My finance and i are going to Japan next april for a month. We are both american but we would really like to get married while we are there. From what ive read it seems that you fill out papers at town hall and then are offically married. But we really wanted to have our ceremony there. Essentially we are looking for the equivialant to a justice of the peace ceremony, something small and private with just the two of us. We will be staying in Asakusa, tokyo. Any Advice?
You can have a ceremony here with or without the civic rigamarole of filling out the papers at town hall, a process which would be meaningless for you and an irritation for the civil servants who have to process it.
You can easily hire a cheesy wedding "chapel", complete with a fake foreign "minister" to hold a ceremony for you, even if you don't have a Japanese marriage certificate. A good plan if you want to make the same mockery out of Christianity and the wedding ceremony that Japanese do.
There is no such thing as a Justice of the Peace wedding here. No concept of it and no equivalent either.
If you are people of faith, you might try to find a Tokyo church of your particular faith and contact them about holding a very simple ceremony for you. Something like that could probably very easily be arranged.
I would recommend doing the civil portion of this in the U.S. The reason is that later on in married life when things come up that you need to show proof of marriage, your registration and documentation are halfway around the world in a country whose language you don't speak (assuming that bit).
I originally married at a Tokyo ward office, like you're proposing, and within a very short time back in the U.S. I had need to submit proof of marriage to the U.S. government. I didn't trust them with my one-and-only certificate from Japan, which would have been difficult to replace. So I grabbed my wife by the hand and said, "Come on, we're going to the courthouse to get married." I turned in the (sentimentally) meaningless and easily replacable certificate as the proof that I needed.
Several months later, I dropped by the govt office and asked what had become of my marriage certificate. "Oh, did you want that back? Here." So saying, he opened a two-ring binder, snapped open the rings, and removed our now-punched certificate.
Point is, for practical reasons you may find yourself ending up doing a courthouse marriage at home afterwards anyway.
