Most of our couples fly in. These two took the train.
They’d lived in Tokyo for the best part of a decade, and he had proposed on the beach at Odaiba with the city across the water. So when they came to plan a wedding, Japan wasn’t the destination. Their friends were: fifty of them, from Tokyo and from overseas. The brief was to take everyone an hour out of the city and give them a night under one old roof together.
People who have lived somewhere that long stop treating its customs as scenery. They know which traditions they love, which they can leave alone, and which can be played with. The broccoli toss would come later.
A Cherry Blossom Wedding at Jinya, an Hour From Tokyo
Their first email was clear about what they didn’t want. The reception “would not be the typical 2h Japanese style,” she wrote. They knew the format well enough to know it wasn’t theirs. They wanted a DJ, dancing and games, and somewhere for everyone to sleep under one roof.
The answer was to give their guests the whole house. We arranged a full buyout of Jinya, the old inn at Tsurumaki Onsen, so every room, every corridor and every garden path belonged to their people for the night. They chose the first weekend of April, with the cherry blossom out.
Everyone Arrives
A destination wedding for people who live nearby has its own logistics. Their friends were coming by train on the day, many straight from Tokyo, and nobody should have to dress for a wedding in a station bathroom. So the guests arrived early to a welcome room, somewhere to change, and time to settle into the inn before anything began.
There was also the question of coffee. “We have big coffee drinkers,” they warned us. So we brought a barista to a ryokan, which is not a sentence we expected to write.
Getting ready at a ryokan is a different thing from getting ready in a hotel suite. The walls are paper and timber, the garden is right outside, and your friends are never more than a door away.
A Friend at the Front
The ceremony was in the garden: a white aisle, our gold frame dressed in loose white flowers, and the cherry blossom out across the garden doing the rest. Their colours were emerald and gold, from the bridesmaids’ dresses and his deep green suit to the frame at the top of the aisle.
A close friend married them, and family who couldn’t travel watched live from home. When they walked back down the aisle together, their friends threw confetti.
Every Name, Spelled Properly
For each guest there was a glass from Kyoto, each a different colour, in a hexagonal wooden box with the guest’s name written on the lid in green ink.
Many of their friends have names with accents, the small marks that change how a letter sounds. The couple insisted every one stay, and explained why. Those marks do the same work as the two small strokes and the little circle in Japanese, the ones that turn ka into ga and ha into pa. They change the sound. So every name went on its box the way its owner says it.
Nobody would have noticed a missing accent on a box lid except the person whose name it was. That was exactly who it was for. It’s the smallest detail of the whole wedding, and the most telling: a small expression of a life lived between languages.
A Broccoli Toss Wedding, and Games Instead of Speeches
“Not really keen on any speeches,” they told us, “so will focus on the games.”
Cocktail hour was on the terrace, with yakitori grilled to order and a DJ playing city pop and French house.
At dinner, Jinya’s chef reworked parts of the kaiseki menu for their guests and finished with a dessert made from the summer oranges that grow in the inn’s own garden. The two of them opened a sake barrel for kagami biraki, the mallets coming down on the lid under a shower of gold.
Where the speeches would have been, the guests played: a shoe game with the whole room voting on the answers before the couple did, and a crossword they’d written themselves, printed for every guest, with a prize for the first two to finish. Nobody had to sit still for long.
The throws happened out on the terrace after dark. The women had their bouquet toss. The men answered with broccoli.
A broccoli toss is essentially Japan’s playful answer to the bouquet toss, a Western wedding custom reworked for the other side of the room. The groom turns his back and throws a whole head of broccoli over his shoulder, and whoever catches it is said to be next to marry. The florets growing from one stem stand for a large and happy family.
The friend who caught it marked the occasion the only reasonable way. He bit it.
When the music started properly, the floor filled on its own.
Back to the Beach Where He Asked
A fortnight before the wedding, we met them at Odaiba, where they’d got engaged. It’s one of our favourite views of Tokyo: the bay, the Rainbow Bridge, the towers stacked up on the far shore. She wore white, he wore his suit, and they walked the same stretch of sand where he’d asked. Our film team came too, and we stayed until the bridge lit up.
When it came to their film, they sent one instruction: “You have the green light to go wild on the video with all the crazy footages.” We did, and at the very end the film goes back to where it started for them, the beach at Odaiba. “We love how you blended it into the mix at the end,” they wrote.
For most couples, Japan is somewhere they come to. For these two it was the commute and the weekly shop, the city where he asked and the one they took the train home to afterwards. Their wedding took the Japan they actually lived in and edited it down to what they wanted to share: a ryokan without the formal reception, games where the speeches would be, broccoli for the men, and every name on every box spelled the way it sounds.
