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Modern Japan Through Its Weddings: Gender, Person, and Society in Ritual Portrayal

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Walter Edwards begins his book with a detailed description of a wedding ceremony at the White Crane Palace, a wedding hall where the anthropologist did his fieldwork as a participatory observer. The wedding performance is organized as a succession of staged events marking the transition of the couple from one social status to another and projecting an ideal image of the marital relationship. It begins with a ceremony at the Shinto shrine--or a room dedicated to this end at the wedding hall--, a ritual that evokes traditions from times immemorial but which was in fact first staged in 1900 for the wedding of Crown Prince Yoshihito, the future Emperor Taisho.

The wedding then follows a conventional pattern orchestrated by the nakodo, a prominent relative or company superior who acts as a godfather to the couple: the opening addresses, the cake-cutting ceremony (the cake is usually a fake one), the bride's change of dress or ironaoshi, the congratulatory speeches, the candle service (when the couple lights each candle at the guest tables), the flower presentation (when the newlyweds express gratitude to their parents), and the parting gifts or hikidemono.

"Of course, we did none of this sort of things in my day," comments an elderly waitress at the wedding hall. The modern wedding's standardized script and uniform pattern of service contrast sharply with the diversity of marriage customs that existed in the pre-war period. Modern traditions such as the wedding cake, the candle service, and the flower presentation were introduced by a commercial wedding industry that evolved from mutual-aid clubs and that colonized the wedding space by offering ritual expertise and an integrated service package. But the general acceptance of these innovations has depended on their ability to articulate values appropriate to the context--values concerning the nature of the marital bond, the proper shape of relations between husbands and wives, and the role of the individual, as a married person, in the larger society.

The author is at his best when he analyzes the symbolic content of the wedding by focusing on the image it projects of the ideal marital relationship (including sex and fecundity, expressed through the cutting of the cake) and by examining how this marital ideal draws on values defining the most basic concepts of gender, person, and society. Although the anthropologist never departs from a simple and accessible language, he delves deep into the Japanese psyche and revisits important theoretical issues that feminist scholars usually obfuscate with unnecessary jargon.

Although this short book can be read in a couple of hours, its depth and clarity left me ponder with a sense of awe and admiration. You will learn more by discovering Modern Japan Through Its Weddings than by reading many travel books or personal accounts, which often tell us more about their authors than about Japan itself.