More Japanese TOKYO >> A growing number of Japanese couples are getting married at overseas holiday destinations like Hawaii, Guam and Australia with a small group of family and friends attending.
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Hawaii is still the top destination
as more couples elopeStaff and wire services
Japanese couples are becoming unsatisfied with standard ceremonies at wedding halls and hotels in Japan, and want to avoid sticky details, such as asking elders to make speeches and deciding the seating order.
Watabe Wedding Corp., a major wedding service company based in Kyoto, said about 58,000 Japanese couples held wedding ceremonies overseas last year, accounting for 7.35 percent of the total number of married couples and a five-hold increase over 10 years ago, when couples married overseas totaled some 12,000.
Watabe, which enjoys nearly a 60 percent domestic share in the business, began selling wedding ceremonies in Hawaii in 1973 in a tie-up with a travel agency. At that time, baby boomers were reaching the marriageable age, and the domestic wedding service industry was enjoying a boom.
"Wedding ceremonies at hotels and wedding halls were becoming more luxurious year after year, but some clients were dissatisfied by conveyer belt-like ceremonies," said Takao Watabe, president of Watabe Wedding. "I happened to have a chance to visit Hawaii and hit upon an idea about wedding ceremonies in the scenery there."
In the first year, about 1,000 couples married in Hawaii, and the story then spread through the grapevine. The number of such couples began sharply increasing in the early 1990s.
According to a Japan Travel Bureau Hawaii Inc. survey, 491 couples planned to marry in Hawaii in the last quarter of 2000, a 44 percent increase over the same period in the previous year.
Dianna Shitanishi, director of weddings for the Kahala Mandarin Oriental Hotel noted a jump of about 50 percent in the hotel's Japanese wedding business in 2000 compared to 1999.
Though there's been no big increase seen so far this year, she says the numbers are holding steady so far.
"We've already done 63 weddings since the beginning of the year," she said.
Reasons for Hawaii's popularity cited in the JTB Hawaii survey included convenience for couples accompanied by an average of six to eight guests and the presence of wedding chapels which now have glass-walled sanctuaries from which the sea is visible.
About 60 percent of couples deciding to marry outside Japan go to Hawaii, and Watabe Wedding operates three chapels in Hawaii and two in Australia which suit Japanese tastes. The cost of a wedding ceremony, including costume rental fees, is &YEN500,000-600,000.
JTB Hawaii's parent company JTB Corp., one of the largest travel agencies in Japan, said it handled overseas wedding ceremonies for about 16,000 couples last year, 2.5 times more than in 1994. "The number of people wishing to hold wedding ceremonies overseas suiting their own tastes is increasing," said a JTB public relations official.
Last year, some 788,000 couples married across Japan, and the number will rise to 810,000 in 2002. But the number will likely drop to 650,000 in 2010.
"In 2010, one-third of couples will be getting married overseas," says Watabe.