[Crispy]

Why anyone would decide on a wedding on the basis of popular media of any origin is just beyond me. Don't they have their parents to consult about this? I thought parents were who everyone learned about marriage from, and from going to parents' friends and family marriages. I guess things are just different in Japan.

Being married by an actor in a foreign language, in a fake church...what the bloody hell? What a strange country I decided to study.

[cstaylor]

... the parents are in on the marriage... who do you think pays for it? Average weddings run $30k over here, and many of them are excuses for the parents to grease their business contacts.

I read one (lameass) excuse that went "Japanese weddings are depressing, nothing about love or livelong committment. Western weddings are uplifting and positive".

It's like those Fendi handbags you see them carry around: it's todays fashion.

[Crispy]

I can't imagine a parent going along with such a weird idea for marriage without putting up some kind of fight. After all, it's their money, they have bargaining power. Fake church that looks like ones in movies...bah. I read rather extensively about Japanese marriages for a class last semester, but the texts were a couple years old, and mostly talked about wedding houses and how they mix Western and Japanese stuff into a ceremony that was pretty well standardized, and didn't seem very hokey at all. Except for the dry ice under the cake, that was a little odd.

I'm not an old fogey, damn it, and I'm not married! I think it's boneheaded to have a wedding so tied with pop culture, they'll look at the pictures years later and ask themselves what the hell they were thinking.

[cstaylor]

I can't imagine a parent going along with such a weird idea for marriage without putting up some kind of fight. After all, it's their money, they have bargaining power. Fake church that looks like ones in movies...bah.

I'm not an old fogey, damn it, and I'm not married, and even I think it's boneheaded!

Hey man... spend a year over here, and then I want to hear your reaction. They don't understand how dopey it is... my wife does (she lived in the U.S. for eight years), so when our father suggested a wedding like that, she put her foot down. But for kids who've lived their whole lives over here?

Anyways, the ceremony doesn't mean shit anyways, it's the paperwork. The weddings aren't binding by Japanese law, only the $3 license(yes, you heard me right, $3).

[Crispy]

Yeah, yeah. I will check things out for myself, but I don't think I'm getting married or anything...

[kamome]

My guess is that being a fake minister is probably just "arubaito" and hence hardly pays well enough to cover rent and other costs in Tokyo. Maybe if you live in BFE, like Tochigi or Gunma, and commute into Tokyo when it's time to hold a "ceremony", you could scrape by.