Married by Starlight

10 July 2022

Doing a little bit of a deep dive today, talking about an important cultural festival in Japan. But you know there’s a personal connection, too. Hang on!

The night of the seventh day of the seventh month (in the lunar calendar in China, Vietnam, and Korea, and on the Gregorian calendar in Japan) is a festival with a very literal name: 七夕.

The characters mean “seventh evening”. The Mandarin pronunciation is Qixi, which echoes somewhat in the Korean, Chilseok, but is pronounced quite differently in Vietnamese (Thất Tịch) and Japanese (Tanabata).

Students of Japanese will scratch their heads because that pronunciation for those two characters is out there. There is an alternate pronunciation which makes more lexical sense, shichiseki, and you can hear faint echoes of the Chinese and Korean there.

Tanabata is also written 棚幡 but as was the case when the Catholic Church decided to map Christmas to the Roman Saturnalia, 棚幡 refers to an older Shintō festival that occurred at roughly the same time of the year as the Star Festival. Those characters are read tana and hata, respectively.

Sometimes English gets in the way. The translations for this event range from Star Festival to Double Seventh Festival to Magpie Festival to Chinese Valentine’s Day to Night of Sevens.

All of those different translations can mean only one thing: a story, and it dates back to ancient Chinese folklore, introduced to Japan in the eighth century, CE.

The principal players are the original star-crossed lovers, 織姫 (Orihime, the weaver princess), and 牽牛 (Kengyū, the cowherd), also known as 彦星 (Hikoboshi, star boy) or 夏彦 (Natsuhiko, summer boy). In Japan, the antagonist is Orihime’s father, 天帝 (Tentei, the King of Heaven), and in China, the Queen Mother of the West (西王母, Seiōbo in Japanese) plays an antagonist role, too.

Orihime got her name because she wove the beautiful cloth that her father loved. So much so, that he ordered her to make more and more of it. Orihime was happy to please her father but there was a snag: she couldn’t meet any guys if all she did was weave. Tentei relented, and arranged for her to meet Kengyū, but Orihime and Kengyū immediately fell in love and ran off to be married.

Tentei was pissed. He asked Seiōbo to help rectify the situation, and she created a great river in the sky (known to us as the Milky Way) and Tentei placed Orihime (identified as Vega in the night sky) on one side of the river and Kengyū (Altair) on the other.

What happened next depends on who you ask. In some versions, Orihime begs her father, tears streaming down her face, to let her see Kengyū, and he concedes: the pair can meet one night a year: the night of the seventh day of the seventh month.

In another version, a flock of magpies take pity on Orihime and fly in tight formation over the river, allowing her to walk across on their wings.

Extreme tangent alert: the scientific name for the European magpie is Pica pica. Holy Pokémon, Batman!

One other (less extreme) tangent: if it rains on July 7th in Japan, the rain is described as 催涙雨 (sairui ame, tear-inducing rain), because both Orihime and Kengyū will cry at being unable to meet—the rains will cause the river to swell, and the magpies cannot bridge it.

One tradition associated with Star Festival observances in Japan is the making of wishes. Wishes (and poems) are inscribed on narrow slips of paper and then tied to bamboo branches, hoisted high for the gods to read and grant.

Combine the notion of a love long separated (Hiro and I did not marry because, until 2013, marriage would not have changed our lives in any meaningful way) with wishes come true. When the US Supreme Court read out their ruling on United States v Windsor on the morning of June 26, 2013, invalidating key parts of the Defense of Marriage Act, they enabled three key benefits for the two of us: joint tax filing, the sharing of social security benefits, and, most important of all: the long-awaited ability for me to sponsor Hiro for a spousal green card.

To get that green card, we needed to be married. I therefore (re-)proposed on June 26.

We filed the British Columbia paperwork on June 28.

We met with a commissioner of marriage (the BC equivalent of a justice of the peace) on June 29, whereupon we selected our vows and the ceremony date.

For me, the closest date with an auspicious association was July 7, the day Hiro and I would be reunited as spouses, and the day our wishes would be heard.

On July 1 (Canada Day), we contacted our witnesses (our friends David and Klaus) and asked them and their spouses to attend on us on the 7th.

July 2 was Hiro’s birthday.

On July 5th, the marriage commissioner called to let us know that friends of hers would be away and that we could marry in their garden if we so wished. We so wished.

July 7th dawned bright and clear. The combination of nerves and my anti-anxiety medications tamped down a lot of the joy I wanted to express, but Hiro smiled enough for both of us.

Our wedding certificate arrived in the mail within the week, and by the beginning of September, we had all the paperwork—translated birth certificate, police records from Japan, the US, and Canada, my tax records, twenty years’ worth of photographs, letters from family and friends, financial documents, the wedding certificate, and the application itself—together for the green card application.

It took eighteen months before we received his interview appointment. March in Montréal was cold in more ways than one—the interviewer did not consider my temporary Canadian student visa as proof that I’d return to the US.

After sending letters from both a US-based employer and a potential US landlord, Hiro’s green card was finally issued, and we crossed the border into the US at Blaine to get it entered into his passport in late June of 2015.

The Star Festival will live on in my memory as not only our wedding anniversary, but also as a testament of my ability to get things done really fast.

In the words of the Muppets, somebody’s getting married today!