All over Tokyo, there are billboards with brides. Sometimes with grooms, but always with a bride in a fairy tale princess wedding dress. You see them outside of parks, hotels, temples, shrines, and all the major landmarks. They smile at you from the subway, the cleanest and brightest thing there. The first one I saw was within sight of Japanese immigration at the port in Yokohama. Have Your wedding here!
Yoshiko told me there is a crisis of sorts in Japan. Young people are ot getting married. It's very expensive to buy an apartment, and it's expensive to raise children, and young people are not getting married. I asked if that means they are living together without benefit of the legal protection of marriage and she said no, they are simply staying in their family homes.
One week later, in Shangha, our guide Xu (pronounce: shoe) tells us about weddings in China. They are a very big deal, very expensive. Many couples want to get married In the Year of the Snake, because the snake is the little brother of dragon, and dragon is the holder of great happiness. Earlier in the day, we have eaten at a large restaurant popular for wedding parties, and seen the set up for a wedding banquet for about 500 people. We ask Xu, do couples get married at the temple? No, she says, marriage is not religious, it is a commercial affair. Very big, very expensive, a big drinking party.
At a Chinese wedding, the bride must share a drink with every guest, so even with little sips, she gets drunk very quickly. Xu is clearly disapproving of this rowdy entrance into marital bliss, but does not present any alternatives.
Next week, we will be in Vietnam, where weddings have taken on an unexpected significance for the Semester at Sea voyagers. I gather the Vietnamese wedding is also a very large party, usually in a hotel, where liquor flows freely. Having grasped only the last quality, some of our students are planning fake weddings for the time we are there. A drinking party with a new twist: you wake up married.
Yes, there is a group on board that thinks marriage does not count if it's in a foreign country. They think it would be fun to have a pretend wedding. Do they suffer from a lack of dress up play? Barbie never came to play in the bride outfit at their house?
We received an email from an SAS alum who is Vietnamese, explaining carefully that marriage is taken seriously in Vietnam and there are few divorces, even though it is now legal to divorce. She asks us please, do not make a mockery of my culture.
We are taking these students around the world to learn to be global citizens. We know it is too much to ask them to stay sober. For some, it is evidently too much to ask for the tiniest bit of good sense.
Maybe they will never feel a need to acknowledge their Vietnamese weddings. Maybe they will never go back to Vietnam. But I've been married, and I've been divorced, and I know that you never again get to check "single" once you've been married. The Roman Catholic church is not alone in requiring a divorced woman to get permission to marry a second time.
Get drunk without a party theme, kids.
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