At first, she couldn’t decide between Mt Fuji and Karuizawa.
Fuji had the mountain. Karuizawa had, in her words, “a little bit of snow.”
Karuizawa won. The day before the wedding, 27 centimetres of it fell on the town.
By then, Japan had been home for years. They lived and worked here. But their ANELLI Karuizawa wedding fell in February 2022, when most of the people they loved overseas still could not enter the country.
So the friends who could be there came up to the mountains.
About a hundred more arrived on a 65-inch screen.
Her original brief had been wonderfully small: “My groom and I will give our vows in front of our friends with a beautiful background of Japan.” Then dinner somewhere nearby.
It became rather more than dinner.
A Karuizawa Winter Wedding, Close to Home
Karuizawa has long offered Tokyo a change of climate without requiring a change of country.
For centuries it was a post town on the Nakasendo, the old highway between Edo and Kyoto, sitting just beyond the difficult climb of the Usui Pass. In 1886 a Canadian-born missionary, Alexander Croft Shaw, came up from Tokyo, was taken by the cooler air and the landscape, and began encouraging friends and their families to spend their summers there too.
The resort town that followed is still best known for summer, and autumn makes a compelling case for itself as well. February is another Karuizawa entirely. Bare trees, short days, air cold enough to sharpen everything around it, and, if the weather agrees, snow.
For these two, that was the attraction.
They were not coming to Japan for their wedding. They were already here. They were simply taking the life they had built in the city and moving it into the mountains for a night.
The Morning After 27 Centimetres
The overnight temperature had fallen to around nine below. By morning the sky was clear, and the view from The Prince Karuizawa, where they got ready, had been completely rewritten. A golf course lay somewhere beneath the snow.
You could no longer really tell.
The groom and his friends took the table beside the window. His bow tie required two of them, which seems a reasonable allocation of resources for a bow tie.
There was no formal bridal party. Her friends wore matching white robes and drank something pink from glasses while she got ready.
Before either of them was dressed, though, the two of them stood together at the window and looked out at the absurd quantity of snow.
There were gifts later, his to her opened by the window. And there was the light. Snow does something very particular to a winter interior. Instead of falling only from the sky, light comes back up from the ground, and rooms that would normally be dark in February become soft and bright from below.
The People Who Could Be There
ANELLI Karuizawa is a wedding house in the forest a short drive from the station, taken over by one wedding at a time. They married in its glass-walled chapel, with the winter forest on every side.
She walked herself down the aisle. The friends who had made the journey to Karuizawa were there in the chapel.
And beside the couple was the screen.
Around a hundred people joined from elsewhere. In another year, many of them might have been in the room. In February 2022, they couldn’t be. The screen was how they got there. Parents, family and friends who could not cross the border still heard the vows, and some of them would speak later. They were part of the room the couple had assembled as best they could.
A wedding is usually defined partly by who is present. That year required a slightly broader understanding of presence.
Out Into the Cold
Afterwards, everybody went outside.
Briefly.
The couple’s colours were pink, emerald green and black, all of them vivid against the snow. Heavy coats appeared. A small child stood at the front in a padded jacket. And in one frame, three couples kissed at exactly the same time.
Look at the group outside and you are looking at the life these two had made in Japan: friends and couples who had come up into the mountains in February to stand cheerfully in the snow for a photograph.
Not everyone they loved could reach Karuizawa. But these people could.
And they came.
Into the Pines
Later, we went into the forest with just the two of them.
Winter light in the mountains arrives from a low angle and leaves early. By then the sun had dropped between the trunks, and the edges of the snow had gone warm where they caught the last of it.
It looked considerably warmer than it was.
They laughed through most of it. We kept moving. The snow had given her exactly the landscape she had imagined when she chose Karuizawa.
An ANELLI Karuizawa Wedding, After Dark
Then the wedding changed temperature. Inside, the winter coats disappeared. The reception room had a chandelier beneath a high dome, round tables dressed for dinner and, later, fountains of cold sparks on either side of the couple.
They danced their way into the room. That settled the tone fairly quickly.
Some of the speeches came from the screen. When the first dance began, the floor belonged to the two of them. By the first chorus, other couples had joined.
There was also an oironaoshi, the change of attire built into many Japanese wedding receptions. Historically the word refers to changing colour. She went from white to white. The second dress was simply shorter and considerably better equipped for what came next.
She used it accordingly.
The Second Party
Then came the nijikai. Literally the second gathering, it’s the after-party that often follows a Japanese wedding reception once the formal part of the evening is finished.
There was a karaoke machine. This was important.
Our production notes for that part of the evening contained one fairly straightforward objective, and solemnity was not among the requirements.
The groom sang. So did everyone else.
By then it was a room full of friends who had been given music, drinks and no particularly persuasive reason to go to bed. Which was exactly right.
She’d found us through our website and gone straight to our Instagram. Before booking she wrote, “I am looking through all your photos on Instagram and I’m soooo in love with all of it!!” After her first call with Dee she admitted, “You have no idea how many times I checked my email coz I didn’t want you to think I’m not interested!”
She needn’t have worried.
A Little Bit of Snow
At some point that evening, it began again. Not another 27 centimetres. Nothing dramatic. Just snow moving through the dark.
We went outside with them for a few minutes, back towards the gate. The air was cold enough that you could see his breath. Snow caught in the light around them and disappeared as quickly as it arrived.
Months earlier, while deciding between Mt Fuji and Karuizawa, she had asked for “a little bit of snow.” The weather had interpreted that request generously. By the end of the night, Karuizawa had come back to the original brief.
Just the two of them outside.
Japan already home.
And a little bit of snow.
