I guess you could partially explain the expensive weddings with status. I mean, most people would probably be wed in a cathedral than in a cardboard house, right? And yeah, there's always that one thing people talk about

And talking about high expectations, I read an article form amagazine where an Indian woman told about ehr arranged marriage. She had lived in the US before marriage, dated guys and so on. She was, however, disappointed with the eternal search "for the one" and eventually went back to India and agreed to marry the man her parents had introduced to her. The interesting par tof this is that she said her marriage worked out because she didn't have any high expectations about her marriage - she just expected her husband to treat her well and support the family etc. This way, there wasn't any "where is the man I married 10 years ago" because she didn't love him at first so there wasn't any drop from cloud nine to reality. They just sort of grew into the relationship and learned to love each other.

I'm not saying that marriying for love is bad, I'm just trying to say that an arranged marriage might not be such a bad thing as long as you're not forced into it. Didn't "love" in Japanese mean passionate love that can fade out pretty quickly more than the kind of love that's usually associated with the Western idea of marriage?