Before their Buddhist temple wedding in Japan, the couple sent us seven moments they wanted to keep. Taiseki-ji would be surrounded by thousands of cherry trees in bloom, with Mt Fuji beyond its grounds. Their list began with a bow to a priest and ended with a speech from a guest. Every request placed another person inside the memory.
We thought about that list throughout the wedding. There was extraordinary beauty everywhere we looked, but the couple had already told us where the deepest meaning would be found: in a greeting, a shared cup, a room raising its voice together, the family standing beside the people who had conducted the ceremony.
The blossom made the day beautiful. Their attention to those seven moments helped us understand what would make it theirs.
The Mountain in the Gate
Taiseki-ji was founded in 1290 on the lower slopes of Mt Fuji, in what is now Fujinomiya, Shizuoka. Its name, Great Rock Temple, recalls the stony ground on which it was established. As the head temple of Nichiren Shoshu, it has a religious life that continues quite independently of the blossom season: services, worship, and the daily observances carried forwards by successive generations.
A wedding here takes its place within that life. The temple’s requirements and the meaning of the ceremony shape what happens, while the people arriving bring something particular and unrepeatable into it.
At the entrance stands the Sanmon, two storeys of red-lacquered timber rising twenty-two metres. Completed in 1717, it was built with seventy great trees from Mt Fuji donated by the sixth Tokugawa shogun. Repaired over the centuries and fully renovated in 2021, it remains an imposing presence in the temple grounds.
Seen from the air, the gate holds its red against a landscape softened by blossom. From the ground, you feel the depth of the timber and the considerable act of making it must once have required. The mountain is physically present in that construction, carried into the temple by the hands of people who worked here three hundred years ago.
Fuji had been faintly visible beyond the blossoms the evening before. By dawn, mist lay over a nearby cherry grove and clouds had covered the mountain. Yet at the Sanmon, some part of it was still there, holding up the roof.
A gate can carry a mountain into the life of a temple; a tree can continue to shelter people long after it has stopped growing.
An Approach Beneath Weeping Cherries
The cherries at Taiseki-ji arrive in succession. Weeping varieties open early, followed by Somei-Yoshino, mountain cherries and double-flowered varieties, extending the season from around late March into April. The grounds hold thousands of trees, each responding in its own time to the spring.
Along the approach between the sub-temples, the weeping cherries trail their blossom over old stone walls. Their branches lower the scale of an otherwise monumental place. You pass a great gate, and a few steps later there are flowers at the level of your face.
The couple’s first portraits belonged to that passage. Around the bride’s white shiromuku, red brocade caught the light; cranes appeared in the fabric as she moved. The birds carry a long association with longevity, while red and white together, kōhaku, are colours of celebration in Japan.
Those colours kept returning: the gate and the kimono, the white robes of the priests, the red lacquer of the sake cups. They gave the wedding a visual continuity that came from the place and its traditions. Even in a wide photograph, with the couple small beneath the trees, the eye knew where to settle.
Inside a Buddhist Temple Wedding in Japan
At the entrance, the couple bowed to the chief priest. Inside the ceremony hall, a priest explained what would happen, and the explanation was given in English as well as Japanese. The red cup before each guest had a purpose; the prayer beads, or juzu, could rest in the lap or hang from the hand while drinking. These small details helped everyone understand how to take part.
We notice that kind of care. A ceremony can be unfamiliar without leaving a person outside it. An explanation offered at the right moment allows someone to enter an experience with confidence and respect, paying attention to its meaning because they no longer need to worry about what to do with their hands.
When the room chanted together, those hands came together around the beads. When the couple drank sake, both took their turn. A priest then moved among the guests, pouring into each red cup, so that everyone shared in the drinking.
That participation gave this Buddhist temple wedding in Japan its particular intimacy. People who had arrived from different places were now undertaking the same actions, in the same room. The ceremony asked something of each of them, and their presence became active.
The chief priest’s sermon followed. Afterwards, the couple stood with both chief priests, and the whole family joined the priests for a photograph at the entrance. These were among the moments the couple had named in advance, and seeing them happen explained their importance far more fully than a written list could.
It was on their list for a reason. Years from now, this is the photograph that shows who stood with them, and who welcomed them in.
Hanagumori: A Sky Made for Blossom
Japanese has a word for the overcast skies of cherry blossom season: hanagumori. Alongside it sit hanafubuki, a blizzard of falling petals, and hanabie, the cold that returns while the flowers are out. Each describes a different way of experiencing spring.
There is a lovely precision in having enough language for these changes. It encourages attention to the season as it actually arrives, with its softer skies and returning chill, its still branches and sudden movement. The old calendar of seventy-two small seasons takes that attention further, marking subtle shifts that a broad label like “spring” cannot quite contain.
Then the hanagumori turned to rain. Wet stone darkened around their feet, the lacquer seemed richer, and the pale sky gave a gentle light to the detail of the bride’s kimono.
This is part of what draws us towards yūgen, the depth that remains partly beyond what is immediately visible. An image may show a couple standing on a bridge, yet carry the hush after chanting, the cool air against silk, the knowledge of all the people waiting nearby. Experience gathers around the visible moment.
The Scale of a Place
The long stone steps led towards another red gate. Elsewhere, a small waterfall and a great weeping cherry gave the grounds a different kind of movement. Beyond them, a red bridge crossed the Urui River, its bright line holding the couple within the wider landscape.
The temple grounds remained a place other people were visiting too. Worshippers, people coming for the blossom, the wedding party: different reasons for being there occupied the same paths. It was a living place, with a life broad enough to contain this celebration for a while.
We love making photographs in which the people have room around them. At a temple with more than seven centuries of history, that room can tell you something about time. Two people are here, together, on a particular afternoon. The place gives their presence a scale that a closer image could never offer.
In the grove later, the bride wore a gown and a long veil. Petals fell around them in a hanafubuki, the trees giving a second expression to a landscape we had first seen in the morning mist. The same place had changed without needing to become somewhere else.
At the Lake, a Mountain Returning
Lake Saiko lies on the other side of Fuji, in a landscape the volcano helped create. Lava from the great Jōgan eruption in 864 divided the older lake known as Senoumi, leaving Saiko among the waters that remain. The relationship between mountain and lake runs much deeper than a reflection.
By the shore, the air had the returning cold of hanabie. The bride still hoped for a photograph looking towards Fuji, and as the light began to leave the day, the mountain gradually came through the cloud.
It never cleared completely. Its outline emerged far enough to recognise, while the sky held the rest. After the red gate, the blossom and the rain, the view had a quietness of its own: a mountain that had been present in so many ways finally becoming visible.
Some photographs gain their feeling from how much they allow to remain unresolved. The cloud belonged to this day as surely as the mountain did. Together they gave the view its atmosphere, and the couple their own experience of being there.
Two Family Crests at the Door
At the reception house, pink noren carried two family crests. These kamon, signs passed through generations, appeared together on one curtain at the entrance to a traditional wooden building. Before anyone stood to speak, the doorway had already made a small, eloquent statement about the gathering inside.
Petals greeted the couple as they arrived. A fire burned outside, drawing people towards its warmth, while inside the long table gathered the families for food and speeches.
The groom spoke in English, with a translation for the room; the bride had prepared her words of thanks. A guest gave the formal Japanese speech the couple had asked us to preserve. Language moved in both directions, giving people time to receive what was being said and to recognise the feeling behind it.
The sake barrel opened for kagami biraki. There was a toast, a cake carrying cherry blossom, and eventually a dance floor the older guests made their own.
Outside, the fire continued to burn.
Seven Moments, Held Together
Their highlight film brings back the temple, the chanting, the shared sake and the people gathered around them, with the music they chose, Carter Burwell’s “Bella’s Lullaby,” performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. The blossom and the lake hold those human moments in the landscape where they happened.
Whether we are planning a celebration or making its photographs and films, we are always listening for what a couple recognises as essential. Sometimes it arrives in a long conversation. Here, it arrived in seven requests.
They understood that a bow could contain gratitude, that drinking together could make a room into participants, that a photograph with the family and the priests could hold relationships which mattered to them. They had already begun the work of distinguishing what they would want to return to.
Next spring, the cherries will open again. Other people will walk through the Sanmon; the temple will continue its observances. The continuity is part of its beauty.
But this gathering of people, at this point in their lives, will never assemble in quite the same way again. The couple knew that. Those were the seven moments they asked us to keep.
