Our main purpose for this trip was the wedding of our friends Aya Higayama and Kazushi Ohmura. Donna shared housing with Aya in Seattle when Donna was in law school.
This was a western-influenced "hotel wedding," where both the ceremony and the reception are held in a hotel. Many hotels, including the Imperial Hotel Osaka, have Shinto halls and Christian-style chapels for this express purpose. The Christian-style ceremony, complete with hymns ("What a Friend we have in Jesus" sung in Japanese) prayers and a reading (in Japanese) from 1 Corinthians 13, for Aya and Kazushi was held in a chapel, although they are not, to the best of our knowledge, Christian, and presided over by an American (of European descent) minister who spoke both in English and Japanese. Such weddings are very popular in Japan. Sometimes couples will also have a shinto ceremony just for the family before hand; we don't know if Aya and Kazushi did so. The actual civil wedding license was granted back in December, so this was a celebration for family and friends.
And what a celebration it was. A very elaborate and carefully staged banquet followed. We had wonderful food--Japanese-style appetizers, followed by a fish course with a citron-lemon sauce, grapefruit sorbet, beef with sauce bourdelaise, cherries jubilee in full flame, and finally the wedding cake (though the massive cake in the banquet hall was just a prop--Aya and Kazushi mimed putting a knife, or more like a small sword, to it, but nothing was cut). All of this was interspersed with a toast, speeches, and a video retrospective of the happy couples' lives.
We certainly enjoyed the ceremony and the banquet. We hope the couple did--they had 2 changes of clothes, from their western-style wedding clothes, to traditional Japanese including a beautiful kimono for Aya, and finally formal evening wear. They hardly had time to eat, it seemed, but were kept busy while the guests ate and drank.
The guests also received gifts from the couple, as is traditional--mostly specially packaged foods. We gave our gift to them as well, by tradition cash in a special envelope just for this purpose. The bills are supposed to be new and uncreased, and we resorted to ironing the money in our hotel room the morning of the ceremony. Japanese custom suggests that the number of bills be an odd number; one explanation being that if it were divisible by two, it would be too easy to split in half and lead to a split marriage, but an odd number would have to be truly shared in common. It's all symbolism, of course.
A happy ceremony, with a beautiful couple surrounded by family and friends.
In the evening we went over to Osaka central station and walked around, including Joypolis, a gigantic games area, populated mostly by teenagers (although after 7 pm no one under 17 allowed, apparently.)
