Is Nothing Sacred? Making Money as a Wedding Priest in China.

53 Pages·2015·0.779 MB·English

by  Christian D. Taulkinghorn

Table of Contents
Introduction
China's Booming Wedding Industry
How it all Began in Japan
Vestments and Accessories
Mainland Locations
Opportunities Beyond China
Finding Work Opportunities
The Rise of the Big Fat Chinese Wedding
Wedding Expositions and Exhibitions
Wedding Portraits
Legal Considerations
Making Sure Your Chinese is up to Scratch
Wedding Ceremony Scripts
Wedding Small Talk
About the Author
Introduction

There was a time when any smart foreigner could walk into lots of high-paying teaching jobs in
China, but those days are unfortunately long gone. The good news is that there is a brand new money-
making opportunity that very few people know about, that of clerical duties.
I am not talking about the usual filing and typing and office work. Instead, you will see as soon as
you arrive, that weddings and wedding photography is now a multi-billion dollar business in China.
In any Chinese high street you will see a selection of high-end wedding shops that supply everything
from limousines to luxury, all-inclusive honeymoon packages. They have access to all kinds of
accessories and services but there is one thing that I can guarantee that 99.9 percent of them are
screaming out for, and that is a white clergyman. With a little preparation, a well organised expat can
still charge 1000 RMB an hour for these very specialised services. Even with intermediate Mandarin,
as long as you have the wedding vows down pat, and a few suitably religious vestments, you will
soon be receiving more offers of work than you can handle. English need not even be your first
language. It will certainly make no difference to your clients. Find a good location which is popular
with honeymooners, do a couple of hours on Saturday and Sunday, by appointment only and spend the
rest of your time living like a king.
China's Booming Wedding Industry

The first wedding company in China was established in 1990. These days the wedding celebration
market is bigger than anybody could have anticipated and is still expanding. Its prosperity has
propelled the development of hotels, wedding photo studios, car hire companies, flower shops, travel
agencies, and even media organizations. Additional services include wedding planners, restaurant
decoration, dress rentals, make up and hairdressing services, video recording services, wedding
banquets and masters of ceremonies (MCs). With around twenty percent of Chinese being single, and
a growing middle class, businesses from dressmakers to dating websites, from marriage head-hunters
to real estate developers and travel agents are all getting in on the action. To share in a slice of the
wedding cake, even TV station personalities, actors and actresses are trying to cash in on the industry.

As the first generation to grow up being the only child in their families, this new middle class
typically has the resources of four adults to draw on, in addition to their own savings. They tend to be
less concerned about the negative impact of their wedding budget as they can count on financial
support from parents on both sides. After all, weddings are a milestone event in life and people
usually do skimp on this once-in-a-lifetime event. Parents will do anything for their one and only
child, and a wedding is a very special occasion, so people are willing to spend big bucks tying the
knot. To say the Chinese wedding industry is booming is an understatement. Weddings are not just the
most significant event in the lives of the Chinese, they are also an event that the average Chinese
citizen factually spends the most money on. The children of a generation that was only allowed to
give birth to one child are reaching the age of marriage, and their parents are looking to hold the most
luxurious wedding they can afford.

According to the China Wedding Industry Development Report, the average couple now spends
$18,500 on a wedding, or twenty times their average monthly salary. With over ten million weddings
taking place in the country each year, the industry could soon reach $200 billion.

By all accounts, the wedding train is still in full-steam in China, despite the gloomy economic
outlook. Over the five years through 2014, revenue has been growing at an annualized rate of 5.1%.
Industry profit remains high at 17.0% of industry revenue, but has been falling from a peak of 25.0%
in 2007. This can be explained by the number of wedding services that have been opening up on the
Internet. These stores provide consumers with invitations, wedding rings and other items at very good
prices, which can sometimes amount to 50 percent of the prices at brick-and-mortar stores.

Incomes are still continuing to rise, and China creates a million new millionaires every year. The
recent corruption crackdown is having little effect on the wedding industry. Instead it is the legions of
freshly minted Tu Haos (New Money) that are driving the sector's unprecedented growth. Tu haos
have typically become super-rich through real-estate rather than government graft and are therefore
still quite willing to flash their cash without any worries about negative repercussions. In addition,
we are now seeing a explosion in the 'fuderdai' class, the so called second generation wealth, a
completely new generation of idle rich.

Big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou have established well-developed wedding
celebration markets. Beijing, for example, leads the country with 1,000 wedding related firms. About
50,000 couples get married each year in the capital, a “diamond mine” for the wedding businesses. A
recent survey shows that young people of marriage age are ready to spend up to 91.2 percent of their
savings on a wedding. As such, the wedding industry in China has created a huge market with massive
potential. Compare this to a $40 billion business in the United States. Even that estimate appears to
be low, though. According to a poll of 18,000 American brides who were married in 2011, the
average cost of their big day was $27,021. If that is the case, then the approximately 2.1 million
weddings that occurred last year would have created an industry worth almost $60 billion. In the US,
the average wedding costs a third more than a wedding in China. Even so, there are five times as
many weddings taking place in China. As prices continue to rise in China, this will no doubt have an
effect on the overall value of the industry.

With increasing affluence, a large, young population that wants to be part of the modern, global
world, parents that will do anything for their one and only child, and that great enhancer — the
internet — it should come as no surprise that Western-style weddings are becoming a big business in
China, as well. Chinese weddings are pure theatre. The players share the stage with many brands: the
costumes, props, and supporting characters that convey the meaning of the experience and allow the
hosting families to gain face with the audience. As an example of this brand consciousness, many
Chinese girls want to be married in dresses from top designer Vera Wang. Despite the debacle of
Vera’s Shanghai store opening, her brand is standing strong and remains synonymous with “beautiful
wedding” in the eyes of Chinese brides-to-be. Diamond rings are another must have and the average
price for an engagement ring in China is now $3,500. It is little surprise that event organisers point
out that 85% of wedding participants are women. Few men attend because they are too busy working
so that they can afford to become fiancés. There is a strong societal obligation for them to work very
hard to build up their savings for marriage.

The wedding banquet remains the largest expense. In Shanghai, the sky is the limit for wedding
banquets. In the best five-star hotels the starting price for a table of ten people is nearly $1,200.
According to Time-Weekly, Shanghai ranked first on the wedding spending list, with the average cost
reaching 230,000 RMB. Other first-tier cities like Beijing and Shenzhen did not fall far behind. Take
Beijing as an example, catering for a 35-table banquet will run at about 120,000 RMB, and once you
add in the wedding dress, the car, and all the various trimmings of your modern, urban wedding in
China, it averages out to around 200,000 RMB. For some younger couples who do not have the
finances to handle these horrific expenses, the only solution is to become creative. I have some
friends who recently got married in the park, and then had a cocktail party to follow. This saved on
the cost of a traditional wedding banquet. Others have been tempted to get married abroad, weddings
can be arranged relatively cheaply in Singapore, Thailand or Malaysia. Even the cost of something as
simple as flowers is going out of control. One recent wedding celebration involved 10,000 yuan
(US$1,209) worth of flowers just to decorate the hired cars.

Chinese consumers are dynamic and their values are changing. Those brands that define China’s
wedding market today cannot take their position for granted. Although they may continue to expand
into China’s lower-tier cities, there is a rising class of consumers in Tier One and Two cities looking
for new definitions. To cater to the differing tastes of couples, wedding companies now provide an
assortment of wedding packages ranging from underwater weddings, tree-planting weddings, meadow
weddings, and church weddings, to villa weddings, overseas travel weddings, group weddings and
bridal sedan weddings.

As couples move away from the traditional Chinese weddings towards those more commonly
found in the West, complete with white wedding gowns, photographers, expensive jewellery, and the
like, China’s wedding industry is bound to grow even larger. That’s why overseas companies are
beginning to target the China market.

A good example of this is Weddings Beautiful Worldwide, a Virginia firm that specializes in
training wedding planners. In 2011, the company set up a joint venture with Weddings by Ling, a
boutique wedding planner located in Beijing’s Sanlitun SOHO. They have already begun grooming a
new generation of wedding planners through an 18-part training course that enables the trainee to
become a “certified wedding specialist.”

While China is already the second-largest economy in the world, it is still in an embryonic stage of
development. Everywhere one looks, there are product, technology and service gaps to be filled, each
of which represents a new business opportunity for someone with the ability to recognize that the gap
exists and the vision to develop and implement a strategy for filling it. Some of these gaps may be
filled by Chinese companies or entrepreneurs, but others may be filled by Western companies or
entrepreneurs. The degree to which China’s wedding industry has changed is astonishing and
demonstrates the speed with which new ideas are adopted in the country. If someone had told me as
recently as five years ago, let alone in 1993 when I first came here, that the Chinese would be
spending so much on Western-style weddings, I simply would not have believed it.
How it all Began in Japan

In the past, almost all weddings in Japan were Shinto, but in the last few years Western-style
weddings have appeared and become very popular. People like the dress, the kiss and the whole
image. Christians make up only 1.4% of Japan’s 127 million population, but Western “white
weddings” now account for around three quarters of all bridal ceremonies, which means Christian
priests are in high demand. To meet their clients’ expectations bridal companies have given up on
trying to find ordained ministers and have kept requirements to a minimal – men looking foreign-
enough to pass as Christians who can speak a little Japanese and perform the ceremony in twenty
minutes. The Western ‘photo priests’ are used to create an authentic Christian feel.
With a rise in the popularity of Christian-style weddings in Japan, A few savvy Westerners have
found that they can make a lucrative living by acting as priests. Mark Kelly, originally from
Lancashire in England is a fake priest at weekends. While he was living in Sapporo, studying
Japanese, he needed some extra money and acting as a wedding celebrant turned out to be far better
paid than teaching in a language school. This soon led to other work such as a major TV commercial
for one related company. In Sapporo, there are five agencies employing about twenty fake priests. In a
big city like Tokyo, there are literally hundreds. The fake Western priests are employed at Western-
style weddings to give a performance and add to the atmosphere. These are not legal ceremonies - the
couples also have to make a trip to the local registrar. Mark works mainly at one large hotel. They
have a Christian chapel next to a Shinto chapel. The Christian chapel is always in use, but the Shinto
chapel is being used as a storeroom. There are Japanese priests, but most couples are trying to re-
create a European wedding, so they overwhelmingly ask for a foreign priest.

Western-style chapels are often found in unexpected places. The Morito Ishi Kyokai (Forest and
Stone) Chapel is on the sixth floor of a supermarket in Sapporo. As you walk between sushi
restaurants, cake shops and noodle bars, a grey plastic stone grotto decked in plastic flowers and
fairy lights suddenly appears. There are plastic cherubs and little fountains inside, in a Japanese
attempt to mimic the style of mid-century stone churches in Europe. Because it is in a shopping centre,
you get the sounds of vegetables on special offer mixed in with the opening bars of the wedding
march

The fake priests in Japan sometimes have to deal with difficult situations. Kelly has had brides
vomit on him and then faint, hardly the romantic experience that we imagine. Another time an old
Japanese man dressed head to toe in military uniform hobbled to the front and then promptly fell
asleep. Halfway through the service, he opened his eyes and gasped in horror at the white devil
standing in front of him. Perhaps he thought he was back in Burma or Thailand and quickly began
shouting ‘banzai’ war cries. Fortunately his relatives were quite embarrassed and eventually calmed
him down. Mark has presided over plenty of ceremonies where the bride was already quite visibly
pregnant.
Occasionally he meets genuine Japanese priests who are usually very negative about the whole
thing and sometimes downright antagonistic. Unfortunately there are simply are not enough genuine
Japanese priests to meet the demand. Of course, the ceremony is not about religion, but about image.
Mark gives a good performance and if people are crying by the end of the wedding, then he considers
it a job well done. While the prime motivator for the Western wedding ministers is cash, many take
an extra pride in their work.
Religion in Japan has recently become a kind of vast spiritual buffet. At different times in their
lives, Japanese have a full range of different religions to choose from; a bit of Shinto here, a dash of
Buddhism there. The boom in what some Japanese magazines call "foreign fake pastors" speaks
volumes about modern Japan's attachment to appearances and its smorgasbord approach to religion.
Japanese often choose Shintoism for childhood ceremonies, Christianity for weddings and Buddhism
for funerals.

While a few couples still get married in traditional Shinto ceremonies, the majority of Japanese
weddings are now done in the Christian tradition, complete with the chapel, the white dress, a priest;
the whole nine yards. Even so, the parts of Western-style weddings that appeal to the Japanese are
purely aesthetic; the religious aspects are more or less non-existent. It is not surprising that the
Japanese celebrate Christian-style weddings without any actual Christianity; Japanese adaptation of
Western religious traditions usually completely misses the point. That is why Christmas is widely
celebrated in Japan on a non-religious basis with Kentucky Fried Chicken and strawberry shortcake.

What’s particularly interesting about Christian-style Western weddings is that it has generated a
huge market for fake priests. Japanese Western-style wedding ceremonies need something to lend an
air of authenticity, but hiring a real, bona fide priest is tricky. Since there are so few Christians in
Japan, priests are in already short supply. Not only that, but they can be expensive to hire, and might
frown upon a Christian-style wedding without any actual Christianity involved. Anyway, a priest
simply will not marry two people who are not Catholic and most pastors will not marry two non-
Christians either. This is just filling a gap in the market.

So the companies that arrange wedding ceremonies resort to hiring people who look foreign
enough to actually be Christian. They do not need to be certified as a priest, they do not even need to
be a Christian. For all intents and purposes, being a priest in Japan is an acting gig for Westerners, a
way to earn a few extra bucks on the weekend. Fake priests try to put on a genuine performance, and
some even use wedding scripts complete with all the necessary lines to make sure everything goes
according to plan. Some of the most popular actors are flown all around Japan to do weddings, while
others are hired long-term to perform in spaces designed to look like churches, chapels or cathedrals
and built especially for fake weddings. They can earn hundreds of dollars for twenty minute
ceremonies for which they have to put on the ceremonious robes, recite a few lines in English or
decent Japanese and tell the couples to kiss. Your Japanese has to be decent enough to read through
the ceremony, and you have to be able to stand the immense pressures of officiating somebody’s
wedding, one of the most important days of a person’s life.

Hiring foreign-looking stand-ins is already popular in other Asian countries. The trend in China
that involves companies hiring white men to pose as business partners in order to make them look
more international to their real partners, also known as 'White Guy Window Dressing.' is already
very well established. It also explains why wedding services often use a young, photogenic white guy
with perfect teeth and curly brown hair as the grooms in their advertising material. It is a common
scheme to sell the "white wedding" fantasy to Asian women.

There is nothing sacrilegious to have a fake priest marrying couples in a fake chapel. After all, if
Americans can get hitched by an Elvis impersonator in Vegas, why shouldn't Japanese couples enjoy
all the trappings of a church ceremony on their special day. Everyone knows of the cliché Vegas
chapel wedding, but other venues are now cashing in on the romance by offering unusual and some
outright bizarre ways to enter into wedded bliss. Soon to be partners who wish to walk the road less
travelled, can now exchange rings in some very unusual and not quite so romantic spots. Apart from
zombie, Hello Kitty and Star Trek themed weddings (set on a full scale replica of the Enterprise’s
bridge no less), there is even a flying school that offers sky diving wedding ceremonies at 10,000
feet. The New York - New York Roller Coaster has set aside two times a day - 12:30 am and 10:30
am, where the ride is made available only to blushing brides and their grooms. The actual fifteen
minute ceremony takes place on the platform but once that first kiss is finished, the bride and groom,
and up to fourteen of their favourite people, hop aboard and take a thrilling ride. Across the street
from the Hard Rock Hotel is an 18 hole mini golf course themed around the rock band KISS, where
inside you will find the Hotter than Hell Wedding Chapel. Concert tickets are sent to guests, who get
to watch the nuptials unfold on a stage fashioned to mimic the “Love Gun” album cover. And because
every shooting range should have its own wedding chapel, the aptly named Shot Gun Weddings by the
Gun Store, offers a wedding package that includes perks such as five free shots with a shotgun and
photo ops holding your favourite fire arm.

It is not just the Japanese who pick and choose the best bits of religion. Just look at how Christmas
is celebrated all over the world, not by people who are remembering the birth of Jesus Christ though.
It is all about shopping and eating and partying. If anything, Christians should be grateful. The fake
priests are actually cultural ambassadors, introducing their religion to other cultures with an
irresistible romance and elegance. It works the other way around as well. Yoga for example is
actually a religious ceremony in India, but you do not see anybody complaining about it being misused
for recreational purposes.

Japan’s love affair with Christian wedding is believed to have started in the 1980s with the
televised weddings of Prince Charles and Lady Diana and was fuelled by the nuptials of Japanese
pop star Momoe Yamaguchi. Since 1996, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry,
the number of Christian weddings has nearly doubled while the number of Shinto weddings has
plunged by two-thirds. People, women especially, were attracted by the idea of celebrating their
marriage through a ritual that revolved around love and that elevates the bride to the status of princess
even for a short while. Traditional Shinto weddings, on the other hand, encase women in a wig and
kimono, and are focused more on the merger of two families. The Japanese simply fell in love with
the sharp dress code, the kiss and the overall image of Western weddings over their centuries-old
traditions. Part of this rising popularity can be attributed to the fact that so many movies and soap
operas feature examples of white weddings rather than of Shinto ones. But in order to have a genuine-
looking ceremony, they wanted Christian priests, which were pretty hard to find. That started the now
famous “foreign fake pastors” trend that saw companies and hotels hiring average foreign gentlemen
with minimal knowledge of the Japanese language to perform Christian weddings.

The "white wedding" in Japan copies an archetypal Western ceremony. There are all the
traditional elements: live music, an expensive white dress, and a giant cross hanging in the
background. The couple swaps rings, cuts a cake at the reception, and at the end, the bride throws a
bouquet to the next lucky girl. But perhaps the most essential part of the event is a minister who looks
the part. In other words, a white person.

For the most part Japanese couples get married in either lavish hotel lobbies or in one of the many
ornate chapels built to accommodate the booming wedding business. At a hotel near the central train
station in Nagasaki, a typical ceremony has a string quartet and organ play Pachabel's Cannon in D to
open the service and then the white minister takes over. From behind the podium, he reads in both
Japanese and English, delivering all of the traditional lines: A speech about the rings and their
significance, the "do you take this man, do you take this women" bit, and of course the climactic, "you
may now kiss the bride." At the end the choir sings a weddingifed version of "All You Need is Love,"
and the crowd showers the newly-weds with rose petals supplied by the highly organized hotel staff.

From a small beginning a few years ago, the Western wedding "priest" has suddenly become an
established part of modern Japan's cultural tableau. The lure of easy money has prompted hundreds of
foreign men to respond to newspaper advertisements here, like the ones that read: "North Americans,
Europeans wanted to conduct wedding ceremonies." When the first fake priests began conducting
these ceremonies they used to make almost $400 per wedding ceremony. Now all the best hotels have
chapels with someone dressed up as a priest. In fact, the less overtly religious the pastor, the better.
Hotel managers generally discourage proselytizing by authentic Christian pastors. Overhead, a movie
camera runs on a ceiling track, filming the couple marching past red roses suspended in crystal
columns, and white curtains opening to a hotel garden where a green neon cross glows in the
afternoon sun. At the end of the centre aisle, past white trumpet lilies, a "pastor" stands at the altar,
gold cross gleaming on white robes. Any man from an English-speaking country who will show up on
time, remember his lines, not mix up names and perform the ceremony in twenty minutes will do
perfectly well as far as the customers are concerned. Sometimes the hotel will do fifteen in a day.
These days applicants have to take a two-day course before they can begin officiating at wedding
ceremonies on weekends. Among foreigners, competition has depressed the pay for a wedding
ceremony to US$120 from US$200 five years ago.