Thought you might be interested in this. Can you imagine such a thing??
I can’t imagine being a professional fake priest, but I can’t admit to being overly surprised that they are doing it. 
Actually…it sounds kinda fun. Hmm
Not that I’d betray any personal information, but it’s possible that a certain Doper might know something about this whole sordid business.
Ohoh. 
…I wonder if he has an Elvis outfit…
I lived in Japan from September of 1990 to February of 1996. The marriage itself is actually done at the local district office and is purely a civil matter (there is no concept in law of a religious ceremony sufficing for the civil): complete a couple of forms, have two friends sign as witnesses, pay for a couple of tax stamps, get the official seal, and the happy couple is now married.
The big production is the wedding. While I was there, wedding rooms/halls (actually hotel banquet rooms dedicated to the purpose) did very big business. There is both great variety and great similarity from wedding to wedding. The big difference, of course, shows up in the many outfits the bride wears. She will enter and depart a number of times, each re-entry entailing a different dress.
The one wedding I’ve attended, last year, here in South Korea was quite similar; however, there was no fake priest. The man conducting the show was actually the groom’s Bishop. The happy couple are LDS and had already gotten their marriage registered at their district office (same rules apply in South Korea as in Japan, unsurprisingly), gotten sealed in the LDS Temple in Seoul, and finally had the big theatric production. For the LDS wedding hall productions (which are the local version of the US LDS ring ceremonies), there are never any prayers other than an opening and closing prayer as at any LDS gathering–nothing to indicate that this is the “real ceremony” instead of the one in the Temple.
The wedding hall production here was like the wedding I witnessed in Japan back in the early 1990s. The biggest difference is that the one in Japan was done in a hotel banquet room while the one here is done in an actual wedding hall. Oddly, South Korean wedding halls look, from the outside, just like Japanese love hotels do from the outside.
After seeing both, and also following (wi thout even trying to) the wall-to-wall media coverage of famous people’s weddings in both countries, I can see that the couple would consider an actor to be necessary in each stage of the routine. When the bride is in traditional dress, they could hire, say, someone dressed as a traditional shaman; when she’s wearing the modern wedding dress, they’d need someone wearing the Roman collar. All of this so each stage of the wedding looks exactly like something from a period dama on television.
As the actor…er, Mr. Kelly in the linked article says:
BTW, I used the term production above because that’s what it is: an incredibly big and incredibly expensive production.
I just remembered, I did actually attend another wedding here in Korea. It was in August this year and I just attended the Temple sealing for the couple. Obviously, I won’t describe that other than to say that the bride was lovely, the groom was very happy, the Temple President who conducted the ceremony gave a great speech to them.
A coworker of one of my Canadian friends does the fake priest thing one the weekends. My friends says the guy has this really rich voice and is popular. He gets about $500 per wedding and can sometimes do a couple of them in one day.
The trend from Shinto-style to Western happened about 12 years ago. Weddings were insanely expensive during the heady days of the bubble (late 80s to early 90s).
There’s a better trend now, going overseas. I like it because the guests give cash, and when one of my staff gets married, I would be expected to contribute heavily, maybe 30,000 to 50,000 yen, or $260 to $460.
“I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to find fake priestery going on here!”
“Your salary, sensei.”
“Thank you.”
Like the article says, it’s a matter of supply and demand: lots of demand for Hollywood-style weddings, not much demand for Christianity. There aren’t nearly enough ‘real’ clergy to to fill the need. Plus, the aims are different: the couple wants a ceremony that looks like what they see in the movies, while the clergy want a ceremony that affirms the couple’s faith in Jesus, which 99% of the time is non-existent. Besides, how are you going to have weddings on Sundays if that’s when church services are being held?
I’m not sure how I’m supposed to be giving the “real” priests a bad name. I’m ordained (by one of the “real” guys) as a wedding celebrant (meaning I don’t conduct regular services, just wedding ceremonies, which I tell any couple or guest who asks). In the six years I’ve been doing this I’ve married around 700 couples and nobody’s ever come back complaining that I didn’t give them a real ceremony. I guide the couples through the rehearsal, get them to relax and cheer up, counsel them on occasion, and generally try to perform a ceremony that leaves everyone feeling happy.
Heck, if anyone wants to make this an “ask the not-quite-real minister” thread, I’m open to questions.
$500 per? That’s about what I make in an average day (I usually do 2-4 at about US$150 each). Maybe I should look into another agency. Does he just do the ceremony, or does he do anything at the party as well?
Whew, I was about to ask why you were doing that stupid advertising job when the priest gig paid so well!
And, I think this thread is a perfect opportunity to tell that anecdote about the school teacher who invited a bunch of her students to the ceremony.
Well, I never had anyone start trying to shoot me in the middle of a ceremony, but pretty much everything else the guy in the article mentions has happened to me. At the lower-priced venues about one-fifth of the brides are visibly pregnant, so the hall staff and I usually work out a signal beforehand to handle dizzy spells or morning sickness. I’ve also done lots of yakuza weddings, including ones where it’s pretty obvious what line of business the bride was in (i.e., her friends all show up in their ‘work’ clothes).
Some of the unusual ones:
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The bride and groom were both 17, and the bride was about six months pregnant. She was Shinto/Buddhist, he was Muslim (Iranian, I believe) and the ceremony was supposed to be Christian. Most of the guests were wearing school uniforms. I sometimes wonder how they’re doing.
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A couple of years ago, there was a popular TV ad that featured a father at a wedding holding his pet chihuahua, both of them wearing matching tuxedos. In the two months following (with nothing before or since), I had three ceremonies in which the couples brought their dogs. The groom came down the aisle first, carrying the tuxedo-clad chihuahua on his arm. Then the bride entered, walking arm-in-arm with her father. They met at the middle of the hall, where the groom passed the dog to the father and the father passed the bride to the groom, like they were bartering. To the dog’s credit, even though he was a nervous little rat in a suit surrounded by strange people and loud noises, he sat on the front bench for the whole ceremony and didn’t make a peep.
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Miniature cameras are now standard fixtures on cell phones here, leading to a law that camera phones must make a very audible noise when shooting, to cut down the problem of pervs on crowded trains sticking them under girls’ skirts. How does this relate to weddings? The anecdote that Cerowyn mentions occured just as camera phones were starting to really catch on: the groom was a teacher and coach (and apparently a popular one) at a women’s college, and invited his students to the ceremony (they made up most of the guests by far). Most of them didn’t have their own full cameras, but they did all have cell phones with cameras built in. However, most of them had set the shutter sound to something ‘cute’ like a bark, a meow, a kiss, or some electronic sound effect. As I was starting the ceremony, there was suddenly a loud BOOEEE-OOP! from the middle of the audience, followed by some embarrassed giggles. For the rest of the ceremony, different noises kept blasting out as each girl apparently had the same thought process: “my camera’s not that lou-WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP… oops.” By the time the bride and groom kissed, they gave up on trying to be discreet, and the rest of the ceremony was punctuated by huge choruses of WOOF! BZZZT! ZZZING! MEOW! smooch BRRING! EEP-EEP! PHHBBT!. Fortunately the ceremony was a casual one, and by the end the couple was just trying to keep a straight face.
They could be ordained online as Unitarian universalists for a few bucks.
Why take the chance?
As Sublight points out, he is actually ordained by a “legitimate” church, albeit a very small one (with a Cross-bedecked ID card to prove it :)). Some of what the Japanese are looking for are the trappings of a Christian wedding, specifically. A Unitarian service would not necessarily meet those expectations.
Actually, the online ordination route runs the risk of trouble with immigration. When I first started, a “specialist in international relations and humanities” visa (the standard visa for teaching English, translating or general business) was sufficient. You could be ordained by anyone, anywhere, anyhow, and use the title of bokushi (minister) in your work.
Around 2003 or so, the rules changed, mainly due to lobbying by Christian clergy. Some of them may have been sincere, but one very vocal American minister was pretty transparent about simply wanting to bring the wedding biz under his own control to take a cut of the action. I have letters from him explicitly asking for names and addresses of ministers not in his church so he can report them to immigration as undesirables, along with the implied message that members who don’t keep donating will find themselves undesirable as well.
Sorry to get off track there. Anyway, the new visa rules went into effect, and now you need a missionary visa to perform wedding ceremonies, an internation relations visa won’t do. To get a missionary visa, you need sponsorship from a recognized group that wil act as your guarantor while in Japan. How am I still working if I don’t have a missionary visa? Before the law changed, I received my spousal visa, which does an end run around the whole process by allowing me to do any kind of work I want.
Also, another change that the new laws created was that you can’t be referred to as bokushi unless you have a degree from a divinity school. Otherwise, you are a shishikisha, or celebrant (I just skip the whole thing and introduce myself by name). When someone asked “how will anyone know the difference between a bokushi and a shishikisha?” the immigration department had to think up a distinction between the two. Their verdict? Bokushi are allowed to raise their right hand during prayers, while shishikisha aren’t. Seriously. So I’ve worked that very minor change into my ceremony so I don’t get in trouble. The Immigration department probably couldn’t care less, but there are people who have a financial interest in seeing this line of work shut down and would try to catch us making a mistake (never take on a Methodist when money is on the line).
Well it is Asia.