John and Hisako’s Tokyo Marriage Proposal Story

Once again I’m delighted to share a very special marriage proposal story that I hope will put you all in a fantastic mood for the weekend ahead! This week I’m thankful to John and Hisako for sharing their lovely Tokyo marriage proposal story with us – hopefully it will inspire all you romantics out there!

Please introduce yourselves
John LaDue & Hisako (Chaco) Nagumo, now LaDue!

Could you please tell us where the idea of your proposal came from?

When Chaco and I first started dating, she sent me a link to a Disney proposal video on YouTube. I watched it and and immediately panicked, worrying that she was expecting something like that from me when the time came to propose!

Of course, when I asked her later she said never in a thousand years would she expect a proposal that grand, she just thought the idea was cute, but I still wanted to try and do something like what she had seen. Since both of us are living in Japan I thought about the appropriate place to propose which would be comparable to Disneyland. I decided that the perfect area would be a place called Hachi Square in Tokyo, which coincidentally shared its name with one of our favourite films, Hachi. I wanted to take the loyalty and love from that film and base our marriage proposal on it.

What kind of planning went into making the proposal so successful?

I had so many people involved, it’s amazing someone didn’t accidentally spill the details! My Italian dancer friend choreographed the dance, and I have an Italian composer friend who remixed the music. I also had three professional videographers, and planned the screen to show the proposal message 9 months in advance.

I even had a friend who was a time keeper, so I knew how much time I had to finish the songs before the screen lit up with our picture, which we took in a gondola in Venice on our trip to Italy and Greece. The songs were very well thought out, too. She speaks French, Japanese, English and more, so I had the song ‘Question’ by Rhett Miller translated into French by my buddy and serenaded her in front of the crowd.