We Lost ¥400,000 Cancelling Our Wedding in March 2020. The Money Was the Easy Part.

We were already married when we lost the wedding. That distinction matters — it’s most of this story.

We lost about ¥400,000 cancelling the celebration. ¥350,000 of it was the venue. The rest evaporated in credit-card refund fees — paying back the friends who had, kindly, already paid in advance.

I cancelled by email. I didn’t have it in me to call.

Here’s the part that still makes my husband angry six years later. Cancellation fees climb as the date gets closer, and there was a deadline: pay before this date, lower fee; after it, the fee jumps. I emailed the day before the jump. The reply came back: “The person in charge is out today. We’ll contact you tomorrow.” Tomorrow was the other side of the deadline. The fee went up.

My husband is American. When he’s truly angry, it comes out in Kansai dialect. “Arienhen,” he said. Unbelievable.

I didn’t cry. Not then. The pandemic had flattened all of us into a kind of numbness. The tears came about six months later, out of nowhere.

This is the story of the wedding we never had.

The short version

• We were already married — quietly, at a city office, in May 2019. The wedding was going to be the celebration: March 2020, with my husband’s family flying in from the US.
• COVID closed the borders. His family couldn’t come. Our Japanese friends were scared. We cancelled days before the date.
• It cost about ¥400,000, none of it refunded.
• Would wedding insurance have saved us? Almost certainly not — more below.
• The money was the easy part to lose. The hard part was everything else.

March 2020, in case you’ve blocked it out

Nobody knew anything. That’s the part that’s hard to explain now that we know how it all went. In early March 2020, we didn’t know if this was a matter of weeks or years.

It turned out to be years. By March 21, 2020, Japan was requiring a 14-day quarantine for arrivals; the US had told its citizens not to travel at all, anywhere. We cancelled in early March — reading the writing on the wall a couple of weeks before the wall officially went up.

The double impossibility

An international wedding in a pandemic is the worst of both worlds.

On the American side: my husband’s family was trying, right up to the last minute, to come. Then the flights started vanishing and the border math became impossible.

On the Japanese side: our friends were frightened. Several had already, gently, asked us to postpone.

And then the moment that still undoes me. When we finally cancelled, my friends — friends who had been so happy for me, a late bride they genuinely wanted to celebrate — said, “thank you for cancelling.”

That’s how scared everyone was. They wanted to see me in a wedding dress. They were also relieved not to have to choose between loving me and staying safe.

Here’s the guilt I still carry, and it isn’t the one you’d expect. It wasn’t cancelling that I felt bad about. It was holding on too long — hoping, right until the end, that maybe a small ceremony, maybe if his family could just make it — and so not saying the words until the last minute, leaving everyone suspended in do we really have to go to a wedding right now? That’s the part I cried about, six months later.

The decision

I’m the one who finally said it. Let’s cancel.

We tried, once, to soften the blow. “Given COVID — can you reduce the fee at all?”

The venue’s answer: “We can postpone the wedding, for free, for six months.”

Me: “Will COVID be over in six months?”

Silence. "…"

Nobody could answer that. Not them, not us, not anyone on Earth in March 2020. The six-month offer sounded generous and meant nothing: the thing had no end date.

Where ¥400,000 went

The venue cancellation fee was ¥350,000.

The rest was a lesson I didn’t expect. Our guests paid their attendance fee by credit card — convenient, modern, painless. Until we had to refund them, and discovered that refunds aren’t free: the card company takes its cut (a few percent) on the way back out. “Paying by card is so easy,” I’d thought. Card fees, it turns out, are quietly terrifying.

There was no refund. The only thing on the table was the six-month postponement we couldn’t use. We took the loss.

It wasn’t just us, and it wasn’t just Japan

Strangely, this helped a little: we weren’t singled out.

The exact same tragedy was playing out worldwide. In the US, couples were losing deposits too — enough that it spilled into class-action-level disputes over force majeure clauses and non-refundable payments. Every spring-2020 wedding on the planet died the same death. We were one couple in a very large pile-up.

What we learned (the money part)

For anyone planning a wedding now:

1. Wedding insurance exists — but read what it actually covers. In Japan, wedding insurance (ブライダル保険) generally does not cover cancelling because of the general pandemic situation, a government event-restriction request, or your own judgment that it’s too risky. It mostly pays only if you or your family actually catch the illness and are hospitalized or ordered to isolate. The exact situation we were in — everyone healthy, but no one able to come — falls right in the gap. (US policies added pandemic exclusions once COVID became a “known event” in late January 2020, so newer policies generally don’t cover it either.)
2. “Force majeure” rarely rescues you from a pandemic. Most contracts have a force majeure (不可抗力) clause, but unless it specifically names epidemics or pandemics, it often doesn’t apply — and venues charge the fee anyway.
3. Read the cancellation-fee schedule before you book. The fees climb on a calendar. Know the exact dates — and don’t assume the venue will answer your email in time. We learned that one at the cost of a single bureaucratic “tomorrow.”

What we lost, and what we got instead

Here’s what I actually grieve, and it isn’t the party.

I wanted to put my husband’s family in kimono. I wanted them to see the cherry blossoms at the end of March. I wanted a hundred photos. I wanted to show them around Japan while we were still just two people — free, mobile, before kids.

None of it happened.

But here’s what I didn’t know that March: I was already pregnant with our older son. If we’d held the wedding, I might have spent it fighting morning sickness. Even as the celebration collapsed, life was already, quietly, moving forward.

His family did come to Japan — three years later. By then we had two boys. I showed them around drenched in sweat, chasing toddlers, nothing like the serene kimono-and-cherry-blossom tour I’d pictured. It was louder. Messier. Much more alive.

The ¥400,000 is gone. The wedding never happened. But we were already a family — we’d quietly become one at a city office in May 2019, because it simply felt like time.

The party was the part we lost. The marriage was never in danger.

If you cancelled yours too, in that strange spring: I’m sorry. And I hope someone has since told you thank you for cancelling — and meant it as love.

This is our personal experience as of May 2026, not financial, insurance, or legal advice. Insurance terms and cancellation policies vary widely and change over time — confirm the specifics with the provider and read your own contract before you rely on any of it.