Fake priesting seems to be getting some attention again, thanks largely to On the Virgin Road, or iamafakepriestinjapan, as its URL prefers it. What interests me most about this is that it hasn’t been picked up as a decent blog topic before – I certainly wish I’d thought of it back in my stole-wearing days.
Yes, that’s right. I was a fake priest in Japan. Not that it’s much of a secret; I must’ve told the stories more times than I actually performed weddings – 1,092 weddings all told, between the years of 2003 and 2009. I got pretty good at it, too; so good in fact that there was a point during my peak years (yes, I had peak years) that a “chapel” in Kitakyushu secured my services long-term, as newly-weds-to-be were apparently asking specifically for me. I’d like to humbly admit that I have no idea how they’d even heard of me, but that wouldn’t be true. 2005 was the year, after all, that I began appearing in fake priest commercials.
It’s true that I never saw one of these, though a number of my friends told me they’d seen me reading from Corinthians in Japanese during a JAL flight between Tokyo and Fukuoka. It didn’t surprise me at all. During “the peak years” I’d occasionally be flown out to the Goto Islands in Nagasaki (which, incidentally, already had a history of religious invasion), and sometimes be requested to perform dog weddings.
A dog wedding does exactly as you’re hoping it does: two dogs, one in a gown and one in a tuxedo, walking down the aisle and signing singledom away with one mucky paw print (the owners would dip the mutts’ paws into a bejewelled tub of paint). I even went so far as to star in a commercial for a dog wedding, though it was a service that never really caught on. I’ve always hoped this was because Japanese people are not as easily fooled out of their cash as the bandits who dream up things like dog weddings think they are, but the company that hired me explained that it had more to do with a lack of extra advertising funds. What some people will do with their money during a recession beggars belief.
The peak years lasted between 2005 and 2007, a time when I could rattle off the scripts in my sleep, although I always kept them glued inside my copy of the King James Bible to be on the safe side. I was good at my job, I was being paid ridiculously well (15,000 yen per 15-minute wedding; approximately 6-8 weddings per weekend, and 3 or 4 during the week) and I had a huge amount of free time with which to pursue my writing career. Had I not been a fake priest in Japan, I’d never have found the time to freelance, or the money to support my family. No two ways about it, fake priesting served me well.
In 2008, I was approached by a literary agent in New York who had heard my odd tale and asked me to write it up as a book proposal. I spent a few months trying, but quickly found that it had very little substance – much the way I felt about the job itself by this point. It was great for a few anecdotes, but ultimately soulless – and I use that word with caution. Not in the slightest bit religious, I spent years dismissing the god fearing folk who told me I was destined to burn. What ultimately got to me was the fact that I was, quite literally, living a lie.
While these weddings took place in establishments that screamed fakery, the amount of people who appeared to have had the wool pulled over their eyes unnerved me. Nobody seemed to question why “Chester Cathedral“, a vast gray monstrosity that sat 250 people and had bigger stained glass window than the church in the village I grew up in, sat on a nondescript road in Fukuoka’s Kasuga district. If they did, they seemed to dismiss it easily enough.
Maybe I shouldn’t have allowed it to get to me so much, but the idea of a such as myself performing pre-wedding counselling sessions, as I was occasionally asked to do, really began to make me feel deeply uncomfortable. The standard line used by most members of the fake priest community was that we were just actors, but I occasionally found that the people I worked with closely – the choirgirls and ushers – were under the impression that we were the real deal. If they weren’t in on it, the chances were that the bride and groom weren’t either.
The last 12 months were unpleasant. I started having severe panic attacks in the middle of ceremonies – white knuckle rides that, by all accounts, I did an impressive job of covering up. Somehow I was able to get to the end of each wedding without collapsing, though my heart was pounding, my fingers were locked around the edges of the altar, and my mind was swimming in the absolute surreality of it all – “what the fuck am I doing here in front of 300 Japanese people, dressed in a smock, reading scripture I don’t believe in a language I don’t fully understand?” I still dream I’m doing it, but never during a comfortable sleep.
In a way it helped me forward. I used any energy that I could find in my subsequent depression to work harder at my other job, my writing and editing, and eventually I managed to claw my way out of the pulpit. If I’m surprised by anything now, it’s only how quickly I managed to forget the script, words I used to read so well that they’d regularly summon me for a performance in small towns in the Honshu hills. Forgive me the cliché, but it seems like a story from another lifetime. And thank the good lord for that.
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