单选题
Mark Kelly is originally from Lancashire in England. He has been living in Japan for six years and, at the weekend, he is a fake priest. "I was living in Sapporo, studying Japanese, and I needed the money. It"s far better paid than teaching in a language school," he said, "Being a fake priest is big business in Japan—I"ve done a TV commercial for one company," he added. "In Sapporo, there are five agencies employing about 20 fake priests. In a city like Tokyo, there must be hundreds."
The fake Western priests are employed at Western-style wedding to give a performance and add to the atmosphere. These are not legal ceremonies—the couples also have to make a trip to the local registrar. "In the past almost all weddings in Japan were Shinto, but in the last few years Western-style wedding have appeared and become very popular," said one Japanese priest. "Most couples are trying to re-create a European wedding, so they overwhelmingly ask for a foreign priest instead of a Japanese one," he added.
The fake priests in Japan sometimes have to deal with difficult situations. Mr. Kelly has often presided over ceremonies where the bride is pregnant. "It is common. Once, the bride vomited on me and then fainted. It wasn"t very romantic," he said. "Another difficulty is meeting genuine Japanese priests to meet the demand," he said.
One Japanese Christian priest spoke out. "It is a real problem for us. They are not genuine and they give us a bad name," he said. "It is important for the bride and groom to have a proper wedding, and they are not getting it from these foreign priests. I have even heard of hotels using staff when they can"t find anyone else."
But Mr. Kelly argues that the ceremony is not about religion, but about image. "I give a good performance. I use an Apache wedding prayer in my ceremony. It works very well, although I had to take out the part about the bear god in the sky," he said. "If people are crying by the end of the wedding, I think I have done a good job."