The Anchor: Why Gen Z Is Choosing Destination Weddings in Japan

First published May 2026. Updated November 2026.

In 2016 a Canadian came to Japan for the first time and fell for it at once. When he got home, he told his mother that when he married, it would be here.

He kept his word. Years later he and his bride married on the walkway at Jinya, an old inn below the Tanzawa mountains: a destination wedding for more than eighty of their people, seated among the trees, from Canada and the United States, Europe and Sri Lanka. His sister led the ceremony. After the vows the couple exchanged the maalai, the flower garlands of his Sri Lankan Tamil heritage, and his sister told everyone what they meant: accepting each other as partners for life, accepting each other’s families, and working things out together.

Gen Z is now getting married, and Japan is their place of choice. We’ve watched the change arrive from inside a great many weddings here: guest lists long again, and whole families crossing the world together.

About a third of Americans see a destination wedding as a chance to travel somewhere unique, a Bank of America Institute survey found this year. In Japan that undersells it. Almost nobody talks about a destination wedding as a way of sharing a place and its culture, and here that’s the whole point. A wedding in Japan is the best way we know to show the people you love a country, from its kitchens to its particular way of looking after a guest.

Gen Z Is Getting Married

We’ve planned weddings for every generation from Gen X on, and we’ve watched this one arrive. The figures agree. In the United States, Gen Z made up about one in three newlyweds in 2024 and 41 per cent of the couples who married in 2025, according to The Knot’s annual studies. Zola found them the majority of its couples marrying in 2026, at 51 per cent, for the first time, and the Bank of America Institute, reading the bank’s own payments data, says Gen Z weddings have tripled since 2019. Each draws the line between generations in a slightly different place. They all point the same way.

The couples writing to us now sit either side of that line, the youngest millennials and the first of Gen Z, and they have more in common than the labels suggest. Marriage is optional for them, and they know it. So when they choose it, the choosing is the point, and they have generally settled why they’re marrying long before they ask us where. Their first email is often a single line, and we’ve learned to answer in the same spirit. The long conversations come later, and they’re about people.

Some have carried the idea for years. One couple, from Orlando, met in high school and talked about Japan for fifteen years before either of them had been. They came for the first time the week they married, an elopement in the hills of north Kyoto, just the two of them in a private garden at the height of the autumn colour.

That’s a long time to carry a country around. How long have you been carrying yours?

Why Gen Z Is Choosing Japan

Our couples often know Japan before they write to us, and some have been many times. Ask young travellers where they most want to go and Japan comes first, or close to it. YPulse has ranked it the number one dream destination for young people aged 13 to 39 in North America three years running, and in Britain Travelbag found it on the bucket list of 43 per cent of 16 to 28-year-olds, against about one in four of the over-55s. Young Australians, summer bookings in 2026 and even honeymoon registries say much the same; the figures are in the box below.

Japan, by generation

Share of people in Britain with Japan on their travel bucket list, by age, 2025

16 to 28

43%

All adults

32%

55 and over

about 1 in 4

Share of people in Britain with Japan on their travel bucket list, by age, 2025 (Travelbag)

Age	Japan on their bucket list
16 to 28	43%
All adults	32%
55 and over	about 1 in 4

Many of them met Japan long before they came. In Dentsu’s Japan Brand Survey for 2025, which covered twenty countries and regions, 36 per cent of Gen Z named anime and manga as a reason to visit, against 16 per cent of Gen X, and their interest in Japanese food runs higher too. They grew up with Japan on the screen and at the table, so a first trip can feel less like discovery than recognition.

What they ask of us is rarely the Japan from the screen, though. The couple on the walkway wanted somewhere outside Tokyo that felt lived in. Another couple met because of Japan. She had travelled through Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka in March 2019, and when her profile appeared on a dating app, he recognised Fushimi Inari, the Kyoto shrine known for its tunnels of vermilion torii, in one of her photographs. That gave them something to talk about, and then a great deal more. Years later, when they decided to marry, she put it simply: “Japan was the only logical choice for us.”

For couples like these, Japan is already part of the story. The wedding is how they bring everyone else into it.

Big Weddings Are Back: The Multi-Day Destination Wedding in Japan

The guest list has come most of the way back. In The Knot’s figures, the average American wedding had 131 guests in 2019 and 66 in 2020, the year everything stopped, and it has held at about 115 to 117 since 2022. The share of couples marrying away from home has stayed between 17 and 19 per cent every year since 2021. What we’ve seen change is how many people come with them.

The guest list came back

Average number of guests at a wedding in the United States, 2019 to 2025

0

50

100

150

131

66

117

2019202020212022202320242025

Average number of guests at a US wedding, 2019 to 2025 (The Knot Real Weddings Study 2026)

Year	Average guests
2019	131
2020	66
2021	105
2022	117
2023	115
2024	116
2025	117

Most of our weddings at the moment are for about seventy to a hundred guests, which is a great many people to bring to the other side of the world. More than a hundred travelled to the Japanese Alps for an American couple who now call Japan home. In spring 2027, the largest celebration we’ve planned will bring together about two hundred.

None of this has made elopements any smaller in our eyes. An elopement is its own discipline, with its own pacing and its own way of using a place, and some of the days we’re proudest of had two people in them and nobody else.

The bigger wedding has come back in a new shape. It runs over several days, the guests travel with the couple rather than to them, and the place has to hold far more than a ceremony. Not many traditional inns can sleep a hundred people under one roof, so the choice of house shapes the whole weekend, and it’s made early. A guest count measures attendance. Hosting everyone well is the planning.

Three Generations, One Journey: Multigenerational Travel to Japan

There’s a line in an American survey of grandparents that we keep coming back to. Of grandparents who expect to travel with their grandchildren, 62 per cent said there are places they want to take them before they outgrow them, and 88 per cent said travel brings the family closer, the Family Travel Association and NYU’s Tisch Center found in their 2025 US Family Travel Survey.

A destination wedding turns that sentence round. The grandchildren have grown up, and now they’re the ones bringing their grandparents somewhere. Who would you most want to bring?

This generation is at the centre of that kind of travel. Across Asia Pacific, Booking.com found that 47 per cent of Gen Z help plan and shape their family trips, that Tokyo is the most searched city for travel across generations, and that safety is the first thing families look for. We’ve never seen so many families travel in three generations at once, and a wedding is the reason many of them make the trip.

Japan understands what a grandparent’s presence at a wedding means; its own weddings are built around family. What a destination wedding adds is the journey. At one onsen wedding, the bride’s grandmother flew in from New York at 92, and a great-uncle of 93 took the train from Kyoto on his own. At the welcome dinner the night before, everyone came down in the cotton yukata the inn gives its guests, so for an evening the grandparents and the children, the doctors and the builders, were all dressed alike at the same long tables. When a family has an inn to itself, the grandparents can go to bed in a room down the hall.

By the ceremony, two families have lived alongside each other long enough to start becoming one. On the walkway, his sister had already put it in a sentence: accepting each other’s families.

Three generations travel at three speeds. Our attention goes to the pace of the whole family: how far the oldest guest has to walk, how long anyone sits in a car, where the rest falls in a long weekend, which dishes the kitchen should know about months ahead. The grandparents are at their best for the vows, not the morning after.

Omotenashi: What a Destination Wedding in Japan Gives Your Guests

A few weeks after their first trip to Japan, one couple decided to come back, marry here and share it with the people closest to them. They chose Asaba, in the hot spring town of Shuzenji, kept by the same family since 1484. On the day she crossed its pond by boat towards the Noh stage where her guests were waiting. The moment we remember is her father, standing on the floating platform at the other side, ready to walk her onto it.

Japanese hospitality has a name, omotenashi, and a wedding lets a place offer it to a hundred people at once. For one family wedding of seven, dinner was the celebration: junsai gathered from ponds, grilled nodoguro, rice cooked with bamboo shoots from the inn’s own garden. At the walkway wedding there was a koto before the vows, sake cups of hinoki with an awaji knot beside the couple’s initials, and a noren at the reception door. Small things, and every one of them told the guests exactly where they were.

Travel shows you Japan. A celebration makes it yours.

Behind it all is our Japanese team. On the day, Sumika is there in kimono, as she always is, after months of making sure Japan is ready before anyone lands: the inn knows who’s coming, the kitchen knows who eats what, and the musicians know when to stop.

It wasn’t always like this. Ten years ago, at a talk to Japan’s wedding industry, a man at the back of the room asked us what a destination wedding was. It was a fair question. The places we work with now ask us something else: how to host one well.

Gen Z and Destination Weddings in Japan: Quick Answers

Why are Gen Z couples choosing destination weddings in Japan?

Because they marry on purpose, and Japan sits at or near the top of their generation’s travel wish lists. A destination wedding lets them share it with everyone they love at once, often three generations, over several days, in a country with a long tradition of looking after guests. For many couples Japan is already part of their story, and the wedding brings their families into it.

Are Gen Z couples having destination weddings?

Yes. Gen Z now makes up a large and fast-growing share of the couples marrying in the United States, and destination weddings have held steady as a share of how couples marry. What we’ve seen grow is the size of the party: most of our weddings in Japan are for seventy to a hundred guests, over several days, with families travelling in three generations.

Can grandparents travel to a destination wedding in Japan?

Yes, and many do. Japan’s trains, inns and hotels are well run and calm, and we plan the days around the people who need them most: shorter transfers, rest between the main events, food everyone can eat, and a house where the family can stay together. Our Japan Wedding Guide covers what guests should know, and Attending a Wedding in Japan is written for the guests themselves.

How many guests come to a destination wedding in Japan?

Anything from two to well over a hundred. An elopement is just the couple; an intimate wedding is a few of the people closest to them; most of our weddings at the moment are for seventy to a hundred guests, often staying together for several days. The size shapes everything that follows, so it’s one of the first things we ask.

How far ahead should we plan a destination wedding in Japan?

Couples can book with us up to eighteen months ahead, and planning with us begins in earnest about twelve months out. Larger weddings, and the seasons people want most, spring blossom and autumn colour, are worth starting early, because the inns that can hold a hundred guests are few.

Do we need to marry legally in Japan?

No. Many couples register their marriage at home and hold the wedding here, and the ceremony in Japan carries all its meaning without the paperwork. If you’d like to be legally married in Japan as well, it’s possible, and our guide to getting legally married in Japan explains how.

Remember When We Were All in Japan?

In May, when this piece was a short essay, we argued that a generation that has watched the world rearrange itself constantly is hungry for something that holds. The photographs matter, we wrote, but they aren’t the anchor. The day itself is.

The photographs are the doorway. The day itself is the room on the other side.

And the room is built, not found. Six months on, we’d add one thing: it was never only the couple’s room.

A wedding in Japan makes a core memory for three generations at once. It belongs to the grandparents and the nieces and nephews, the old friends and the colleagues, everyone who made the trip, and long after the photographs are filed away it’s the one place the whole family can return to and find unchanged.

After his first trip to Japan, in 2016, a Canadian told his mother where he would marry. He couldn’t have known then what “here” would come to hold, or that the walkway he’d marry on had never held a wedding before.

Years from now, at an ordinary family dinner somewhere, someone will say, “Remember when we were all in Japan?” And everyone at the table will.

Sources: The Knot, Weddings in 2024 and the Real Weddings Study 2026; Zola, First Look Report 2026; Bank of America Institute, “Weddings: Putting a price on love”, June 2026; YPulse, March 2026; Travelbag, 2025; StudentUniverse, 2024, reported by Travel Weekly; JustFly, summer 2026, reported by TravelPulse; Honeyfund, 2026 Honeymoon Destinations and Wedding Trends Report; Dentsu, Japan Brand Survey 2025; American Express, Global Travel Trends 2025; Booking.com, Gen.Voyage, September 2024; Family Travel Association and NYU Tisch Center, 2025 US Family Travel Survey. Written November 2026.