I asked Chika to marry me.

We had been dating for about 4 years at the time and I was crazy about her. She said yes and life brought us to Japan to plan our first wedding. Here’s our story.

t’s hard to do unique things in Japan. People like rules and for the most part they make things run pretty darn smooth around here. But darnit, I'm American! In America every church in every small town has some sort of event space which can be rented out at a small fee. If you’re not religious, pick a field and put up a tent and you are ready to host hundreds. In Japan, they have this wedding game all figured out and have palaces built especially for weddings. They are beautiful and functional and exactly what I didn’t want my wedding to be. Why? Blame my parents. If something is proven and it works I just can’t help but try something else just for the heck of it. That explains a lot of my life. I kept trying to convince Chika to just rent a huge airBNB place and have mama cook. If anyone visited, they could stay there and it would be more like a wedding weekend. In retrospect, that probably wouldn’t have worked and I am glad that Chika has such a practical head on her shoulders. As in most couples, she is normally right.

omehow we had overlooked one of our favorite restaurants and places to be in our area. Plopped down in between some rice fields, a perpetual construction sight and a small forest is the most wonderfully designed restaurant I have ever been in. I know that sounds like an exaggeration, and lord knows I love me some exaggerating, but in this case it really is. Half concrete, half recycled wood and filled with natural light and towering ceilings, it just sucks me in every time I am there and makes me wish they would just give me a darn key so I could bring my sleeping bag and move on in.

Chika sent some emails inquiring about the space and to our surprise only one other couple had ever used it as a wedding venue before. They would do the food for a very reasonable price, and it was so pretty there we wouldn’t need to decorate at all, so it was a very quick decision for us. Our wedding would be held at Kura6330 on April 30th.

e originally planned on having our wedding during the summertime, but because of our work and Japan’s stingy vacation days, we had to move it to April as it was one of our only long vacation periods here. Of course this was disappointing as many of our friends and family couldn’t make it, but for Japan and Japanese people, this was one of the better times to be able to get everyone together for a big event.

Chika began to feel stressed about the wedding almost immediately, whereas my stress really kicked in only about one month beforehand when I realized how long all of the things I wanted to do took to create. Chika of course stressed about her dress and nails. Looking back it was quite a fun period in our life as we went to dress shops. As we weren’t really doing a big ceremony and since we were going to be inside of a restaurant with stairs, our choices were actually quite limited. The trend here for wedding dresses is big and gorgeous and over the top glamour, whereas we were looking for just a simple dress that was easy to walk in. Chika eventually found that dress with lace sleeves and a simple skirt and I couldn’t imagine a more elegant and refined dress. I loved it. It helps she is so pretty to begin with.

had just rediscovered a passion for design and wanted to use that in every part of the wedding. It was great practice to learn some new computer programs and I am really happy how everything turned out. Here in Japan you need to give a gift to everyone at your party and we struggled coming up with something that fit into our story and was something that people would actually use. We finally came up with the idea of getting a local coffee roaster, where Chika’s cafe used to get their beans, to make us some single serve coffee packages. The owners are a younger couple and had actually given out the same sort of gift at their wedding and went out of their way to help us. I came up with some designs to print on the packaging and everyone got one of each design to take home with them.

Another fun design adventure was making our video that would tell our story and kind of narrate our relationship. We spent a week getting out all of Chika’s old family photos and looking through them and having my parents send childhood pictures of me and the whole process was great fun. It all took much longer than it should, as I wanted to subtitle the whole thing so people could understand it, and Chika kept wanting to include this person and that person in the video but again, she was right and even though I have seen that video at least a hundred times while editing it, I still love watching it. Here's a link if you haven't seen it yet.

Apart from that, there were the flowers to pick out, and the bus company to call and countless meetings with the manager to check and double check the food and seating arrangement and gifts to package and name cards to print and …

Finally April 30th came!

pril 30th had perfect weather. The sun was shining and the first leaves of the year were well on their blooming way. My two good friends had agreed to be our MCs and came early to help set up and put the finishing touches on the schedule. Another friend and musician Tetsuya agreed to play a few songs and bring sound equipment so I could perform as well.

Chika’s brother, Kazuyoshi, and his girlfriend came early and helped us out at reception. And with my friends from all over the world and my father, who had surprised us by buying a plane ticket to visit, we had more than enough help to get 80 people seated and rilled up for the big event.

“James and Chika, James and Chika, James and Chika” -crowd chanting

“Are they just practicing or are they calling us to come down for real?”-Chika

“I don’t know, are you ready?”-James

“Oh my God, my heart feels like it is going to explode out of chest, can you see it?”-Chika

“OK, they keep on chanting, this is getting awkward, they definitely aren't just practicing, let’s go!”-James

Ribbons and music and smiling faces and “oh God is that Heesoo from Korea?, what the heck is she doing here?”

ur crafty MCs helped creatively cut and bend the schedule to fit into the precious 3 hours we had at the cafe. And it all worked. Everyone ate, everyone looked beautiful and we were able to go around and talk a little bit with everyone. We smiled til it hurt and people were nice enough to laugh at the jokes in our video and we got to eat a bit of cake. Tetsuya sang some beautiful songs and got super into a guitar solo which everyone loved. I cried giving my speech and didn’t get to eat at all because we were so busy walking around talking to everyone. We had lilacs to remind me of home and hydrangeas to remind us that it was spring and the cafe looked wonderful.

Our fathers gave the final speeches and we took some fun jumping pictures outside where Chika showed off her mad 2 inch vertical. And we waved goodbye and packed up our things and by the time we came back into the restaurant most everything was back to normal. Months of preparation and so much time and effort and emotion and it was all over so quickly.

e grew up so much during that time planning and somehow those three little hours changed my life. I am so happy we decided to plan and design most of our wedding ourselves. I look back at every little line and every word on every paper and can see the time and effort that went into it all. I’m so lucky to have my new found family here and such support and love from my forever family back in Oconto. Thank you.

I feel like a part of something so much bigger, having gone through such an event, something people from all over the world and from every culture do in their own crazy ways. I can’t wait for the next time the conversation turns to weddings in some bar in some part of the world and Chika and I can grin at each other and finish each other’s sentences telling the story of those wild three hours. Chika will say I cried and giggle and I will laugh and tell how Chika almost stabbed me while cutting our wedding cake. And now that little preface has finished and we dig into the first chapter of what I hope will be adventures and tales worthy of writing down and telling the world about. And even if it isn’t and I live just another normal little life, I’d be fine with that too. As long as I get to keep Chika and keep those three hours.