Western weddings in Japan

At the Tokyo Mariage bridal fair, visitors are invited to walk across a red-carpeted footbridge, past an artificial Mount Fuji, and on into a reproduction of a Western-style chapel. There, couples view a ceremony that they may choose for their own in which a "minister" (in this case, a Romanian actor) reads from the Bible and then – in English – instructs the couple to kiss and pronounces them man and wife.

But some young Japanese want an actual free-standing chapel, a desire that has given rise to faux chapels (not affiliated with any church but designed solely for weddings and bearing names like "Amour et Confiance" and "Cappellina").

By having their ceremony in a real building, says Yumi Katsura, a Tokyo-based gown designer and wedding planner, Japanese brides can descend the church steps in a shower of rice (or bird seed), as they have seen Western brides do in films.

The descent down the steps also is an excellent chance to show the bridal gown to full advantage, explains Mrs. Katsura, who insists that "the beauty of the gown is the true lure" of the Western wedding.

Katsura has been one of Japan's pioneers in the Western-style wedding business. While working as an instructor in a post-World War II dressmaking school, she discovered that most of the young seamstresses-in-training longed to design a Western wedding gown. She also surveyed young university wo-men and discovered at least a third wished they could have a Western-style wedding.

Katsura went on to open one of the first bridal shops in Japan and engage in wedding planning. Interest in Western weddings has grown steadily over the 38 years she's been in the business, but it positively exploded after heavy media coverage of the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1981.

Traditional Japanese weddings will never entirely disappear, says Katsura, but she predicts they will further drop from about a third of the total today to permanently make up about a quarter of all Japanese wedding ceremonies.

At Tokyo Mariage, the staff says about 4 out of 10 of their customers still express interest in a traditional Japanese wedding. But one employee there notes that it is sometimes the parents who argue for a traditional wedding, with the bride-to-be protesting that she won't look as pretty in ceremonial Japanese garb – particularly if she is required to wear the formal wig that traditionally tops a bride.

Some young Japanese say they are less concerned about whether their weddings are Western or traditional, and more interested in simply being sure that they reflect their own interests, and not those of their parents or of society.

Tomoko Tagishi, a legal secretary living in Tokyo, married her husband Sadahide, a taxi driver, last December. The couple chose to have a Western-style ceremony in an Italian restaurant with 35 family members present.

"I wanted something small, something of my own," she says. "I wanted the opposite of what my parents had."

Her mother and father had shared unhappy memories of their elaborate, very formal Japanese ceremony attended by two or three hundred family friends and business associates. "It was more like a business, more for their families, they told me," Ms. Tagishi says. "They were happy for me that mine could be different."

Tagishi says she actually would have preferred a wedding more Japanese in feel, perhaps something at a Shinto shrine, but she says those need to be booked far in advance, and she felt the planning of a Japanese wedding would be too complicated.

With the money they saved on the ceremony, Tagishi and her husband honeymooned in Hawaii where they met another young couple who had just had their own formal Japanese-style wedding.

"They were exhausted," says Tagishi. "They said they envied us."

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