Hi people i know it's rather weird for me to post this here.
I was watching some tv program about weddings in japan a few years back. and there was one particular hotel which caught my eye. at that time i didnt really have much interest in japanese and couldnt read what the name was.
now im trying to see if i can get any info on it. it's probably gonna be my first choice for a wedding location in future.
the hotel is a grey building with a dome-shaped structure beside it. the dome-shaped structure actually houses the chapel. so the structure pretty much swivels open to reveal the chapel within.
i know my description is pretty generic but i'd really really appreciate it if anyone can offer any clues on it? probably a website of the hotel for me to look at?
That's probably a match for dozens of places. If a couple doesn't go the traditional route to get married at a shrine, hotels have a monopoly on the market with their own chapels.
Timothy Harada's article in the Sendai Voice Online Magazine is very funny about his experience getting "rapped by the wedding industry in Japan."
Being Raped by the Wedding Industry in Japan PDF Print E-mail
Monday, 22 October 2007
My foreigner friend is getting married in Japan and I feel his frustration! I had to have one of our two wedding receptions in Japan, because my family from California and my wife's family from Niigata, Japan didn't want to meet half way in the middle to have our wedding in Hawaii, like we originally planned. In the end our wedding reception in Niigata, Japan cost us over six times the combined cost of both our wedding ceremony and our wedding reception in Orange County, California.
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The total cost of our wedding ceremony and reception in California, which I personally planned (because my wife's English isn't fluent enough and she has no connections in the US.) and successfully executed for my family cost somewhere between $3,000.00-4,000.00 (US money: a little over 300,000-400,000 yen), which is about what I had hoped to spend. Yes this is probably a lot less than some people spend in the US on their weddings, but even if I was rich, I've never believed in extravagance. However, when my wife and I first went to a ﾂ"real (which is actually ﾂ'fake'; we'll get to that later)ﾂ" wedding place in Niigata, Japan (after we came back from our US wedding) to discuss plans for our Japan wedding reception, I told my wife we should tell the wedding place that we wanted to spend no more than $10,000.00. (Actually we said 1,000,000 yen, which is a little less than $10,000.00 US. For me this seemed an outrageous price for only a wedding reception, especially when we were already legally married, but my wife had warned me that Japanese weddings are much more expensive than weddings in the US.) When we told the wedding planners in Niigata about out budget, they gave a look that said, ﾂ"are you guys ******' kidding us or what?ﾂ"
Crazily, my friend who is now getting married in Sendai told the wedding company, which his Japanese fiancée and him went to, that he only wanted to spend about $3,000.00 (under 300,000 yen). They really thought he was crazy! You can't even expect to do a ceremony in Japan for that price, even if you didn't have a reception afterwards. In fact, you can barely rent the dresses and tuxes for the wedding at that price (and in Japan you have to rent them both at the same wedding place, if you expect to have your wedding at a ﾂ"realﾂ" wedding place in Japan. Never mind that you can buy dresses and tuxes online for half the price of renting them in Japan-they don't allow you to bring your own clothes to ﾂ"realﾂ" weddings in Japan.)
So my friend was telling me about how the wedding place had asked his fiancée and him if they wanted to have flower pedals for the guests to throw at them as they were leaving the ceremony, but he was shocked when they told him it would cost $80.00 for just the petals. (I was not at all surprised, because I had already went through near cardiac arrest when the wedding place in Niigata told my wife and I that the large bouquet of flowers for our bride and groom's table at the reception in Niigata would cost us about $1,000.00 [about 100,000 yen]-no there was no gold trim on the flowers-just normal flowers that would cost about $100.00 if you ordered them on 1-800-US-Flowers and had them delivered in Japan. You also can't bring your own flowers to ﾂ"realﾂ" wedding places in Japan. Everything at the ceremony and reception has to be ordered through the wedding company, which probably adds at least a double mark up fee, like everything else in Japan.)
After a few months of arguing with my wife about the absurdity of the cost of the wedding reception in Japan, I finally fully submitted to whatever she wanted, because her family agreed to pay for most of the wedding cost, if they could keep all the gift money after the wedding (which usually just pays for the reception in Japan) (1). Despite this agreement, I gave my wife's mother about 50,000 yen (about $500) each month for about 6 months before the wedding, because I felt guilty she was going to be paying for everything upfront. We also agreed to my wife's aunt's request to take professional wedding pictures in Kimono's days before the wedding (at the absurd cost of $2,000.00 [200,000 yen-that is just for kimono rental fees and does not include the hairdresser fees for hair styling and kimono wrapping fees [a least $100.00 per person], nor the professional photographer's fees, which I have no idea how much he charged. No you don't get to keep the kimonos either, like any normal westerner might think after paying so much money. My wife wouldn't even go out with me to dinner in our kimonos after the pictures were taken, because she was afraid we might spill something on them.)
Until I started reading the book, Dogs and Demons: Tails From the Dark Side of Japan, by Alex Kerr (one of the most interesting books I've read thus far about contemporary Japan), I couldn't understand why everything in Japan is so insanely expensive. He explains in the book how every business in Japan has to pay many fees, such as license fees for everything they do, like difference licenses for selling import beer and different license fees for selling domestic beer, and licenses for having live music, etc. Unlike licensing in the US, however, which is supposed to (in theory) protect consumers, or make sure companies are doing things lawfully, like not selling drinks to minors (which many clubs in the US have lost their alcohol license for, when they got caught serving minors [no one cares in Japan]), licensing in Japan has nothing to do with insuring things are done by any standards. They are not regulations that anyone checks up on. For example, if you want to dump toxic waste in the mountains in some uninhabited part of Japan, you just have to pay a fee to some group that sounds nice like the ﾂ"Clean Mountains Coalition [this is just a name I made up, but similarly as Orwellian as the real agency names that do licensing in Japan-read the book to be shocked],ﾂ" which then gives you the permits that allow you to dump the waste. However, the agency doesn't do anything to regulate how much waste you dump or if the waste is really the waste you said it is, or what effect the waste has on the environment. The licensing fees are simply a way to insure that the Ama-kudari (2) (ﾂ"decedents from heavenﾂ"-those former government bureaucrats, who have retired from politics to ﾂ"workﾂ" for the business cartels) never have to work for a living again. So every business in Japan has to pay all these meaningless (non-regulation) fees to all these agencies that don't do anything, except give them some papers that say they can do some part of their business. (It's kind of like the fee we are supposed to pay to NHK for having a television in Japan. It doesn't matter if you even watch NHK or not, or whether or not you even understand Japanese. I know some foreigners that were tricked into paying an NHK fee, even though they only used their television to watch videos on their VCR, they don't hook the TV up to any TV antenna or watch any of the corporate garbage that is on the TV. NHK says you have to pay the fee anyway, whether you watch TV or not. My wife and I will not let the NHK guys even look in our door.)
Every business in Japan has similar fees for everything they do. However, this still doesn't justify the outrageous fees for everything in Japan. Another thing that increases the price of everything in Japan is that the relationship between the capital of Japan and each outlying area still follows a relationship that has existed ever since the Shogun moved the capital of Japan to Kamakura and made his Daimyo in each outlying area pay loyalties to the central government. So today, almost everything that is imported to Japan has to first go through customs in Tokyo, which charges a customs fee, and then it is sent through trade bureaus (not trade bureaus like in other country that regulate or help protect workers or do anything of any meaningful value) to a prefectureal government agency that then tacks on another fee, and then to a city bureau that tacks on an additional fee, etc (where there are wards and guns, you may get even more fees, all to keep Ama-kudari awash with cash.) However, this insane feudal business scheme still doesn't completely justify the outrageous fees in the wedding industry or any other of the many insanely priced industries in Japan. Some other explanations are either the upside down mentality of people on the top in business in relationship to those on the bottom in business in Japan, or the twisted mentality in Japan between the value of the ﾂ"realﾂ" and the fantasy, both of which are explained to some extent in Kerr's book.
First let's look at the upside down relationships in business (and in everything else) that exist in Japan, where the higher you are in the hierarchy, the more it's believed you should get paid for doing less work. I have quite a few foreign friends that work as fake ﾂ"priests.ﾂ" They work for one of the many wedding companies that have buildings that look like churches all over Japan, where all Japanese go to have a ﾂ"Hollywood styleﾂ" wedding. One of my friends was hired to be an ﾂ"Englishman father;ﾂ" never mind that he was from the US, and he wasn't religious. He had to speak in a fake British accent and say he was from England, because that was the fake chapel's English sales gimmick. I can't recall exactly how much my friends made for each service (they have been trying to get me to quit teaching and come over to the dark side for some time), but it's about $100.00-$200.00 (over 10,000-20,000 yen) for about ½ hour of work. However, how much does the customer pay to have a fake priest perform the wedding? Upwards of $800.00 to $1,000.00 (over 80,000-100,000 yen), which is at least a 4 to 10 time mark up fee on the cost of having the fake priest do the service. I also have musician friends who perform for weddings. The wedding places also charges about $800 - $1,000 for a piano player or a guitar player to come and play, or to play and sing a few songs for the wedding or the reception. However, the wedding place only gives the musician who does all the work a 10th to a 5th of the fee charged to the customer. Of course, the wedding place has to pay an agent to get the musician to come, or to get the priest to come, and the agent will likely take about $300 to $400 for providing the musician or priest. The musician will only get anywhere from $100 to $200 (like the priest), and the wedding place will keep up to $500.00 of the $1,000 collected from the married couple for having a few songs at their wedding, or for have a fake priest say a few words.
Although relationships in the US are similarly unjust in many businesses, when I was doing musical performances in California on the weekends, while I was a banker by day, the going rate for a booking agent's fees was around 15% - 30% of the clubs charge for the show. Therefore, if a club booked me to perform a concert for $200.00, I would have to give the agent who got me the concert anywhere from $30.00 to $60.00 and keep the other about $140.00-170.00. In Japan, it is backwards; the musician gets paid less than the agent, who doesn't do half as much work as the musician. I'm sure this is almost the same with the $1,000 bouquet of flowers; the florist most likely only gets about $100.00 for providing the flowers, and the fake wedding place keeps 90% of the 10-fold mark up fee on the flowers. Like the musician, the florist does all the work and only keeps 10% of the money collected from the bride's family.
I had to explain to my foreigner friend, however, that you can't argue with a young Japanese lady, who has gone to about six of her best friend's weddings, which each cost over 3,000,000 yen (about $30,000.00 US), and who has dreamed since high school of doing the ﾂ"Hollywood-styleﾂ" Japanese wedding at a ﾂ"realﾂ" wedding place, that you should do a non-tradition wedding at a place of your choice for a hell of a lot cheaper (like I did in the US.). This is one of the only dreams my wife has ever had, so I guess there is no amount of money one could argue saving, if it would be at the cost of not allowing her to fulfill her life-long dream. I certainly would pay much more than the about 2,500,000 yen (about 25,000.00 US), which we ended up paying for our Japanese weddings, if I could fulfill just one of my many life-long dreams, like getting a recording contract or doing a concert tour of the US. However, despite being able to fulfill my wife's life-long dream, and despite the fact that I really enjoyed the wedding reception in Japan, and so did my wife and all of the guests and her family, I had to admit in the end that the price was a great absurdity, and it was a case of highway robbery that wedding industries charge an arm and a leg to try to give Japanese girls the impression that they are having a ﾂ"realﾂ" wedding, like they see in Hollywood movies.
This brings us to a discussion of the relationship between what is real and what is fake in Japan, and why people would pay so much for a fake wedding, as they do for so many other fake things in Japan. Perhaps people in Japan could join a real religion and have a real wedding at a real church or at another religious building, if they wanted to. I'm sure if they did it would be a lot cheaper than at the fake wedding places. My wife and I are Buddhist, so in the US we had our wedding ceremony at our Buddhist community center, like many people of my faith do in the US. Being members of our religion means we don't have to pay a penny to have our wedding at our religions centers. (Of course, we do donate money from time to time to our religion, when we want to.) Though I've never asked my friends who are members of other religions if they would have to pay to have a wedding at a church in their faith, I'm sure if they did have to pay a fee, it would probably just be a small donation to their church. (Of course I could be completely wrong, as I have never known anyone who has had his or her weddings at a real religious center other than my Buddhist friends. In Southern California, where the weather is always beautiful, most of my friends have had their weddings in their backyards, which were the nicest weddings I've ever been to.)
In Japan, the fake is valued much more than the real. Take for instance my old vintage blue jeans that have many natural holes from me wearing and tearing them for many years. If I tried to sell my ripped up jeans (and I have) to a recycle shop in Japan, they wouldn't give me a penny (or a yenny). The recycle shops in Japan only buy the newest-looking, old clothes and sell them at prices that are more expensive than new clothes cost in the US. However, you can go to a new clothes store in Japan and you can buy fake worn out jeans, that look almost as nice as my real ripped up jeans, but which were ripped up in a factory and faded with bleach and other chemicals to give them the impression that they are real, old jeans. Ridiculously, these fake, old jeans sell for about 3 times what new, nice looking jeans cost.
Another example is fake nature parks. Most people in Japan (though it's believed Japanese love nature) are either afraid of or discussed by nature, because they believe it's too dirty (and if fact, most natural places in Japan are so polluted, that people are right to think they are too dirty). You can go to a fake beach, amusement park in Japan, where they make fake waves for you, and you can pay an arm and a leg to boogie board the fake, man-made waves, or lay on the shipped-in, very clean, sand-box sand, as if you were on a real, beautiful beach. However, if you try to go to a real beach in Japan, you will have to search far and wide for a beach that doesn't have its waves blocked by hundreds of concrete tetrapods and isn't completely littered with trash.
Alex Kerr explains more in the above-mentioned book about the adoration by many Japanese of the fake and their loathing of the real, so I won't go on with it. (Please read the book.) Let it suffice to say, when I asked my wife, ﾂ"Why don't we have our wedding in Japan at our Buddhist community center?ﾂ" She said, ﾂ"Japanese don't do that?ﾂ" I never did bother investigating whether Japanese Buddhists really do or don't have their weddings at their Buddhist centers; I wanted my wife to be happy with her choice of our Japanese wedding reception, as it was planned mostly for her family and her friends (none of my family came to Japan, as none of her family went to the US for our wedding and reception there). So despite having a great time in a fantasy land, amusement park style wedding place, afterwards I felt I would have rather went to Hawaii and did the original wedding I planned, which would have cost a lot less and would gave us a honey moon at the same time.
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1. In Japan, the expected ﾂ"giftﾂ" someone must bring to a wedding is 30,000 yen (about $300.00) if you are a friend of the bride or groom and 50,000 (about $500.00) if you are a relative of the bride or groom. If you get invited to a wedding, don't think you can skip out on the fee just because you say you are busy and can't make it to the wedding. You are expected to pay the fee whether you can make it to the wedding or not. (This is one of the many reasons why I haven't been able to go back to the US to see my relatives for the past 2 years, because my wife has been invited to so many of her good friend's weddings, plus her brother's wedding in the last 2 years. [We've spent more money on wedding fees than it would have cost us both to go see my family in the US].) In the worse case scenario, where a husband and wife are both friends of the bride and groom and are both invited to the wedding, each of them are expected to give the 30,000 yen fee, which makes the couple's combined total 60,000 yen (about $600.00) in wedding fees. I really wonder if this expected ﾂ"giftﾂ" fee would be a hell of a lot less, if Japanese didn't insist on all getting raped by these fake wedding places, and instead planned their own much more reasonably priced weddings, like I did in the US? The worse part about having all your friends and family pay this culturally obligatory wedding fee (I would call it a gift, if it actually went to the bride and groom) is in Japan it is expected that every time someone gives you a ﾂ"giftﾂ" of money that you are expected to give that person back a ﾂ"giftﾂ" of about half the value of the money ﾂ"giftﾂ" they gave you. So the wedding place sells you all these bags of things, which are way over priced, like most ﾂ"giftsﾂ" in Japan, to give back to all the people who came to your wedding. On top of that, the meals that you serve to each person at your reception (at the fake wedding place) are way overpriced (ours cost about 10,000 for each person [about $100.00].) Therefore, the wedding fee that each of your guest has to pay to come to your wedding (or not to come to your wedding) just barely covers the cost of the wedding, if you are lucky.
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