Soka University of America

We had our wedding here in June 2018. The photos look great and the price looks reasonable, right? But it is not. Do not read this and say that you weren’t warned. Soka is incredibly difficult to work with during planning. Weddings are not their primary business, so they are not eager to have you as a client. Frankly, they treated us and our professional wedding planner with contempt. Be prepared for simple clarifying questions to be answered with hostility and suspicion, if at all, and requests for basic coordinating information to be answered with stonewalling. Be prepared for strange and arbitrary changes to the basic conditions imposed on you for using the space (like the start and end time) - yes, even after you've signed a written contract. Be prepared for what feels like active, deliberate obstruction with your plans, including in the last days before the wedding. Expect the process to be a constant struggle and a source of anxiety. By the wedding, we felt that Soka saw us as the enemy, and treated us accordingly. They even imposed restrictions on us because another couple - employees of Soka University - were getting married the same day. In the end, we loved our wedding, but only because of (1) Herculean efforts by our wedding planner and other vendors to overcome Soka's obstinacy and unreasonableness through creative problem-solving (2) our ability to compartmentalize all the stress Soka imposed on us away from the day itself and enjoy our time with our friends and family, and (3) a healthy dose of luck that we managed to find ways to work around the various problems Soka created. If you're confident in your wedding planner, you don't mind a lot of unnecessary stress, and you're willing to gamble, Soka might just be the place for you. Otherwise, look elsewhere.

This place is the most beautiful place ever! Not usually a venue for weddings ( I think they mostly do proms), the place has a reasonable site fee. The only catch is that it's DIY everything, and we had to bring in all our vendors. Soka also requires that you hire a coordinator that signs the contract with them (so they don't deal with the brides directly), but I highly recommend Naomi from DNT. Fae, the coordinator at Soka, was also wonderful to work with and made sure that I was in the know with the details even though I wasn't the "contract signer". Love this place!