The squat, rectangular building boasted a vast doorway shaped like a triumphal arch, which was flanked by two pageboys in European courtly costume holding trumpets at the ready. The large foyer was studded with long conical electric lanterns around its walls, and decked out with chintzy sofas, mauve satin armchairs, mock-Chippendale cabinets, rushed curtains, sparkling chandeliers, and other icons of kitschy comfort. A queue of people waiting to register their arrival, gifts in hand, snaked around the milling guests. In return for our little envelopes of money we were each presented with a bag containing a tiny melon, a kilo of rice, dried fish, a porcelain bowl and some chocolates, which we deposited at the cloakroom with our coats. I noticed that my new friend’s envelope had genuine, rather than printed, ribbons, and that a strip of abalone was glued to the top right-hand corner. Mine must have been the economy version.
After a lot of waiting, the sound of trumpets signalled the arrival of the bride and groom and their attendant family members. They drew up in two polished black rickshaws, drawn by bronzed young men with perfectly sculpted bodies, wearing traditional kimono-style short jackets over black shirts and tights. Everyone clapped enthusiastically as the newly-weds cautiously descended from their high perch, each assisted by a tugging Adonis, and walked gingerly down the red carpet of the foyer, glancing left and right but not really looking at anyone. Both were sombre to the point of impassiveness as they made their stately progress towards a set of ornamental doors that led to the ballroom beyond. He was dressed in a male kimono of black silk and hakama loose-fitting trousers, secured with an spotless white sash. She wore the customary white bridal kimono, with its winglike sleeves embroidered with peacocks and other birds of paradise. Her face was powdered waxen-white, and a geisha’s red lipstick traced the lines of her mouth, so that you could detect the smallest movement of her lips. A large hood reached high like a canopy over her ornate hairdo, whose graceful sweep was decorated with tiny flowers and jewels. This elaborate headgear supposedly hides the “horns of jealousy” that all new wives are expected to sprout, evidently within minutes of taking their nuptial vows – an expectation that struck me as typically Japanese in its down-to-earth realism. Japanese men are, with good reason, deeply terrified of female jealousy, and well practised at feigning coolness when confronted with it. It is a myth that wives calmly accept philandering husbands as part of a “deal” in which she gets social status, income and children while he is granted a second mother and sexual freedom. Though wives can’t do much about it, because of the social ignominy still attached to divorce, their anger, active and passive, is alive and kicking.
The solemnity of the couple’s bearing conveyed something wonderfully pristine: a quiet and natural respect for tradition, or imagined tradition. This was in violent contrast to the sugary contrivances of the foyer and ballroom, with their pot-pourri of naff furnishings and clichés of luxury plagiarized pell-mell from Western suburbia. As they approached the ballroom, the crowd rapidly closed in behind them, funnelling through the ornate doorway into the large dim space like a great fish tail vanishing into the sea. In the crush the two families were finally forced to succumb to proximity, and to abandon the separate phalanxes into which they had, until then, been resolutely divided.
Squeezing through the doorway with the last curious stragglers, I saw bride and groom emerge from a side room, now in less formal kimonos. To polite applause, they walked ceremonially around the four sides of the ballroom, greeting their guests, before mounting a platform to join a dozen or so family, friends and business colleagues. At no point did they exchange the slightest sign of affection. Meanwhile, attention was riveted on the long buffet table in the middle of the room, towards which many of the three hundred or so guests were insistently gravitating. Few were listening to the speeches by the two fathers, the groom’s boss, childhood and college friends, and the “matchmaker” (who, my new friend told me, was paid to fake his traditional role of “arranging” the marriage, though, in fact, the couple had met on an Internet dating site). Most of the guests were forming an orderly but firm scrum, three or four deep, around the buffet.
The end of the decidedly unfunny speeches – replete with clichés about happiness, destiny and love, and discreet stories of the bride and groom’s past – unleashed a feeding frenzy of barely veiled brutality. Almost at once people started barging their way to the food table. The choicest offerings, like a plate of gleaming lobster tails placed invitingly on little shelves of sculpted ice, were hoovered up first, as guests ripped plastic films off the dishes they coveted before bemused waitresses had even been given the order to do so. A particularly fierce knot of greed formed around a chef who was continually cooking fresh pasta. Conversation, bowing and greeting dried up completely, as formerly milling guests turned themselves into a huge lattice of grabbing arms, straining bodies and avaricious eyes. By the time I made it to the table, a forlorn succession of empty plates, strewn with unwanted lettuce leaves and tomato segments, was all that remained of the expensive Western food, while bowls bursting to the brim with salads and cold meat stood conspicuously untouched. In addition, a mouth-watering selection of sushi and sashimi lay inexplicably intact; and I gorged myself on this fantastically fresh fish, amazed and delighted at the lack of competition that I encountered.
I have always counted myself among the very best when it comes to attacking a buffet, having honed over many years the skill of carefully inspecting a spread, casually moving in on the best bits, and then striking with unhesitating decisiveness. But on this occasion I found unexpected inspiration from the Japanese, who seemed to dispense with the stage of nonchalant hovering and instead went directly for the kill, edging each other out of the way with impeccably polite vehemence. People were seizing the delicacies by any means available: sticking in their forks, if the serving spoons were being used by others; stabbing the food with their knives; and if all else failed using their hands, sometimes both. Many of those who hadn’t secured ring-side positions were reaching between feeders who were closer to the action, dripping gravy onto the starched table clothes or smudging cocktail sauce over the suits and kimonos of front-row predators. These gluttons had one clear advantage over Westerners in a similar situation: if they roughly displaced someone from the front line or else hogged a particularly desirable morsel just as another guest was about to claim it for himself, the victim couldn’t show he’d noticed, let alone that he was furious; or else both parties would have lost face. The danger of getting one’s comeuppance was much more remote than in a Western culture, where the baser forms of rapaciousness can be openly reprimanded.
The bride and groom had eaten nothing at all; they had been too busy talking to the speakers on the platform – and being photographed by a man with a huge camera on a tripod who seemed to take more or less the same shot of them over and over again – to pick from the food that a waitress had rescued for them. And then they had vanished, though barely any of the guests could have noticed.
Suddenly the lights went down, casting the war zone of barren tables into welcome darkness, and powerful beams of red, yellow and blue light projected a myriad tiny zig-zagging hearts onto the walls. As the kaleidoscopic images raced and wriggled over the room, a second surprise raised the overdue suspense another notch. At the end of the ballroom opposite the platform, two great doors opened and a huge tiered wedding cake, a good two metres high, was rolled in to the sounds of Elvis singing ‘Love Me Tender’.
Bride and groom glided in on the same platform, dwarfed by the cake, together clutching a giant knife in the shape of a samurai sword, which glinted menacingly in the moving beams. Both had changed their clothes yet again, she into a glittering ball gown, he into a tuxedo. As the song climaxed, they raised the knife high above their heads and, with help from two waiters, brought it down onto the first layer of the monster cake – which lit up translucently, revealing a star-spangled interior and a merry-go-round of angels on horseback.
This stunt unleashed wild applause and had obviously been secretly planned by the bride’s family, because no one looked more amazed than the groom. Small step ladders were immediately provided by the waiters, and the couple were asked to mount them in order to make their next attempt at cutting the cake, this time on its second tier. Up they clambered, and down came the sword. But this, too, yielded only another illumination, now bearing the names of bride and groom in neon-lit kanji, flanked by little rococo cupids. It was going to be a case of third-time lucky. And as they brought the sword down on the third tier, it sunk reassuringly into the heart of the cake. Waving stiffly to the cheering audience, the groom expressed suitably humble surprise at the trick that had been played on him, and then they sealed their success with their “first kiss”, while Elvis was still crooning his approval.
The official cutting and kissing over, waiters armed with more step ladders hurried to prepare a slice for every guest and, with that ineffably deft service of the Japanese, driven by total dedication to the task in hand, three hundred people duly received a perfectly presented piece of cake. After toasts to the couple, the groom, in his reply, related in oleaginous detail how they would eat a small portion every day until they conceived their first child, and added that the centre of the cake was to be reserved for this infant and his or her siblings. Finally, with the formalities over, loudspeakers blared out Cole Porter’s ‘True Love’, and the newly-weds’ poker-faced composure, relentlessly sustained even through their official kiss, abruptly gave way to relaxed intimacy and to luminous joy in each other.
Sitting down at a little table in the ballroom, I asked my new friend about the love of her own life. This didn’t feel odd: women in Japan can be astoundingly open – much more so than men.
“In my day, marriage was arranged by parents,” she said. “But I was lucky: I love my husband and he love me. But he die three years ago. This really help me love him more.”
I asked her what she called love.
“Of course, every couple become bored of each other from time to time. That’s normal. But my husband always give me sense of my identity. And so he give me sense of my value. For me, love always give sense of value. Otherwise, it is no love.”
“But when we give a sense of value to people, don’t we always try to change them into someone more accessible to us, almost out of love, so that we can value them even more?”
“Yes, of course, that is temptation for everybody. But when my husband value me, he just protect my identity. He defend my soul, but he never try to change it. And certainly not to possess it.”
“That’s very hard. Not many people can do that.”
“I know. I try to do same for my husband, but perhaps I always try to reform something about him! Always try to keep him for myself!” And clenching her fists she hugged an imaginary figure.
“So tell me how he defended your soul.”
“Just through his simple presence. Just by looking at me.”
“Did he defend you by trying to heal past suffering, or to give you courage when you felt vulnerable?”
“No, not really. He was just present for me. Without words. Without making a deal. Without expecting anything in return.”
“And fidelity?”
“I don’t know. Fidelity not so important as Western people say. Many years ago, Japanese wife like to send husband for evening of pleasure with geisha, and even dress him up to look nice for geisha, and then settle bill for his visit. But still husband and wife could protect each other soul!”
Next morning I left Hiroshima. It had been a strange visit, which had denied me the expected immersion in nuclear tourism and instead exposed me, at close quarters, to emotions such as love and friendship that, contrary to myth, the Japanese have in as much abundance as any Western nation. Food, marriage, new relationships – time present and future – had invaded the territory that I had thought would be dominated by time past. And so it usually is in today’s Japan.