In the old days, I lived for a while in Japan.  Japanese people are curiously flexible about religion. There’s a saying that the Japanese are born to Shinto, marry as Christians and die as Buddhists.

The mixture of East and West is  best seen than at weddings. Weddings are big business. There are huge wedding complexes with space for twenty simultaneous weddings, beautiful gardens for beautiful photographs and a cute wedding chapel with a rosy-cheeked Western priest. At every wedding,  the father of the bride always wore an anxious expression throughout as he watched the money pour away.  Ex-fathers of the bride reading this might say “What’s unusual about that?” Well the thing is that in Japan the money just  pours faster! For example, the bride usually wears four dresses during the ceremonies. A white silk robe for the Shinto ceremony. Then a traditional wedding kimono with sumptuous embroidery in gold thread, which can cost thirty thousand dollars. Then a western wedding dress. Then at the end, an elaborate ball gown, though there’s actually no ball. Japanese parents don’t even get to sit at the front. As a sign of modesty, they sit right at the back, behind the important business guests. A father I knew told me that he was taking his daughter and  hundred guests to Hawaii for a wedding. I said, “Isn’t a wedding here expensive enough? Won’t Hawaii kill you?”  He replied, “You foreigners don’t understand. If I did the wedding here there would be six hundred guests. I can fly a hundred to Hawaii for half the price. No need to buy a wedding kimono and my wife and I will get a few days holiday to recover!”  

So if your child is getting married  and you are groaning under the expense, it could be much worse.

Japanese funerals are even stranger by Western standards. First of all, you have to take a money gift to the cemetery wrapped in a special ceremonial envelope. The more important you are, the more money you give. How much is no secret. There’s a tent at the entrance to the cemetery where you hand over the money and the ladies open the envelope and count it. Why? Because when you leave you will receive a gift worth exactly half the value you gave. Then you listen to the Buddhist priests. Apparently you can tell how much the family paid them from the length and intensity of the prayers. The more you pay, the better the chance of the deceased to be reincarnated at a high level.

Note to my family. Don’t waste your money. I’m happy to come back as an animal.

Isn’t it an odd world that we live in?