In Tokyo, Halloween means Shibuya: tens of thousands of people in costume, packed around the crossing.
Two hours west, in a mountain village of about seven hundred people, it was a quiet autumn evening like any other. That’s where these two chose to have their Halloween wedding in Japan. On Halloween, on purpose. “October is a special month for Nick & I,” she wrote.
The Kosuge River rises in those hills, one of the headwaters of the Tama, which runs all the way down to Tokyo Bay. They went to the quiet end of it.
A Place on the Internet
They found Nipponia Kosuge while Japan’s borders were still shut. The village had done something unusual with its empty old houses: rather than let them fall in, it turned them into a single hotel spread through the valley, with the Ohya, a farmhouse of about a hundred and fifty years, at its heart.
From Canada, it was a set of photographs on a screen. So, since they couldn’t come, we went for them. We stayed the night and walked them through the village on a video call from the other side of the world. “It made the venue feel real,” she wrote afterwards. “It isn’t just some magical place on the internet.”
That line gets at something fundamental about planning a wedding from abroad. A place you’ve only seen online is a picture of a place. What she wanted to know was who lived there. She’d read about the people of Kosuge, the farmers and the mayor. “It seems like such a genuine and heartfelt place.” It is.
Who It Was For
In the summer of 2022 Japan began to open, but only to guided tour groups, and most of their friends couldn’t commit to a trip that might not happen. They could have gone ahead anyway. They waited, because a wedding without their chosen family wasn’t the day they were planning.
They wrote again the week the border properly reopened, and asked for October 2023. They picked the date themselves.
When it came, the circle was small after all: the two of them and one close friend in the village, their families at home in Canada watching on Zoom. That turned out to suit them. “We’ll be in our own little world anyways,” he wrote. They wanted time more than they wanted an audience. “Nick and I tend to gravitate to having a bottle of sake and chatting for hours,” she’d told us. “We want to celebrate, but more so bask in the time with those there with us.”
So the night before the wedding, we did exactly that. Ramen is her favourite food, and the village has a small ramen shop. The three of them and our team sat down there together with beer, two hours and a whole world away from the costumes in Shibuya. It’s one of the evenings we remember most from that autumn.
A Halloween Wedding in Japan, Upstream
On the day, the ceremony was outdoors in the valley with nothing added to it. In late October the hills above Kosuge do their own decorating, and it would have been faintly ridiculous to compete. Her bouquet, burgundy and cream with dried, papery stems, simply took its colours from the slopes.
What they did bring was theirs. Howl’s Moving Castle has a particular place in their story, so the cake was designed around it, with cosmos, one of the flowers of the Japanese autumn. And for each of them there was a yunomi teacup from the village potter: something made in the village, to drink from long after they’d gone home.
After dinner they had their first dance alone in the garden, in the dark. On the one night of the year when Tokyo’s streets fill with people dressed as somebody else, they were in a valley with almost no light at all, being exactly themselves.
The Quiet End of the River
A few weeks later, choosing the music for their film, he signed off: “We are still so very blown away!”
When we caught up with them in Tokyo afterwards, they told us they wished they’d stayed a third night in the village. We understood. Most people meet Japan downstream, where the river reaches the city and everything is loud. These two went looking for where it begins. What they found wasn’t a magical place on the internet. It was a village of seven hundred people, a ramen shop, a potter, a garden in the dark, and a valley that had been there long before Halloween and will be there long after it.
They’d come upstream to the quiet end of the river, and they didn’t want to leave.
