Luke and Yuko's Wedding

2005-07-20T17:28:00.000+09:00

A Gallery of wedding photos taken by our wedding photographer is now viewable online
--thank you Tom and Tadako Gallione!!
The Gallione's travelled all the way from Philadelphia to be at our wedding, and although it would have been nice for them to have been able to sit back and enjoy the day with old-time friends, they kindly agreed to be our wedding photographers. (You can see them taking a moment to pose with us in picture #194).

To access this gallery please visit Tom Gallione's Lifestyle Portraiture homepage.
Click on the "Client Login" button in the top right corner.
Enter "elliot" in the password textbox and click "View Proofs."
There are two hundred and twelve great photos, all told, and I would recommend starting from the end and working backwards since it can take a good deal of time to view them all and the collection begins with quite a few photos of the preparation period.
Everyone is welcome to view the gallery, but please do respect the artist's copyright and refrain from attempting to download the images to your computer. Photos can be ordered from Lifestyle Portraiture for a very reasonable price.

The Ceremony

2005-07-06T10:21:00.000+09:00

The Groom Awaits His Bride, in the Company of the Father of the Groom Who Was the Presiding Minister

The Bride Enters, Supported by the Father of the Bride

The Unveiling of the Bride

The Bride and Groom and All Their Guests Enjoy the Special Music
(“He’s Always Been Faithful” sung and performed on the piano by friend of the bride Miss Yuko Sakamoto, accompanied on the Cello by Miss )

The Exchange of Rings Following the Wedding Vows

The Signing of the Register and the Sealing of the Marriage Registration Document (婚姻届)
(the latter was performed with our inkan [印鑑], or official personal seals)

The Mothers Light the Unity Candle, Symbolizing Their Giving Birth to the Bride and Groom

The Bride and Groom Light the Unity Candle and Then Extinguish the First Two Candles, Illustrating the Matrimonial Principle of Genesis 2:24 that “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.”

The Kiss: Some people have given me grief, demanding to know why I kissed Yuko twice at this point. It is my own belief that the groom is not obligated in anyway to justify his actions in this matter, having the matrimonial prerogative, but as a concession to the masses I shall bend and allow the explanation that I merely felt that I had not satisfactorily fulfilled the function on my first pass.

The Man and Wife Begin Their Escape

The Church

2005-04-20T21:47:00.000+09:00

The Church Building as it Appears on the Church Brochure (Sapporo Bible Church is Related to the Hokkaido Bible Institute Next Door)

Various Church Activities Inside the Church Building (Except for the One Picture that Appears to be an Outdoor Service at Some Sort of a Farm)

Yuko Checking Out Her Spot

Getting to the Church

2005-04-20T21:24:00.000+09:00


This is a map of how to walk the five minutes or so to the church from JR Shiroishi Station (ＪＲ白石駅) in Sapporo.  This link to information on how to get to JR Shiroishi Station from JR Sapporo Station is also on the sidebar.  It is just a couple of stops and will cost only a few dollars.

Please also take a look at some of the other useful links on the sidebar.  We are sorry that at this time we do not have any useful information on accomodations in Sapporo.

A Very Merry Christmas

2005-03-31T12:04:00.000+09:00

The Mistress of the Rings: The Why and Wherefore, with a Little Bit of “How”(Trying On the Rings at the Shop)

I am often asked how it is possible for Yuko and me to be so confident of our future together when we were barely more than acquaintances for our first eight years and then suddenly, by email, engaged to be married after a brief and uneventful encounter (the first in four years) at my sister’s wedding in Hakodate, Japan. I have always been at a loss as to how to reply, not out of doubt or confusion, but out of timidity. However, I have been reading a remarkable book lately entitled “A Return to Modesty,” and I am ready to come out of the closet. Yuko and I will overcome because she believes in modesty and I believe in male honour. To be sure, I claim this only in the context of God’s gracious care, but I do claim it. We both believe, literally, in a physical as well as in a spiritual sense, that we both belong to a man called Jesus Christ who we believe (for real) to be the once and future King of the universe by right of creation. And since we both believe that we belong to Him we believe in chastity, constancy, and covenant loyalty, even when it costs us a great deal and means putting other people ahead of ourselves. This shared understanding is the source of the trust we have in each other to journey towards our golden anniversary with equal fervour and tenacity regardless of the nasty surprises, disappointments and inconveniences that are bound to sideswipe us at one time or another. Before you dismiss that book I just mentioned because you don’t believe in that “Jesus is King” crap, I should clarify that its author, Wendy Shalit, is Jewish, a feminist of the newer variety, was raised in a secular family, and doesn’t talk about Jesus Christ in her book. I highly recommend it as a great New Years read. (For the deeply curious, Yuko and I keep certain of our records public, including my e-mail proposal of November 24, 2003, Yuko’s response, and the formal e-mail announcement we made to mutual friends a few days later).

Christmas was the day that Yuko and I set aside some months ago as the time that I should present her with our engagement ring. I would like to have given it to her back in August when I formally asked her parents for her hand in marriage, but I was fresh broke from Canada at the time. For this special occasion, Yuko joined my family for Christmas dinner in Ajigasawa (though not in time for the traditional Elliot Christmas Eve midnight sushi feast).

Unfortunately I have no pictures of the Ajigasawa waterfront location at which we performed our private ritual, but it was in the damp winter twilight amid melting snow on a little manmade peninsula next to the large footbridge. These conditions may sound less than romantic, but we had the entire park to ourselves and the lights of the castle-like hotel on the nearby cliff shone beautifully above us. Yuko had been adamant since the beginning that when the time came, my formal proposal be done in proper form with kneeling and a formal, memorized proposal speech—and so it was. One may wonder why we should stand on ceremony so, when we had already set the wedding date a year previous during the first week of our amorous correspondence, but it is ceremony that teaches the heart to honour and respect, and it is in ritual that that which is common is made holy. The cheat sheet which I carried crumpled in my pocket just in case and which, as an afterthought, I handed to Yuko later to keep as evidence is also on public record by mutual consent.

At Ajigasawa Chapel the Next Day

Japanese Prayer Group at Word of Life Bible Institute in Schroon Lake, New York c. 1995: Bonus Points for Finding Both Me and Yuko (Click on the photo for enlargement)

Yuko and My Sisters in June 1996 when She Took Care of my Visiting Family while I Was Busy at Pre-graduation Seminars

Summer of 1999, Schroon Lake, New York: The Last Time We Met Prior to my Sister’s November, 2003 Wedding in Japan

Meet the Parents

2005-03-31T11:56:00.000+09:00

This past weekend I journeyed to the town of Tobetsu near Sapporo to meet my future in-laws and to receive their blessings on the impending marriage of Yuko Takahashi and myself in June. According to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, by the year 2000 there were 300,000 marriages between Japanese and non-Japanese persons registered in Japan, and it is not uncommon for JET participants to join these ranks during their brief sojourns in the land. It is therefore circumspect to inquire closely into the legal machinations governing these international unions within Japanese society. The prospective spouse of a Japanese national may be surprised, upon browsing through respective Japanese embassy web-sites, to discover that visas for spouses of Japanese nationals are generally covered by one unexciting paragraph informing the reader that such a spouse must renew his or her spousal visa every one to three years depending on the duration of the marriage and the whim of the Ministry bureaucrats. More in depth research will lead to the discovery of an even more sinister instrument of discrimination: Japan’s Family Registry System, governed by the Residents Registration Law. While it is a popular conception among Western ex-pats in Japan that it is easier for gaijin guys to “score” than it is for gaijin girls, the truth is that 80% of international marriages here are between Japanese men and non-Japanese women (primarily Korean, Filipina—yes, that’s how you spell it—and other Southeast Asian nationalities). Consequently, discrimination against gaijin spouses in Japan is also a grave issue of discrimination against women. There are a number of organizations and mutual support groups in Japan seeking to empower gaijin spouses, two of them being ISSHO and UMJ (United for a Multicultural Japan).

My own journey with Yuko began nine years ago at the Word of Life Bible Institute in the Adirondack Mountains where we basically had very little to do with each other.

We would attend the same birthday parties . . .

. . . but seldom made it into the same photographs. We were casually in touch on and off for a number of years (mostly off)

. . . until we met again in November, 2003 at my sister’s wedding in Hokkaido. I will state for the record once more that I am not drunk in this photograph—just very jetlagged. A few days after I returned to Canada we decided via e-mail
to get married
. . . so we were on very friendly terms when she visited me in Toronto in May. As mentioned above, this past weekend I made the journey across the Straits of Tsugaru to Hokkaido where I proclaimed to the Takahashi’s my love for their daughter and received their blessing to become their gaijin son-in-law.