The first mystery of Japan: Wedding in Japan According to Statistics Bureau of Japanese government (stat.go.jp/english/data/index.htm), the annual number of marriages in Japan in 2013, 661,000 couples and the marriage rate was 5.3 (per 1,000 population). The mean age of first marriage was 30.9 for men and 29.3 for women in 2013. Before the Meiji Restoration (1868), the marriages of the common men (including samurai class) took place in the homes of the brides or the bride glooms. Some previledged people and the noble people could hold their wedding ceremony at Shinto shrine. After the Restoration, it became popular to get married in Shinto shrine and also some chose to wed in Buddhist temple. After the World War II (1945), Western-style wedding was introduced. In the recent years it became the most popular way of wedding ceremony, done in the Christian tradition, complete with the chapel (though it is not a real chapel but rather a specifically designated room in a hotel that is decorated to look like one), the white dress, a priest, etc. What is mystery is that more than three quarters of all wedding in Japan is held in the western style wedding but only 1% of the whole population is Christian. The parts of Western-style weddings that appeal to the Japanese are purely aesthetic; the religious aspects are more or less non-existent. What is funny (at least to me) is that it’s generated a market for fake priests. Japanese Western-style wedding ceremonies need something to lend an air of authenticity, but hiring a real, bonafide priest is tricky. Since there are so few Christians in Japan, priests are in already short supply. Not only that, but they can be expensive to hire, and might frown upon a Christian-style wedding without any actual Christianity involved. So the companies that arrange wedding ceremonies resort to hiring people who look foreign enough to actually be Christian. You don’t need to be certified as a priest or anything, and you don’t even need to be a Christian. For all intents and purposes, being a priest in Japan is an acting gig for Westerners, a way to earn a few extra bucks on the weekend. Weddings are a $20 billion industry in Japan. Japanese wedding are notoriously expensive. A typical wedding for 50 to 100 guests in Japan costs around $30,000. It is not unusual for the cost of single wedding to exceed $100,000. Elaborate weddings features as many as five different costume changes for the bride, six-foot-high wedding cakes, champagne fountains, smoke from a dry ice machine and dinners that cost more than $500 a head.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 04:24:02 +0000
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