I got engaged recently and my fiancé and I have finalized our plan to get married in our home country by end of this year. We already booked the venue for our target wedding date.
Now, due to our decision to get a house prior to our wedding (current apartment contract expires before our wedding date), it seems we need to get married in order to have better chances of being approved for a home loan.
Our plan would be to get married in city hall here in Japan and then get married again in our home country several months later.
My worry is if these would somehow someway screw us up; if there would be problems with documentations such as not matchin or need to be updated, etc.
Has anybody been in the same situation? Or what could be done in this case otherwise?
By the way, we wanted our target wedding date (in home country) to be our official marriage date. So we’re also not yet intending to report our Japan marriage to embassy until after our wedding.
5 comments
If you get married abroad you can register your marriage in Japan after you return. If you’re a straight couple, anyway.
>By the way, we wanted our target wedding date (in home country) to be our official marriage date. So we’re also not yet intending to report our Japan marriage to embassy until after our wedding.
I’m no expert, I don’t even play one on TV, but this sounds like a very bad idea. Don’t get married twice when it’s legally binding each time. It is if you do it here at city hall unless your country of origin doesn’t recognize marriages from Japan. Consult with your embassy, a lawyer who specializes in this, and for the love of god don’t base your decision solely on this thread.
The paperwork is the marriage in Japan. People usually do the paperwork first and the wedding quite a while later, but they are officially married from the date of filing the paperwork. The wedding is not necessary. You can do the paperwork in Japan and have a ceremony in your home country. By Japanese law, you will already be married then, but you can celebrate your anniversary on the date of the wedding. If you want to be officially married in your home country, there is usually a process for having the marriage in Japan recognized by filing paperwork at the embassy.
The simplest solution would be to handle the official marriage ’contract’ in Japan (and have that registered in your own country if you want/need to) and then just have the wedding in your chosen location and time without official registration. The registration is a legal matter, so usually a wedding officiant or priest is ok to bless your marriage without the paperwork part.
As for your official marriage date, you can just choose to have your wedding date as the anniversary you look back on every year. This is what my partner and I did – although we keep the registration date as an additional mini anniversary because why not 😊
Getting legally married at city hall and then having your ceremony several months later is totally normal here; no-one would bat an eye at that. Bear in mind you’ll likely need a certificate from your embassy showing that you can legally marry, and perhaps other documents – I had to order a fresh copy of my birth certificate as the one from when I was born is more than 6 months old, for example.
Getting *legally* married abroad after that would be difficult though. Even if you got legally divorced here first, not all countries recognise Japanese divorce by consent.