Hitched in Japan (Not me, relax, Mom)

Pete and Morgan came to Japan for 14 days with a modest but clear agenda: to see some cherry blossoms, find some great coffee, and get married again. They took in some chilly sakura revelry at Yoyogi Park. They had coffee everywhere - I can't wait til Pete puts his caffeine fiend's map of Tokyo online. And they got married at Minato-ku Ward office. Their goal is to pick up 12 marriage certificates before they have a friends-and-family wedding affair.

They did a little reading up in advance. They got a certificate from the US Embassy in Tokyo that said they were fit to be wed, and they filled out a pile of papers at the ward office not much more or less complicated than what I needed to get my cellphone. Someone there translated what they wrote on the forms into Japanese, including "first-born son" and "second daughter" and the phonetic spellings of their parents' names.

All that remained was to get signatures from two witnesses. Feeling celebratory, they went to a cafe across the street from the government building. They tried to convince a waitress to sign. She might have been game, but she checked with a manager who came over, grunted "Happy wedding" in English, and motioned for them to put the unsigned papers away. They cabbed over to my neighborhood. Over spicy black tantan men, careful not to get any broth on the forms, I signed one half of the witness form. We walked back to my office in the rain, where they traded a foil pack of blueberry gummies for another signature from one of my coworkers. Taxi back to the ward office. I joined them and smoothed over a few queries from the kindly, but possibly contagious, civil servant helping them from behind his flu mask.
(Pete gamely tried to answer a question by explaining the societal concept of adding "Jr." to a name, but it turned out the guy was just asking whether it should be transliterated as "joonier" or "jiyoonier.") The clerk, Mr. Toyoda, was one of those cool old guys I associate more with Miyazaki than Tokyo. When I asked him if they could get a copy of the certificate to keep, he said it had to be for a specific purpose, like for submitting to an embassy or a court. I leveled with him - they just want a copy to keep. "Gotcha,"  he said. "We'll call it... embassy."

We sat and waited for the official document longer than the original paperwork. We were alone in the rows of seats except for a nosy homeless guy. Finally, they paid an extra three bucks and got an A4 certificate, a pretty cool souvenir from their first trip to Japan.