The Ballad of Craig and Yumiko
How did two people born on opposite sides of the globe meet, fall in love and get married?
First Sight
Well, in 1987 Craig moved to Japan for a two-year term as a short-term missionary with LIFE Ministries (now known as Asian Access). He taught English in a newly planted church in the city of Tokorozawa. Tokorozawa, as it happens, is the city where Yumiko lived with her family.
Yumiko’s English class
In October 1988 Yumiko signed up for an English conversation class, which turned out to be taught by an emaciated but energetic teacher named Craig. The class was a blast, and both Craig and Yumiko treasure their friendships with the other students in it to this day.
However, at the end of the semester, Craig’s term in Japan came to an end, and he returned to the U.S. to attend Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. During the next six years, Craig returned to Japan twice for shorter periods, and each time he did, he and Yumiko got together.
In 1995 Craig completed his degree and, to pay for all of that education, took a teaching job in Japan, in the seaside city of Zushi. Though Zushi wasn’t all that close to Tokorozawa, he occasionally got together with Tokorozawa friends, including Yumiko. None of these get-togethers could be considered a date.
Then came Valentine’s Day 1996.
First Date
The Japanese do Valentine’s Day a bit differently. Women give chocolate or other gifts to the men in their lives: boyfriends, bosses, brothers, former English teachers. Men have an opportunity to reciprocate on White Day, March 14, if they are so inclined.
Thus it was that Yumiko sent to Craig some chocolates for Valentine’s Day. Twenty-nine anxious days later, Craig—not entirely sure of the significance of Yumiko’s action or his own—delivered a box of chocolate into the hands of Yumiko’s startled mother. Accompanying the chocolate was a card thanking Yumiko for her Valentine gift and saying
- that Craig had been thinking a lot about their friendship
- that he wasn’t sure how the relationship would develop in the future
- that he wanted to get together with Yumiko soon
Craig considered this a big, brave step forward. Yumiko, of course, was devastated. She took it as a Japanese “no”—polite, indirect, even positive in tone, but unalterably negative all the same.
So, when Craig phoned a few days later to say that he wanted to meet her, it was with little expectancy or excitement that she accepted. You can imagine her puzzlement, on the day of their rendezvous, when Craig observed that this was their first date. What did he mean by that?
That first date was pleasant, well-mannered and decidedly ho-hum, but that didn’t prevent them from later having a second date. It was on that second date that the romance began to blossom. From that point on, the two lovebirds were walking on air. Had they not lived three hours apart—with Tokyo, Kawasaki and Yokohama arrayed between them—they might have seen each other more than a couple of times a month.
Pop Goes the Question
Weeks turned to months, and months turned to years, and eventually Craig—bold, impetuous Craig—decided the time to propose had come. He bought a pair of diamond earrings (the ring would have to come later) and met Yumiko for the fateful date. He had wanted to arrange for an intimate dinner at a nice, romantic restaurant, but he hadn’t had time to scout out a suitable place. Unsure whether the evening’s ambience would be conducive to a proposal of marriage, he panicked and blurted out his proposal while they were resting their feet in a tearoom.
Yumiko was shocked. She couldn't speak for the next twenty minutes. A single thought kept running through her mind: “‘Marry me?’ I’m not supposed to hear those words from Craig.” Eventually she recovered her voice and, to Craig’s relief, accepted his proposal.
The following weekend, Craig put on his best suit and traveled to Tokorozawa to formally ask Yumiko’s parents for her hand. On the way, he picked up two gift melons.
Though Yumiko’s parents spoke no English, Craig knew exactly what to say. Years earlier, during his first month in Japan, Craig had asked for another young woman’s hand in marriage—inadvertantly, mind you.
At that point, Craig had had only a few lessons in survival Japanese. He had, however, learned the “magic word” for making requests: kudasai. To request a pen, he had been taught to say, “Pen wo kudasai” (“Please give me a pen”). So when he received a message to call his church’s secretary, Seiko, and when the voice that answered the phone was that of a man, he reasoned that to ask for Seiko he should say, “Seiko-san wo kudasai.”
Unfortunately, kudasai works when requesting objects, but the only time it is ever used with a person’s name is when a young man is asking a young lady’s father for that lady’s hand in marriage. When Craig said, “Seiko-san wo kudasai,” the response was an astonished “Ehhhhh?!?” Not knowing what else to say, Craig kept repeating himself more and more insistently—to the growing consternation of the man on the other end of the line.
Understandably that incident had branded those words into Craig’s memory. Now he would finally get to use them properly. And use them he did. He even remembered to substitute Yumiko’s name for Seiko’s.
Wedding Plans
Weddings in Japan are not cheap, so Craig and Yumiko decided on a do-it-yourself celebration. They would have the ceremony in a church instead of a hotel or a wedding palace. Rather than entrusting the wedding to professionals, they would do everything themselves or with the help of their friends.
None of this proved to be easy. It got even more complicated when, four weeks before the wedding, Craig fell mysteriously ill. After two trips to the emergency room, he was hospitalized. The diagnosis: mononucleosis…and, the doctor feared, perhaps something more serious.
In Japan, no one wants to give bad news to the patient. So the doctor told Yumiko privately that Craig was in very real danger of dying. His blood readings were heading toward the fatal range. He needed to rest.
Rest, of course, was the last thing on Craig’s mind. There was a wedding to plan! For the first several days in the hospital, Craig could barely sit up, but after that he stayed up late into the nights making arrangements. Yumiko begged him to take it easy but of course couldn't tell him why.
As the wedding day drew nearer, Craig began pleading to be released from the hospital. The doctor held firm until the twelfth day. Then, five days before the big event, Craig was discharged, still weak but no longer considered to be in danger of dying.
The following five days were an insane flurry of activity. Craig and Yumiko registered their marriage at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo and at the local city office. Craig moved from his apartment to the house he and Yumiko would share. The printer on which everything for the wedding was to be printed suddenly died and had to be taken to Tokyo for repair. And of course, Craig could barely walk a city block.
They scrambled to cancel their honeymoon reservations (on doctor’s orders) and to postpone the wedding reception, but the wedding itself was still on and almost upon them.
The Big Day
Despite all of the craziness leading up to the wedding, the wedding day itself was…well, insane. We couldn’t possibly give an adequate account of it here. We’ll leave you instead with two special but unexpected moments from our special day.
Weddings in Japan do not include bridesmaids and groomsmen, but ours did. When Yumiko’s identical twin sister came down the aisle wearing a fuschia dress, followed by Craig’s sister in an identical dress, the Japanese guests who did not know that Yumiko is a twin—that is, the great majority of the guests—were baffled. The whispering began. “Why is the bride wearing pink?” “Who is that other, foreign woman?” Perhaps even “Is he marrying both?” When Yumiko herself appeared in white, the guests weren’t necessarily any less perplexed.
When the wedding and all of the other activities of the day were done, Craig and Yumiko were exhausted. Despite his mono, Craig had managed to stay on his feet almost all the way to the end. He had finally had to sit in a chair as they greeted the last guests in the receiving line. Now as we made our way, in wedding dress and tailcoat, the two blocks from the church to the hall where we could change into our regular clothes, Yumiko was trying desperately to keep her rented dress and its train from dragging on the sidewalk, and Craig was doing his best simply to put one foot in front of the other. All around us were shoppers and diners and clubbers, fashionable people going about their fashionable evening affairs in fashionable Omotesando, Tokyo. Suddenly and unaccountably, as we moved slowly down the sidewalk, people began applauding. They were smiling broadly and calling out their congratulations. It was a wonderful finish to an insanely wonderful day.