Saori & Ken: Japanese Wedding #2
I still remember when Saori came to my apartment in Boston (Somerville, just on the border with Cambridge) for her roommate interview. I had myself just moved into the one vacant bedroom of the three bedroom apartment, but had immediately found myself in charge of pretty much everything related to the apartment. Of the other 2 occupants, one was a Ukrainian grad student who was leaving 2 weeks after I moved in, and the other was a Japanese mother who perpetually kept her room in this apartment so she could come to the U.S. for three months at a time to be near her son who was a student at the Rhode Island Art Institute, although she was hardly ever around, even when she was in the U.S. So, when I (way to soon after moving in) had to look for someone to fill the Ukrainian student’s room, I was really hoping to find someone who would be around for awhile and could help manage things.
I didn’t take long to get multiple responses to the roommate wanted ad posting. As with all big cities that not only have a large number of general residents, but also plays host to an insane number of university students (there are over 100 universities, colleges and other higher education institutes in the greater Boston area), available rooms in “good” locations (near subway lines…my apartment happened to be located almost perfectly between 2 prime subway stops) are fairly coveted….even if they ARE ancient and over Chinese fast food restaurants! I’d already done a few interviews before Saori came over for her interview. The earlier interviews hadn’t been that bad, but I hadn’t felt 100% comfortable with any of the applicants up to that point. It was more of, “Well, I guess that could work…” Of course being a good Japanese person, Saori was very polite, sweet, very smiley and under other circumstances, probably would have seemed immediately ideal, except for the one major problem….she was a study abroad student who was going home after a few months, which meant it was guaranteed I’d be doing the same roommate search song and dance again 3-4 months later. Grrrr.
Well, of course that train of thought didn’t last long. Having been a short-term international student myself, I knew how difficult such a situation could be. I mean, even as an American it took me a month to find a place to live in Boston! As a short-term international student, I’d never actually had to go out searching for my own accommodation, let alone do it in a foreign language. There were probably a lot of other people she had/could interview(ed) with that wouldn’t see that side of her situation, and I could imagine her spending all her free time traveling around the greater Boston area, going from interview to interview only to be turned down because she was an international student. Besides, she seemed the most likeable and easy to live with of all the people I had interviewed up to that point and I reckoned that having a roommate for only 4 months that I got along with really well was better than having one longer-term who was bad news!
So, anyway, that’s how I met Saori. She had come to the U.S. 6 months prior to do an exchange program at a college in Santa Barbara, CA, and wanted to spend the second half of the year doing an internship at a TV station in Boston because she was a journalism major back in Japan and wanted to be a TV announcer. She was a great roommate and friend and we stayed in touch off and on over the years after she went back to Japan. Before she left, she of course invited me to stay with her if I ever came to Japan. I hoped I’d find myself in Japan at some point in the future, but back then, didn’t really see it happening.
Fast-forward to 8 years later. I’d been living in Japan for 3 years already and had multiple chances to call in that invitation she extended if I were to ever come to her country. I’d visited her a number of times in Tokyo, she joined my volleyball friends and I on a ski trip, and she even invited me to spend my first Christmas in Kobe with her and her family. And, as luck would have it, I was around to be in attendance at her wedding as well, when she met Mr. Right (I’d been around for a definite Mr. Wrong too)!
Saori and Ken got married on September 19th. Ken is actually a fairly common Japanese name too, so yes, he’s Japanese, no, he’s not a foreigner. Their wedding was in the well-known port city of Yokohama, which is just south/west of Tokyo along the coast. Saori and her family are Catholics (part of the, like, 1% of Japanese who are Christian), so the wedding took place in a Catholic church in the old foreign section of the city. I’m pretty sure Ken’s not Catholic, so that had to be a unique experience for him and his family! I’m not Catholic either, so I can’t say whether or not their ceremony was standard for a Catholic wedding, but I would imagine it was, with those few, small differences I mentioned from Chikao & Mai’s wedding that make the ceremony distinctly Japanese. Saori’s father walked her only 2/3rd of the way to the altar and Ken came forward to meet them, at which point they did a lot of bowing to each other before Ken whisked Saori off to the alter (and when I say “whisked,” I’m speaking snail-speed whisked). There was a Maid of Honor and a Best Man, and the Maid of Honor wore a kimono, as did half the women in attendance, including the mothers of the bride and groom. Unfortunately none of the men wore kimonos (it really is a pity, because they have the same strange appeal as the kilt-tux elicits over there in Scotland). There were a few other small things unique to the Japanese Catholic experience (for instance the ceremony was really short, ha ha!), but for the most part, nothing that out of the ordinary. Actually a few funny things happened that made me feel right at home during this ceremony. For example, the priest (Japanese priest this time, and on the elder side) either lost his place or forgot what he was supposed to say next when they were doing some sort of blessing of the rings, so the emcee lady standing at the microphoned podium on the side had to prompt him with a few words before he could figure out what to say next. Saori had some difficulty getting Ken’s ring on his finger, and appeared to be just shoving it along, to which he was, at least, getting a bit of a chuckle out of. And there were a few parts in the beginning when Saori and Ken would kind of look over at each other, trying to figure out what was going on because they weren’t sure what they were supposed to do next (like when the priest told them to sit down while he was giving his speech!).
The ceremony finished, the newlyweds, Best Man and Maid of Honor stood in the small annex at the back of the church just inside the front door to greet people and take their congratulations as they exited. And as we exited, someone was handing us fist-fulls of flower petals to throw at the couple as they came down the stairs outside. We went out and stood around on the steps and did our duty, trying to get as many flower petals as possible stuck in Ken’s hair and Saori’s veil. When they got to the bottom of the stairs, the professional photographer for the wedding made them go back up the stairs and come down again because she hadn’t gotten the proper photos. Hee hee!
Photographs were taken on the steps of the church at that point, the first one being a group shot of all the people who attended the wedding ceremony, which I thought was a cool idea! After were of course various family combinations, then a quick chance for friends to also sneak in photos with the newlyweds. Then a bus whisked away the family members who didn’t have cars, and taxis that we didn’t have to pay for (yay!) were waiting patiently to take other wedding-goers to the hotel where the reception was to be held. However, there were about 2 hours between the end of our time at the church and the start of the reception. Here’s where luck had been on my side.
When I got to the church 20 minutes before the ceremony was to start, as instructed, I, as my friend says, ‘picked a pony,’ which in this case happened to be a family-looking group dressed as if attending a wedding, and followed them through an outer door on the lower floor on the church, which appeared to be the “holding area” for guests before the wedding. Of course everyone else was Japanese and were divided amongst the few tables set up, which actually had those push-spout beverage jugs (small size) full of tea sitting on them. I couldn’t tell if everyone in the room were just family and I wasn’t supposed to be there, so I made a bee-line for the bathroom as soon as I walked in and felt a bit disoriented. That, and I’d walked from the reception-site hotel to the church, which was about 20 minutes on a slightly windy, slighty humid day, so I was a bit freaked as to how completely disheveled I looked. When I came out of the bathroom, I felt the urge to sneak outside, see if I could get into the worship area, and wait there. I acted out this plan of flight in stages, slowly making my way towards the outer door. Just inside the door, I thought I’d give it one more stab, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do at that point. The first guest I asked just told me that so thought maybe it was okay for everyone to be waiting down there together. The second guest I asked answered back in English, and so naturally the whole, “Oh, you speak English!” conversation ensued, which is when I figured out that she actually spoke quite good English, and I hoped she didn’t try to run away from the silly foreigner so I could follow her lead for what I was supposed to do from there on out. And she ended up begin really cool about it, basically adopting me for the rest of the day.
Her name was Chikako, but I knew she was going to be cool when she said that I could call her “Chica,” just like the Spanish word. Saori was her friend from university; they were in the same journalism program. Chikako also studied French though, where Saori focused on English (although, naturally, Chikako’s English was also fantastic). She had lived in Paris for 4 and ½ years working as a Japanese teacher (and here I am in Japan working on my 4th year teaching English!). She is currently a magazine editor in Osaka, but from next fall intends to go back to Paris on a working holiday visa, because as nice as Japan is for her, she loves France and getting to know other parts of the world. During the 2-hour layover between the wedding and the reception, we went to Yokohama’s famous China Town, because she’d never been to Yokohama, wanted to see at least a bit of it during her 5 hours in town, and was very interested in the cultural aspect of that area of town. I kept thinking how crazy it was that the first person I talked to at the wedding was basically the perfect person to be my ‘friend-for-the-day!’
When we went into the reception hall, I was a bit worried, because I didn’t know what kind of people I’d be sitting with, or if I’d be able to communicate with them. Chikako and I ended up at the same table (Greece…I’ll explain in a bit), but on opposite sides. Bummer! The girl sitting to my left was nice, but didn’t seem that comfortable trying to talk to me. There was a younger guy sitting to my right, with his wife. About 10 minutes into the reception, after some seemingly big-wig guy gave a speech on behalf of the groom (I think the speaker might have been the tennis coach from the groom’s university team), the guy sitting to my right suddenly piped up in English, “Can you understand what they’re saying?” Oh! Another English speaker! So I said, “Oh, you speak English well!” He said, “No, no, just a little. My wife speaks better English.” And indeed she did. Saori is a flight attendant on international flights for arguably the #1 airline in Japan, JAL (which from what I hear is also going to be folded into the conglomerate that is now Delta….but anyway….), and the wife was a flight attendant on the same team as Saori. The husband and lived in Italy for 6 years working in the fashion industry (which he still did, but now in Japan). Knowing Saori, especially the fact that she’s an international flight attendant, I should not have been so concerned with finding people I could easily talk to! Oh, so I mentioned earlier that I was at the “Greece” table. Each of the tables at the reception had a different country theme, for obvious reasons.
Before attending the wedding, I actually didn’t know anything about Saori’s significant other, not even his name! During the course of the evening, besides learning that his name was Ken, I would discover that he is a TV announcer and sports news director! He works for a station called TV Tokyo 7 and instead of trying to describe what it is he does, all I’ll say is that there were video congratulations to Ken and Saori shown at the reception from at least half a dozen of today’s top Japanese sports personalities, including Ai Sugiyama, Japan’s leading women’s tennis player (who was the only one I knew by name…others were only face recognition). During the photo montage (of Ken and Saori’s lives), many photos were shown of Ken at various big-name sporting events, including the Beijing Olympics and the French Open tennis tournament. Ken had apparently been the captain of his tennis team during university, which is highly impressive in it’s own right, but add to that the university he attended, Waseda University, which I believe would be considered amongst the Ivy League of Japanese universities. As all good friends do with the life-partner choices of their friends, I watched Ken closely throughout the day and evening to see what kind of person he was, and again was impressed. He seemed to be pretty laid-back, at ease, and laughed a lot at all the embarrassing things said about him, things done to him during the reception. By the end of the evening, I could say that I was truly quite happy for Saori! I just hope I have a chance to hang out with the two of them on a less mass-group scale sometime to really put him to the test. ;-)
I didn’t take long to get multiple responses to the roommate wanted ad posting. As with all big cities that not only have a large number of general residents, but also plays host to an insane number of university students (there are over 100 universities, colleges and other higher education institutes in the greater Boston area), available rooms in “good” locations (near subway lines…my apartment happened to be located almost perfectly between 2 prime subway stops) are fairly coveted….even if they ARE ancient and over Chinese fast food restaurants! I’d already done a few interviews before Saori came over for her interview. The earlier interviews hadn’t been that bad, but I hadn’t felt 100% comfortable with any of the applicants up to that point. It was more of, “Well, I guess that could work…” Of course being a good Japanese person, Saori was very polite, sweet, very smiley and under other circumstances, probably would have seemed immediately ideal, except for the one major problem….she was a study abroad student who was going home after a few months, which meant it was guaranteed I’d be doing the same roommate search song and dance again 3-4 months later. Grrrr.
Well, of course that train of thought didn’t last long. Having been a short-term international student myself, I knew how difficult such a situation could be. I mean, even as an American it took me a month to find a place to live in Boston! As a short-term international student, I’d never actually had to go out searching for my own accommodation, let alone do it in a foreign language. There were probably a lot of other people she had/could interview(ed) with that wouldn’t see that side of her situation, and I could imagine her spending all her free time traveling around the greater Boston area, going from interview to interview only to be turned down because she was an international student. Besides, she seemed the most likeable and easy to live with of all the people I had interviewed up to that point and I reckoned that having a roommate for only 4 months that I got along with really well was better than having one longer-term who was bad news!
So, anyway, that’s how I met Saori. She had come to the U.S. 6 months prior to do an exchange program at a college in Santa Barbara, CA, and wanted to spend the second half of the year doing an internship at a TV station in Boston because she was a journalism major back in Japan and wanted to be a TV announcer. She was a great roommate and friend and we stayed in touch off and on over the years after she went back to Japan. Before she left, she of course invited me to stay with her if I ever came to Japan. I hoped I’d find myself in Japan at some point in the future, but back then, didn’t really see it happening.
Fast-forward to 8 years later. I’d been living in Japan for 3 years already and had multiple chances to call in that invitation she extended if I were to ever come to her country. I’d visited her a number of times in Tokyo, she joined my volleyball friends and I on a ski trip, and she even invited me to spend my first Christmas in Kobe with her and her family. And, as luck would have it, I was around to be in attendance at her wedding as well, when she met Mr. Right (I’d been around for a definite Mr. Wrong too)!
Saori and Ken got married on September 19th. Ken is actually a fairly common Japanese name too, so yes, he’s Japanese, no, he’s not a foreigner. Their wedding was in the well-known port city of Yokohama, which is just south/west of Tokyo along the coast. Saori and her family are Catholics (part of the, like, 1% of Japanese who are Christian), so the wedding took place in a Catholic church in the old foreign section of the city. I’m pretty sure Ken’s not Catholic, so that had to be a unique experience for him and his family! I’m not Catholic either, so I can’t say whether or not their ceremony was standard for a Catholic wedding, but I would imagine it was, with those few, small differences I mentioned from Chikao & Mai’s wedding that make the ceremony distinctly Japanese. Saori’s father walked her only 2/3rd of the way to the altar and Ken came forward to meet them, at which point they did a lot of bowing to each other before Ken whisked Saori off to the alter (and when I say “whisked,” I’m speaking snail-speed whisked). There was a Maid of Honor and a Best Man, and the Maid of Honor wore a kimono, as did half the women in attendance, including the mothers of the bride and groom. Unfortunately none of the men wore kimonos (it really is a pity, because they have the same strange appeal as the kilt-tux elicits over there in Scotland). There were a few other small things unique to the Japanese Catholic experience (for instance the ceremony was really short, ha ha!), but for the most part, nothing that out of the ordinary. Actually a few funny things happened that made me feel right at home during this ceremony. For example, the priest (Japanese priest this time, and on the elder side) either lost his place or forgot what he was supposed to say next when they were doing some sort of blessing of the rings, so the emcee lady standing at the microphoned podium on the side had to prompt him with a few words before he could figure out what to say next. Saori had some difficulty getting Ken’s ring on his finger, and appeared to be just shoving it along, to which he was, at least, getting a bit of a chuckle out of. And there were a few parts in the beginning when Saori and Ken would kind of look over at each other, trying to figure out what was going on because they weren’t sure what they were supposed to do next (like when the priest told them to sit down while he was giving his speech!).
The ceremony finished, the newlyweds, Best Man and Maid of Honor stood in the small annex at the back of the church just inside the front door to greet people and take their congratulations as they exited. And as we exited, someone was handing us fist-fulls of flower petals to throw at the couple as they came down the stairs outside. We went out and stood around on the steps and did our duty, trying to get as many flower petals as possible stuck in Ken’s hair and Saori’s veil. When they got to the bottom of the stairs, the professional photographer for the wedding made them go back up the stairs and come down again because she hadn’t gotten the proper photos. Hee hee!
Photographs were taken on the steps of the church at that point, the first one being a group shot of all the people who attended the wedding ceremony, which I thought was a cool idea! After were of course various family combinations, then a quick chance for friends to also sneak in photos with the newlyweds. Then a bus whisked away the family members who didn’t have cars, and taxis that we didn’t have to pay for (yay!) were waiting patiently to take other wedding-goers to the hotel where the reception was to be held. However, there were about 2 hours between the end of our time at the church and the start of the reception. Here’s where luck had been on my side.
When I got to the church 20 minutes before the ceremony was to start, as instructed, I, as my friend says, ‘picked a pony,’ which in this case happened to be a family-looking group dressed as if attending a wedding, and followed them through an outer door on the lower floor on the church, which appeared to be the “holding area” for guests before the wedding. Of course everyone else was Japanese and were divided amongst the few tables set up, which actually had those push-spout beverage jugs (small size) full of tea sitting on them. I couldn’t tell if everyone in the room were just family and I wasn’t supposed to be there, so I made a bee-line for the bathroom as soon as I walked in and felt a bit disoriented. That, and I’d walked from the reception-site hotel to the church, which was about 20 minutes on a slightly windy, slighty humid day, so I was a bit freaked as to how completely disheveled I looked. When I came out of the bathroom, I felt the urge to sneak outside, see if I could get into the worship area, and wait there. I acted out this plan of flight in stages, slowly making my way towards the outer door. Just inside the door, I thought I’d give it one more stab, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do at that point. The first guest I asked just told me that so thought maybe it was okay for everyone to be waiting down there together. The second guest I asked answered back in English, and so naturally the whole, “Oh, you speak English!” conversation ensued, which is when I figured out that she actually spoke quite good English, and I hoped she didn’t try to run away from the silly foreigner so I could follow her lead for what I was supposed to do from there on out. And she ended up begin really cool about it, basically adopting me for the rest of the day.
Her name was Chikako, but I knew she was going to be cool when she said that I could call her “Chica,” just like the Spanish word. Saori was her friend from university; they were in the same journalism program. Chikako also studied French though, where Saori focused on English (although, naturally, Chikako’s English was also fantastic). She had lived in Paris for 4 and ½ years working as a Japanese teacher (and here I am in Japan working on my 4th year teaching English!). She is currently a magazine editor in Osaka, but from next fall intends to go back to Paris on a working holiday visa, because as nice as Japan is for her, she loves France and getting to know other parts of the world. During the 2-hour layover between the wedding and the reception, we went to Yokohama’s famous China Town, because she’d never been to Yokohama, wanted to see at least a bit of it during her 5 hours in town, and was very interested in the cultural aspect of that area of town. I kept thinking how crazy it was that the first person I talked to at the wedding was basically the perfect person to be my ‘friend-for-the-day!’
When we went into the reception hall, I was a bit worried, because I didn’t know what kind of people I’d be sitting with, or if I’d be able to communicate with them. Chikako and I ended up at the same table (Greece…I’ll explain in a bit), but on opposite sides. Bummer! The girl sitting to my left was nice, but didn’t seem that comfortable trying to talk to me. There was a younger guy sitting to my right, with his wife. About 10 minutes into the reception, after some seemingly big-wig guy gave a speech on behalf of the groom (I think the speaker might have been the tennis coach from the groom’s university team), the guy sitting to my right suddenly piped up in English, “Can you understand what they’re saying?” Oh! Another English speaker! So I said, “Oh, you speak English well!” He said, “No, no, just a little. My wife speaks better English.” And indeed she did. Saori is a flight attendant on international flights for arguably the #1 airline in Japan, JAL (which from what I hear is also going to be folded into the conglomerate that is now Delta….but anyway….), and the wife was a flight attendant on the same team as Saori. The husband and lived in Italy for 6 years working in the fashion industry (which he still did, but now in Japan). Knowing Saori, especially the fact that she’s an international flight attendant, I should not have been so concerned with finding people I could easily talk to! Oh, so I mentioned earlier that I was at the “Greece” table. Each of the tables at the reception had a different country theme, for obvious reasons.
Before attending the wedding, I actually didn’t know anything about Saori’s significant other, not even his name! During the course of the evening, besides learning that his name was Ken, I would discover that he is a TV announcer and sports news director! He works for a station called TV Tokyo 7 and instead of trying to describe what it is he does, all I’ll say is that there were video congratulations to Ken and Saori shown at the reception from at least half a dozen of today’s top Japanese sports personalities, including Ai Sugiyama, Japan’s leading women’s tennis player (who was the only one I knew by name…others were only face recognition). During the photo montage (of Ken and Saori’s lives), many photos were shown of Ken at various big-name sporting events, including the Beijing Olympics and the French Open tennis tournament. Ken had apparently been the captain of his tennis team during university, which is highly impressive in it’s own right, but add to that the university he attended, Waseda University, which I believe would be considered amongst the Ivy League of Japanese universities. As all good friends do with the life-partner choices of their friends, I watched Ken closely throughout the day and evening to see what kind of person he was, and again was impressed. He seemed to be pretty laid-back, at ease, and laughed a lot at all the embarrassing things said about him, things done to him during the reception. By the end of the evening, I could say that I was truly quite happy for Saori! I just hope I have a chance to hang out with the two of them on a less mass-group scale sometime to really put him to the test. ;-)
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