MacArthur Marriages

Camphor balls and chrysanthemums mingled their odors in stately Meiji Memorial Hall last week as eager bridegrooms in rented cutaways thronged Tokyo's biggest marriage center to claim their kimonoed brides. In the corridors couples stood ten and twelve deep, waiting to go through the sake-drinking ceremony known as three-times-three-is-nine. Between marriages, the blue-and-white-robed Shinto priests, whose duty it is to provide suitable flute music, raced to washrooms to soak their aching fingers in hot water.

Downtown on the Ginza, a big department store was doing a hotcakes business in a $3,000 "bride's special" -wedding kimono, TV set, gas range, refrigerator, washing machine, furniture, trousseau and a supply of salad dressing -while the enterprising hotelkeepers of Atami, Japan's Niagara Falls, offered special rates on honeymoon suites with "a bathtub just big enough for two." November is Japan's traditional wedding season,* and with 700,000 couples either wed or affianced, this year's season promises to be perhaps the biggest since World War II.

Meet the Missus. Next year, under the lunar calendar, will be the "Year of the Monkey," which presents a poor augury for married bliss. But there is another reason for last week's rush to the altar. Marriages are now arranged with greater ease, thanks to the MacArthur constitution, which supposedly equalized the sexes. The ancient gentlemen whose business it has long been to arrange marriages between families without the knowledge or consent of either bride or groom are still as busy as ever. But in modern Japan, young people find more opportunity to meet under less formal circumstances and even to fall in love.

Faced with their youngsters' firm determination to marry whom they wish, many Japanese parents tend to bow to the inevitable, masking their parental pride behind a face-saving ritual in which the already-well-acquainted couple are formally introduced to each other. Many an urban bridegroom has a new respect for his prize. At Meiji Hall last week, one busy girl marriage clerk noted with satisfaction that nine out of every ten grooms let their brides step into the marriage limousine before them.

Cow Without Horns. Yet, despite all the Occupation's well-meant effort to liberate Japanese women, 70% of Japanese marriages are still arranged by parents, with no say-so left to the bride herself. A recent poll of eligible bachelors reveals that most of them rate "obedience" high in a prospective wife's virtues, and greybeards still happily recall the days when every Japanese bride was given a sword on her wedding to remind her that death was preferable to desertion. In the rural districts, where from time immemorial wives have been the best beasts of burden, today's bride is still, as one Welfare Ministry official put it last week, little more than "a cow without horns."

* Because, some say, rural fathers liked to wait until harvest time to see how their prospective daughters-in-law got in the rice before they signed them up.

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