Subject: Legions of Strangers, Guided by Moon, Become Seoul Mates
Date: Published: 8/24/92 (125 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    Legions of Strangers,
    Guided by Moon,
    Become Seoul Mates
    ---
    Unification Church Wedding
    Of a Record 25,000 Couples
    Is a Logistical Nightmare
    ----
    By Damon Darlin
    Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

    SEOUL, South Korea -- Yang Kwan Sik plans a large wedding, and
 anyone thinking about doing something similar might want to pick up
 some tips from him.
    When transporting the wedding party to the stadium for the
 ceremony, Mr. Yang finds, it is a good idea to count on about 800
 buses.  Handing out the 120,000 pieces of sponge cake before the
 wedding avoids those long lines later.  And it is important to plan
 that satellite feed early.  Getting government permission from Kenya
 at the last minute can be a real headache.
    The wedding Mr. Yang is organizing is to be the biggest ever
 held.  More than 25,000 couples from 120 countries will be joined in
 holy matrimony tomorrow by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the
 Unification Church.  This wedding will beat the previous record, also
 held by the Rev. Mr. Moon, set in 1988 when 6,516 couples from 83
 countries got married in a church-owned barley-cola bottling plant
 near Seoul.
    Mr. Yang, director of the church's International Wedding
 Department, doesn't seemed panicked by the logistics of one of the
 biggest events in South Korea since the 1988 Summer Olympics.  He
 isn't fazed by the church's matching 12,000 brides with 12,000
 grooms they have never seen before.  (The other half of the wedding
 participants met under more normal circumstances.)  "I have to
 overcome my fatigue," he admits, "but the Rev. Moon has guided all
 of us and trained us to suffer.  This is fun."
    The mass wedding is intended, among other things, to raise the
 profile of the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World
 Christianity.  That is the church's official name, though many people
 call it a cult and its three million members "Moonies."  Mr. Moon,
 out of U. S. prison after serving 14 months for tax evasion, is full
 of plans to expand his religious and business empire.  He visited the
 Soviet Union in 1990 and takes credit for the fall of communism that
 followed.  Mr. Moon, who followers say is the Messiah, visited North
 Korea in 1991 with promises to invest via the Tongil Business Group,
 the church's business conglomerate.  Church officials now are waiting
 for communism to fall there.
    Details of the wedding arrangements are arrayed across a
 15-foot-long bulletin board in Mr. Yang's command center in a church
 dormitory here.  He is a bit frustrated because he wanted to schedule
 a prenuptial tour of North Korean infiltration tunnels discovered
 under the demilitarized zone north of Seoul.  But no tours are given
 on the Monday before the wedding.  So he shifts to arranging
 last-minute satellite hookups to beam the ceremony to Brazil, Kenya
 and the Philippines, where smaller mass weddings will be held for
 people who can't afford to fly to Seoul.
    Getting various government approvals is time-consuming, but not
 as difficult a problem as the logistics of giving AIDS virus tests
 to all 20,000 foreigners getting married, as top church officials
 have insisted.  Korean resources would be strained, so Mr. Yang has
 been flying in medical teams from Japan.  "This normally takes three
 years to organize.  We are doing it in three months," says Mr. Yang,
 who was married in a Unification Church mass wedding 10 years ago.
    Church officials won't come out and say it, but the toughest part
 of the arrangements is the matchmaking.  Mr. Moon makes all the
 choices himself after looking at about 24,000 photos displayed on
 rows of easels, or so the church says.  In only a matter of days, he
 matches them up according to height, education level and their
 nationality preferences.  He used to do it all in person, church
 officials say, but the number has grown so large that he now uses
 bar-coded photographs and a computer to help do the sorting.
    Any attempt to pierce the mystery is rebuffed.  A tipoff comes
 from a sign in the lobby of the Tongil Group's headquarters
 building, saying access to the 14th floor is "restricted."  There,
 church members with sheaves of photos scurry in and out of an
 easel-filled ballroom, which also has two throne-like chairs on a
 stage.
    The crisis of the moment:  Two Tanzanian brothers want wives from
 Chad, but there aren't enough of those to go around, and the church
 can't please one brother and disappoint the other.  How it gets
 resolved isn't known, because reporters aren't supposed to be there
 watching.  "Nothing is going on here," says Kim Chan Kyun, a senior
 church official, blocking the ballroom door.
    Later, church members in the command center have a stickier
 problem.  Gladys has balked at marrying Roberto, a Colombian.
 "Roberto is too strong for her.  He is too rough for her," says an
 official "Matching Problem Report."  Most church members don't
 complain because Mr. Moon's selections are divine.  In fact, many
 don't even meet until the "engagement party" the night before the
 wedding.  Officials claim only about 1% do object, which is still
 about 500 people who must be rematched now that everyone else is
 chosen.  That is being taken care of in the command center along with
 some of the hard cases, such as a 66-year-old Korean woman with
 cataracts and a bug-eyed Japanese man.
    By comparison, finding 30,000 hotel rooms and arranging transport
 is easy.
    Each arriving group is assigned an alpha-numeric code that
 corresponds to a waiting bus, so each traveler can get to his or her
 hotel.  One possible complication, reassigning roommates after the
 wedding, isn't a problem thanks to another church tradition:
 abstaining from sex for 40 days after the wedding.
    On the wedding day, couples will start arriving at the stadium at
 9 a.m.  Arrivals will be staggered to avoid traffic jams.  Those who
 can't squeeze into the 800 buses will travel by subway or car.  By 1
 p.m., when the ceremony begins, the 75,000-seat stadium should be
 packed with 140,000 people, with the overflow crowd contained on an
 adjacent soccer field.
    The Unification Church is charging $1,200 each, not including air
 fare, for prospective brides and grooms from industrialized nations
 and $300 for those from poor countries.  (Couples supply rings and
 veils.)  So revenue could total $24 million.  Subtract $24,000 for the
 stadium rent, another $115,000 for the satellite hookup and deduct
 the cost of the buses, the unfrosted sponge cake and a can of Tongil
 Group's McCol barley soda handed to each celebrant before the
 ceremony, and the church could make a tidy sum on the wedding.
    But it will be difficult to find out just how much.  "In Korea, it
 is rude to ask how much a wedding costs," says Ju Jin-Seung, a
 church spokesman.

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