Getting Married in Japan part 2 - Long ass wait at City Hall (but we're married at last!)

 Following from my previous post about marriage in Japan, we just got back from city hall, and we are officially married now.

Arriving at city hall in the morning, we had to wait around for a ridiculously long time before we were able to speak with someone. We were initially concerned that we wouldn't be able to register our marriage due to missing some document, or some incorrect information. Experiences with anything bureaucratic in Japan have shown that there is no room for mistakes. So imagine our surprise when we were told we had to make a bunch of corrections. Fortunately, we weren't sent away, and they were fine with us making the corrections right there and then, especially with some of my translated documents. Some was due to the technical terms in Japanese, others were lack of consistency of my parents' names in katakana (I didn't realize I spelt them differently until they pointed it out to me.  
We were hoping to keep a copy of the marriage registration form, considering we took the the time to pick out a design. As we would not see those documents again, we opted to go to a nearby convenience store and photocopy them as backups for ourselves. While we were out, we went to the nearby bakery for some lunch to celebrate (early) our marriage. 

After returning to city hall, we did some more waiting, and everything seemed to be processed without problems. The only one obstacle was regarding who was going to be the head of the household (or 世帯主 / setainushi). We hadn't really thought it about too much, and until now, we put my wife as the head of the household, because the apartment, and utilities are under her name. While the staff said that we could change it later on, they gave us something to think about, as apparently depending on who is listed as head of the household, we'd be paying less tax. The staff said it is an unusual situation for the wife to be the head of the family, though I'm guessing the city I am currently in doesn't get a lot of foreigners going to register their marriage. In any case, not long after that we finally got our certificate of marriage. I will admit though, compared to some of the certificates I have seen online of other cities (Osaka's for one), this city's certificate of marriage design is rather... underwhelming. Very bureaucratic in design, nothing fancy at all, which was a bit of a letdown, but we are finally married and that's all that matters at this point. 

As mentioned before, the wedding itself is still a ways off, though we have decided to hire the services of a wedding planner to help when we realized that there are a lot of things that need to be done, and with both of us working full time, it was too difficult for us to do, even if we're aiming for a small wedding.