Japanese Wedding Traditions

Japanese wedding traditions are over thousands of years old. A traditional Japanese wedding is one where the ceremony is very private between close family and the reception is for all the friends and co-workers. Use your own Japanese heritage to inspire your new wedding traditions. In anything you do from the style of traditional Japanese wedding dress to invitations to customs you can infuse the old style and influence onto all parts of your day.

Japanese wedding traditions will help to dictate how the bride and groom will dress. The bride will wear a formal Japanese wedding gown called a Shiro-Maku. This is a beautiful white kimono symbolizing the bride’s purity. The bride will have her hair styled in the Japanese wedding traditional style pilled well on the top of her head. The groom will wear a short traditional Japanese wedding coat called a Haori overcoat with his families crest on it over a pair of kimono style pleated pants.

A traditional Japanese wedding ceremony will take place in a Shinto shrine. This is a shrine celebrating the way of the Gods and is a very sacred place for a wedding in Japanese culture. The Japanese wedding ceremony is only for the bride and the groom and intimate family since the event is so sacred.

After the ceremony the new couple will then go to an elaborate reception with friends and family. Before the reception the bride may make the first of many costume changes. She may change from her traditional Japanese wedding kimono into a new elaborately embroidered colorful wedding gown. The food served at a Japanese wedding can be either traditional Japanese or French or American. If you wanted you could even incorporate an American style wedding cake into your Japanese wedding tradition. The wedding music played can be based on flute sonatas since it is a Japanese wedding tradition to have beautiful flute music at your ceremony and reception.

When the party has come to an end the bride will most likely have changed into a simple party gown before leaving her Japanese wedding ceremony. This symbolizes her readiness to enter into a new life with her new husband. As a send off someone may decide to wish the bride and groom well with miniature Japanese wedding dolls as a form of good luck. If you can not find little dolls then origami cranes would be perfect since they symbolize good luck.