of violence, bribes and flattery mixed) filling the schedule to the brim...

Coming up next... The horror of the seating charts...

How to get two bottles of champagne on the honeymoon - A step by step guide

Now with Christmas drawing close and this being clearly seen in a radical drop in visitors down to almost half of what is usual on a regular weekday, I thought I could relax a bit and let my hair out. Everyone outside of Japan is probably celebrating Christmas now anyway and the only one who can muster up leaving a comment is the faithful Penguine, but his usual wit doesn't cut as sharp as it used to.

With that said, I thought I could return back to a side-track of my "Getting Married in Japan" series and a little trick from the honeymoon I could share with you.

How to get two bottles of champagne on your honeymoon:

• Book a tour through a Japanese travel agency to a place often frequented by Japanese tourists (e.g. Hawaii )


• Have one or more names that are vaguely Japanese but leaves some room for ambiguity


• Make sure that the hotel gives a complimentary bottle of champagne for honeymooners


• Get one bottle with a congratulatory message in Japanese – drink bottle


• Next day, get another bottle with a congratulatory message, in English this time – drink bottle


• When bottles has been drunk, be sure to tell every hotel staff you meet that could be working with the catering that you are a Japanese-English bilingual couple and enjoy the expression when you hit someone who gets a little white in the face and laughs nervously

Getting Married in Japan Part 7 - The Toastmaster...

From my earlier posts, I think you can see that considerable planning needs to go into a wedding here in Japan . But not only is the preparation phase dealt with very carefully, it is also of high importance that the actual event goes smoothly. I will deal with the program and events for the wedding reception and the planning of that more in detail in an upcoming post since there are quite a few amusing stories in that as well.

But this time, I thought I should discuss the role and responsibilities of the toastmaster during a Japanese wedding reception. Well, in terms of role, there is basically no big difference compared to a toastmaster at a European wedding reception; they are the ones making sure that the speeches and events fit in well in the program, and are in charge of making sure that things go somewhat according to plan.

For a Swedish wedding, this is not an extreme challenge since time does not need to be so strictly managed and there is a lot less risk of offending anyone by mispronouncing the name or having the order mixed up and making relative X hold his/hers speech before the much more important relative Y. As you can understand, it’s much stricter in Japan …

This area was probably the one where me and Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman had the most arguments (thinking about it, this was basically the only area of friction) since she was very concerned about things going correctly according to Japanese customs so none of her more traditional and conservative relatives would be insulted, while I wanted to have it in a relaxed and personal way. The difficulties we had was in finding a middle ground in this and also how to solve the language problem since the guests would be a mixed bunch of Japanese and English speakers with quite a few not bilingual, requiring either a bilingual toastmaster or a translator to one of the languages.

Most people in Japan probably use a professional toastmaster/MC since that gives some assurance on things being managed professionally and with a minimum of mistakes. The toastmaster/MC would then be exclusively committed to that role and would not participate in the overall dinner and merriment. I was very resistant to the idea of having a professional toastmaster and especially the one bilingual American MC they had available annoyed me with that "HEY EVERYONE LET’S HAVE A GREAT WEDDING, MY NAME IS HARRY" faux-foreign style that some of you fellow foreigners who have lived in Japan might understand (it’s foreign, but packaged in a way that makes Japanese more comfortable with it, but makes the non-Japanese crowd feel awkward). Not to mention that it would cost a significant amount of money (around $2,000 USD…).

Since things were reaching the desperate stage and we needed to decide how to deal with this. After asking around among some of my bilingual friends here who I thought might be up to the task, but considering that these friends live in Japan and know how a wedding here works they also knew what kind of pressure this would mean, and as a result; they politely declined (just enjoying the party probably was a lot more appealing to them).

In the end, I turned to my good old friend Mr. Politician who was coming for the wedding, all the way from Sweden, and used to public speaking. In the normal Swedish way he accepted the task with honor, mentioning who he had been the toastmaster at some weddings in Sweden previously and was very honored to be asked and gladly accepted... I believe that he probably thought it would be a fun and relaxed task...

However, after waiting a few weeks after having him accept the task and making sure that it would be too late for him to turn back on his promise, I started to gradually reveal the extent of the task before him...

I am not sure on how he reacted to the stuff we mailed to him in advance to allow him to prepare for the task at hand; the time schedule charts in excel, down to individual minutes, and long strings of text that it was VERY IMPORTANT that he read exactly as they were at exactly the right time. To solve the issue of translator, with a non Japanese speaking toastmaster, we simply assigned that to The Boy, who I perceive as a cross between my son and an immigrant worker I can abuse. He only needed to follow the toastmasters lead, so the work was considerably lighter.

One of the first things I did after my friend arrived in Japan was to take him to the wedding planner for a detailed review of the activities and his tasks during the reception together with the wedding planner. During the two hour long meeting where all details and events were discussed, my friends face got gradually whiter and whiter as the extent and responsibility of his task sank in, with a tight time schedule to manage, Japanese names to remember and things he needed to take care in, to not risk offending any conservative Japanese family member.

With the risk of ending this post with a little anti-climax, in the end, he passed it with flying colors and managed to keep a nice balance between Japanese time keeping and Swedish informality, making both sides of the family very happy with the event. But at the end, he looked completely exhausted and mentioned to us that "this isn't like a Swedish wedding at all, now I know how it must feel to be the MC of a royal wedding in Sweden...".

So yeah, if someone asks you to play toastmaster at a Japanese wedding, consider it very carefully before you accept...

Getting Married in Japan Part 6 - The "Profile Video"

In all honesty, this next installment in this immensely popular series of posts does not deal with something that is a necessity for a wedding in Japan, but it still is something that is very likely to be discussed at some point.

The topic at hand is the "Profile Video" and I believe that it is not a completely unique thing for Japan, similar videos can be found at western weddings as well from time to time. The purpose of the "Profile Video" is basically to introduce the bride and the groom to the guests, usually with a lot of pictures of them as kids and following them as they grow older with some more or less witty comments and catchy music.

Early on in the planning, Ms. Sunshine made it pretty clear that she wanted to have such a video and since I could find no immediate objections to the idea as such, I basically agreed to the concept. Then came the search and planning, some samples were ordered home from professional companies that could edit a video if they got pictures, text and some overall direction. However... the quotes we received were all around $1,000 USD which is a quite hefty sum considering that the samples we saw were less than overwhelmingly impressive.

So, I decided to take matters into my very own competent hands with the help of powerpoint, photoshop, windows movie maker and some funky tunes. Making the main part where the two of us are introduced with pictures and stuff was not the real problem, the problem I faced was in making a fun intro to the whole thing. Some of the samples had (badly) made spoofs of Star Wars, Mission Impossible and similar stuff, something that I thought was a bit amusing. Some friends were also pulled in in trying to help out, but with just a few weeks to the wedding I still had not reached a satisfactory introduction that would set the tone for the rest of the video and, to some extent, the reception as well since the video would be shown pretty early at the start.

After some considerable frustration the inspiration finally came to me and the intro you can see here got made, again, no stupid Youtube or other things, this video is exclusively available here at Salaryman's!:

The reactions? Well, the laughs were definitely heavier among the foreigners in the audience while the Japanese didn't really let loose until Kim Joing Il and Obama. However, Ed Gein was met with complete silence... People just need to get educated!

Getting Married in Japan Part 5 - I appreciate your gift so much that I want to give you a gift as thanks

As you probably have read in my previous post in this educational series of posts, there’s a lot of money circulating around in the system in conjunction with a wedding in Japan regardless of the type of ceremony, reception or such. It can happen that a friend of the family hears about the wedding and even though they are not close enough to be included in the official invitation, they still feel like they want to give some gift and congratulatory message. This is usually a smaller sum of cash (this can vary wildly, but around $100 USD is pretty normal I would think).

Ok, so you get a card and $100 USD cash from that former boss of your father whom you met when you were a kid, nice you might think, but it doesn’t really end there. To thank the person for the gift, you need to thank him/her with a gift of your own. This time cash is no good; it should be a physical gift and the general guideline is that the list price of the gift should be in the vicinity of 50% of the cash you received in the first place. Here you have a minor opportunity to save some money in case you can find something at a discount, the gift usually is some form of plate, glass or similar thing.

So now you got the cash gift and you spent basically half of it on getting a thank you gift to send back to the person and he/she in turn will send you a thank you card thanking you for the gift. Depending on the nature of the new thank you card you might need to consider sending a thank you postcard back to the person and pray that it ends there.

Broken down, the flow looks something like this, 4 active steps:
$100 USD cash gift received - $50 USD spend to purchase and send a physical gift back – Thank you card for the thank you gift is received – Thank you postcard or e-mail is sent to thank the person for the thank you card – END

I personally feel that if the flow could be simplified into these two active steps:
$50 USD cash gift received – Thank you card sent – END

...everyone would be happier in the end and save us all a lot of trouble and time, however keeping things simple is not always how the Japanese like to keep it...

Getting married in Japan Part 4 – Financing the wedding

As I hinted at in my previous entry in this immensely popular series of posts, getting married in Japan can prove to be a quite costly affair. Like everything, you can of course pay a higher or lower amount depending on how you chose to do things. A small crappy hotel in Yamanashi prefecture obviously will save you a lot of money compared to an extravagant wedding at the Four Seasons Hotel in central Tokyo .

But you will need to spend some money, this cannot be avoided. The actual ceremony you can probably get away with relatively cheap even if you splurge on having a Caucasian English teacher playing the role of priest, at a fee of roughly $1,000 for 10 minutes of actual work (we didn’t). But after that, it is normal to have a wedding reception where food and drinks are served.

Since I am a respectable Salaryman with a stable income, and Ms. Sunshine comes from a respectable family, it was more or less required that we have a reasonably nice reception with a full course menu and a decent selection of drinks so our guests could at least get a little wasted to compensate for their time. But treating a relatively large number of guests to a full course dinner menu with drinks at a nice location with professional staff, not to mention the required gifts to the guests (that’s a separate entry) will cost you, there’s no escaping that fact. Add to that the green napkins and other stuff that I brought up in the last entry and you might face a quite intimidating sum at the end of the day…

But do not despair! You see, in Japan , the guests do not bring those annoying gifts you neither need nor want, instead they come with cold hard cash. Not only is it cold and hard, it’s also required to be newly printed bills without a wrinkle in a fancy envelope. The rules are also there: if you are a friend, it is expected that you bring 30,000 yen (~$300) as a gift (less than that and you have cheap friends who need to learn some manners!) and family members usually give more if they are senior (uncle, aunt etc.). Keeping track of this can be pretty difficult, but the sum from the families is usually governed by what has been given earlier; Say for instance that uncle B’s son got married a few years back and Ms. Sunshine’s parents brought X amount of money as a gift, then they are expected to give the same amount back at their daughters wedding.

The money is basically circulated inside the system, don't get too attached to it since when that uncle B's son has grown up and is getting married you have to give it back to him, but no worries, as long as you have a child who then gets married you'll get it back. So the money you can expect from the family members can be predicted if related cousins or such has been married before. Yes, it is complicated.

I basically did a business case before the wedding and knowing roughly how much we would get from friends and family, we managed to keep our private losses at a minimum while having a pretty pleasant reception without going on the cheap. Hell, with some level of innovation, I'm sure that this could be turned into a systematic money machine!

Getting Married in Japan Part 3 – Green napkins cost extra

I should first apologize for the slow speed in which I am following up on this immensely popular series of posts. For those of you who need a quick recap, I recommend going through the earlier chapters in this series you can find here.

After locating a pleasant and reasonable hotel with the facilities we required for our not too elaborate plan of a wedding ceremony followed by a wedding reception/dinner we sat down with the wedding planner to discuss more in detail what could be done and within what budget. Our planner turned out to be a young guy with nicotine stained teeth with a quick sly answer for any of our questions and concerns, if you think Jennifer Lopez in the movie “the wedding planner” and then don’t, you are getting somewhat close to our guy.

After some light probing from his side on how much money we were looking to spend (to which we wisely stated a considerably lower sum than we were actually thinking of spending) he quickly whipped out a quote that looked quite reasonable and within our budget. However, after the initial decision of location and the meetings the following weeks with our planner, the florist and other people from the hotel we quickly learned that things were a bit deceiving…

Before we made the final decision we also attended a dinner where we could try out the dinner course for next to nothing, and see examples of color coordination and flower arrangements together with other hopeful couples. About half way into the dinner it turned into a hardcore sales event where they tried to push a host of “spectacular events” on us that we could pay up a hefty amount of money to have at our reception, most of them involving smoke, bubbles or fluorescent liquids and the most elaborate ones a combination of all of them. Needless to say, the efforts were wasted on us…

Following that, a very common occurrence was discussions like the one below:

Florist: So, what type of flowers are you thinking of?
Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman: Well, we liked the orange ones we saw at one of the tables
Florist: Oh… In your package there are only rotten gray flowers included, but we can upgrade you, no problem
Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman: And we liked that vase
Florist: Oh… no vase is included in your package, but sure, we can upgrade you, what color of table cloth did you like?
Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman: We liked the green cloth with the orange napkins
Florist: Oh… green cloth, that’s extra and the orange napkins will also cost a little extra, but sure, we are more than happy to upgrade you

This type of conversation was repeated a large number of times…

Coming up next: Financing the wedding…

Leaving mainland Japan for some honeymoon!

Again, sorry, for the drop off in posting these lastest week, even salarymen get some vacation from time to time but don't interpret it as a lack of fun/bizarre/interesting things to blogg about! I have quite the backlog now with stuff I will be pumping out over the coming days!

As my previous post hinted, there was a contingency plan to get out of the worst heat here in Tokyo with me and Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman's honeymoon. We actually chose to not venture abroad this time and instead did some local travel to the 48 prefecture of Japan, slightly far off from the mainland honshuu; the islands of Hawaii. Needless to say, we had a great time and now we just have to readjust back to the heat in Tokyo over the coming days before it's back to hitting the office again... More reports on some of the more interesting things we experienced will come, but just a short update now to say that I am alive and rest assured that posting will soon pick up it's regular pace!

Professional Illustrator at work

As promised earlier to Karen, to show some full frontal male nudity for my female reaers, and also some funky Salaryman graphics. My buddy Martin made some illustrations for us to use at the wedding in some of the material we put together for our guests (don't worry, I will follow up properly later on, see this as a brief intermission).

Included in the other illustrations, he also attached the image shown here, which I found quite entertaining and I gleefully showed it to Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman expecting some outrage over the poor squirrel and the genital exposure. She looked at the picture for a couple of seconds with a blank face and then stated matter of factly "Your penis is bigger than that and no, we're not gonna use that for the wedding".

Girls, no sense of fun...

The greatest show on earth!

I know that I am jumping ahead here a little bit since the official “getting married in Japan ” series really hasn’t gotten to this stage yet, but if you just see this as a brief interlude and teaser of things to come, I think we can all get along peacefully. For a wedding reception in Japan , it is customary to have entertainment, speeches and the like lined up for the guests, much as in most European countries and the US I would believe, so nothing particularly special about that.

When discussing the options with Ms. Sunshine (currently Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman) I had a little wish list of things that I wanted to have as below:

• A castrato albino pygmy choir in blackface singing “Jesus Christ Superstar”
  
• A dance troupe of Manpanzees/chumans performing interpretive dance to the song


• A family of fire breathing acrobatic midgets performing feats of strengths


• A herd of squirrels trained to play musical instruments, performing evergreens dressed up as selected US presidents

After investigating this a bit more in detail and discussing with Ms. Sunshine, we settled with having one of her cousins sing a song to a karaoke soundtrack. You can’t have it all I guess…

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!

So, thinking of getting married in Japan...?

So, perhaps you came here to the land of the rising sun, as a lad and/or lass with a song in your heart and cheeks red as red apples, and without you really realizing it, you have hooked up with the girl/guy of your dreams. You are enjoying the company of your partner (ok, "partner" is a stupid word for lover, but it saves me the time and effort in typing out "boyfriend or girlfriend") and after a while you start to realize that it's getting time to settle down and think about the future.

So you propose and if you're lucky you might even get a "yes" of varying degrees of enthusiasm back. At this stage you are probably happy, which you should, since you are still unaware of the horrors that lie await in front of you; a wedding in Japan...

Unless your partner (again, it's just to save me the time and effort in typing out "boyfriend or girlfriend") happens to be an orphan without any living relatives you are in for quite a ride... You might think that you can take the easy way out and just get married overseas and then come back to Japan married and avoid all the Japanese wedding fuss, but believe me, if your partners' (again, it's just to save me the time and effort in typing out "boyfriend or girlfriend") group of family and friends is of a reasonable size, you will still be required to hold a "second wedding" like party in any case, making it easier to just get it done with here in Japan.

So, it's been decided that you will be having a wedding in Japan. You now have to make a choice:

1. Leave all pretense of pride and good sense aside

...or...

2. Trying to manouver through the whole planning with at least a trace of dignity.

As you might have figured out, I am in this process and I did chose the second option, even though the first might provide more entertainment for you readers, my apologies but I put my own well-being ahead of this blog...

If you decide to go ahead with option "1" above, there is an assortment of things to chose from, doing a traditional "shinto" wedding is one, where you have to get decked out in a kimono, drink alcohol from the same cups and have some general chanting going on.

The second one is going to a crappy made-up chapel pretending to be vaguely Christian and having a fake priest (a foreign English teacher or "model" trying to make some extra money on the side) and go through something akin to a Christian wedding ceremony singing hymns that no Japanese guests obviously knows how to sing (unless there happens to be one or two actual Christians among the guest fluent in Japanese).

But no, me and Ms. Sunshine decided to take option "2", but believe me when I say that there are plenty of hurdles to navigate through there as well. Rest assured that I will guide you through the process here! To be continued...

(I actually did not intend to blog about this topic, but there just has been too many good stories so I can't restrain myself here really...)