Weddingbee Blog

We are super busy all the livelong day. It’s hard to get in a free weekend that isn’t devoted to packing or moving details. Next month will be even worse! But our invitation deadline is looming, and we need to get on it.

As I explained here, I thought our best option would be to pick out some pre-made invitations and just print our info onto them. I visited Tokyu Hands tonight, and it turns out I was wrong, wrong, wrong wrong, wrong wrong wrong wrong.

What’s Tokyu Hands? It’s a department store like Macy’s, but it’s a little more comprehensive, with no clothes (if you can imagine that!). First, I started out on the fifth floor, which the floor guide told me was stationery. Really, it turned out to be office supplies, although they had a small stationery offering.

Kuroneko no gigi and Totoro stamps! We would love to find a way to incorporate them into our invites, but only the Japanophiles would understand.

Rows and rows of pretty paper. A bride’s dream!

Pre-rounded edges! I didn’t know they had stuff like this. Why did we spend time on cutting them out ourselves?

Little twin star invitation sets!

These are all sneakily taken iPhone pictures, in case you were confused by the brilliant and awesome photography.

I was disappointed in their selection and decided to take the stairs down to the basement floor, where Mr. G had the interesting task of picking out moving boxes. On my way down, I noticed a mini-floor…floor 4-B. It was the wedding floor! Gasp!

I couldn’t take any pictures because the place was crawling with staff. But listennnnnnnnnnn! It was a floor full of wedding goodies! Fake flowers, guestbooks, frames for displaying pictures, stuffed animals (idk…), escort cards! I found the paper goods section and started looking for invitation sets. Immediately, I noticed a few things wrong with them:

• All of them were frou-frou. Like, bedazzled or lacy or pink flowers.

• They were all in the form of a card, and they all opened the wrong way, a.k.a. not the Western way. In Japan, books are opened from left to right.
• A lot of stuff was pre-written in Japanese, like the RSVP card. I don’t know how I didn’t see that one coming.
• They had funny Engrish on them. Like the headers for sections:

Greeting!
A joyful merriment!
You join us!

While this would be a fun way to commemorate our time here in Japan, I don’t think I’d like to describe our invitations as “WTF?” or “hilarious.”

I found one invitation set with a cherry blossom theme, but it had all the above wrong with it, and was terribly, terribly pink. I also found an alarming amount of Mickey and Minnie–themed stuff.

So we’re gonna check a couple of other places out, and if we run into the same problems, we’ll probably opt to print our invitations out on pretty paper and customize and DIY them. Look what I found!

A huge cherry blossom stamp!

We didn’t find what we were looking for on this trip. Were you frustrated by lack of choices to complete your vision?