The Untold Story of Sound House’s Founding Episode 4: Surprise Wedding Ceremony in a Park and the Family’s Bankruptcy Crisis!

Life is full of accidents. One of the most extreme cases may be a marriage proposal from a woman’s father. It happened when it was only the second time we met, what did it all really mean? However, looking back at it now, I couldn’t hide my surprise at the many unexpected events that had happened since I moved to Narita. I had come to think that this marriage proposal was a fun unexpected event. I wonder if this is what they call divine intervention. Just by being guided by the divine in prayer, I met her for the third time at a church concert and strangely, I found myself asking her, “What do you think about our marriage proposal?” after my performance. What else should I call this but an “unexpected” event?

Six months later, the impossible finally happened. I came to Narita as a man who only had his guitar and his dog Mitchie. Narita was a place I had no connection to, but here I was deciding to hold a wedding ceremony at a park in Karabe, Narita, with a devout Christian woman whom I had met less than six months earlier. Why in a park? The answer was simple. We only needed permission from the city hall office to use the park for the wedding ceremony, and it was free. No other wedding ceremonies could have been more inexpensive. I felt sorry for my fiancée, but I don’t think I even bought a wedding ring. I was initially worried about whether or not she would be okay without one, but I remember she agreed to it because she didn’t like jewelry or valuable things. What I regret now is that I had to set up the park venue myself and I was so busy with all the preparations until just before the ceremony, so I didn’t even have time to go to the barber. Life is an adventure. Well, this must have been a rare moment for people to encounter a guy like me.

A minister who was a friend of mine officiated the ceremony. We also were blessed with nice weather, and our wedding ceremony turned out to be a great success. We then went on a honeymoon trip to the Philippines where I had visited many times when I was doing missionary work. After coming back to Japan from this short trip, I encountered two incidents. One was that church where I used to perform suddenly discontinued their concert nights. To be honest, this surprised me a lot. More and more people started to come to the concerts every Sunday night, so I thought they were just picking up, but they were unilaterally canceled. What was even more surprising was that I was told that the parents of my wife, whom I had just gotten married to, were almost bankrupt and they had to close their business.

My in-laws ran a small tailor shop where they tailored men’s suits by themselves. However, in the early 1990’s, people seemed hesitant about spending money as the economic bubble began to burst in Japan. Furthermore, they both were good-natured people. They worked hard to tailor suits to their customers’ specifications but my in-laws were unable to collect payments from their customers. The customers would say, “I’ll pay you soon”, but only a few of them would actually pay. While my in-laws waited on them for payment, the debt from the cost of materials grew enormously. They told me that their debt rapidly exceeded 10 million yen.
Oh my... I was happy to have a wedding ceremony, but my in-laws were practically bankrupt. I no longer had the church concerts, and I also had nothing else to do. What could I have done with all of this free time? There was only one answer. I decided to work in Narita to pay off my in-laws’ debt in order to free them from the bank loan! (To be continued in Episode 5)