Eric and Kat met in college. They now both work in the video games industry and have a mutual appreciation of all things Japanese – anime and robots in particular! “We share a love of Japanese culture”, explained Kat. “We even went to Japan for our honeymoon. We wanted to somehow incorporate our interests and playful personalities into our wedding, but not alienate our guests, as we had a lot of family members attending.”
“I’m sort of a brute force craftsman so I really wanted us to create a wedding that felt like us”, she continued. “Eric created and designed our wedding website which included a photo gallery of our puppy as well as an online RSVP (which was neat to watch update in real time). We collaborated, designed, and created our wedding invitations, too! Between the two of us, we folded a billion paper cranes, paper stars, constructed wooden block robots, created signs with hand-drawn images of Katamari characters and Sanrio folk, and ate a lot of our wedding favors in the process… Oh. And we had a Dreamcast for a groom’s cake!”
“When people caught sight of our giant, robot heads they debated whether we were walking down the aisle as robots! But no, those were just for the photos! One of my favorite moments was the vows. I started tearing up. I know that’s pretty common, but it was completely unexpected for me. I could feel the tears start swelling up and tried to distract myself by looking at one of the groomsmen… but his expression was terribly soft to where it made me tear up more. My next plan of attack was to think of something random, so I thought, ‘Chicken Fried Steak’.
I’m serious.
But Eric loves chicken fried steak.
It was waterworks from then on.”
“I also really enjoyed seeing people play with our gashapon (capsule toy) wedding favors! We stuffed each gashapon with Japanese candies and stickers and even had arcade tokens to use for the machines!”
“We originally really wanted to have a smaller, more intimate wedding, but it’s a bit tricky when you’re a girl who happens to be the eldest and a first generation American. Alas!”
