Jinya was built for arrivals. In 1918 the Mitsui family made it a villa called Hiratsuka-en, a house at the foot of the Tanzawa mountains for receiving important guests, and more than a century later that’s still the work it does best. This is the story of the first couple to marry on the path those guests arrive by, at Jinya Tsurumaki Onsen. Everyone who comes to Jinya comes the same way, along a long, shaded walk through the trees to the door, where the inn still sounds a drum for the people it welcomes.
For years, Dee walked that path and saw an aisle in it. She kept the idea the way you keep a sketch you haven’t shown anyone, and said she’d pitch it when the right couple came along. This couple were the right couple. They married on the walkway with their guests seated inside the forest rather than looking out at it, and every walkway ceremony we’ve designed there since began with them.
We loved them for many reasons, and this one is near the top: they said yes to something no one had done at Jinya, on the strength of a planner’s sketch. Couples like that change what a place believes it can be.
Jinya, Tsurumaki Onsen: A Camp Below the Tanzawa
The name is older than the villa. A jinya is a camp, the place an army stations itself and makes its base, and long before the Mitsui arrived this ground was the camp of Wada Yoshimori, a close aide to Minamoto no Yoritomo, the first Kamakura shogun. The inn’s own history suggests why he chose it: hot springs rising at the foot of the mountains, and plenty of the bamboo used to make arrows.
Water, materials, shelter. The reasons anyone makes camp are practical, and so are most of the reasons a wedding lands where it does. What turns a camp into something more is who stays. A destination wedding asks the people you love to leave home and settle somewhere unfamiliar with you for a while, and this couple’s people came a long way to do it: more than eighty of them, from Canada and further afield, the United States, Europe and Sri Lanka.
Jinya sits in Tsurumaki Onsen, in Hadano, between Tokyo and Hakone: close enough to the city for everyone flying in, far enough out for the trees to take over. For one September wedding it became their camp, and they held it together.
Between the Mountain and the City
In the days before the wedding they met Japan at both ends. One evening, on their visit to Jinya, they stood on Koboyama, the hill above Hadano, with Mt Fuji on the horizon. Two days later they were in Shinjuku, under the red lanterns of a yokocho and the painted kabuki faces of Kabukicho. Fuji barely changes, and Shinjuku rebuilds itself by the season, yet on a clear day you can see the mountain from the towers. Seeing both before you marry is a good way to understand the country you’ve chosen: it keeps its oldest shapes and its newest ones within sight of each other.
He first came to Japan in 2016 and fell for it at once, and when he got home he told his mother that when he married, it would be here. Years later, on another trip to Japan together, the two of them realised they wanted to spend their lives together. They’re Canadian, they’d been back many times, and they wanted to share the country they loved with the people they loved, somewhere outside Tokyo that felt lived in rather than visited. They had married legally at home that summer; this was the wedding with their people. When the search for a venue reopened, she wrote to us in capitals that they had always loved Jinya, and Dee wrote back that she thought it was the one, because it would be all theirs.
What we can say is what their day chose to say. Its details pointed every guest straight at where they were: a koto before the vows, sake cups of hinoki with a Japanese knot beside their initials, a noren at the reception door. None of it was costume. It told everyone they loved, in small and exact ways, that this wedding belonged to this place.
Rooms Made for Receiving People
A house built for guests is built for anticipation: the room ready before you arrive, the view arranged before you look. That suits a wedding morning, which is anticipation from the first hour to the last. Jinya’s rooms, with their shoji, tatami and one round lattice window, were made for exactly that kind of waiting, and on this morning the guests of honour were the two of them, in separate rooms, getting ready for the same path.
They saw each other first in the garden, away from everyone, before the path filled up. A walkway aisle is long and very public, and those few private minutes gave them something to carry down it.
The Path Built for Arrivals
Most ceremonies turn their guests to face something: an altar, a view, a wall of flowers. On Jinya’s walkway the guests sat inside the forest, either side of the aisle, and the bride came in along the path every one of them had taken to arrive. The way in became the way forward. Very little was added, because very little was needed: chairs, a white runner, flowers set into the trees, an arch at the top of the stone steps where the path narrows and climbs, and a koto playing before anyone walked. For an outdoor wedding in Japan, it asks remarkably little of the place and gives back everything the place already has. The ryokan’s staff told us afterwards they had never seen anything like it.
An aisle usually carries a couple away from their guests. This one ran through them, so the first steps they took as a married pair passed within reach of everyone who had travelled to be there. We still think it’s the most generous shape a ceremony can take.
After their vows they exchanged garlands of red and white flowers, the maalai of his Sri Lankan Tamil heritage. His sister, who led the ceremony, told everyone what they mean: accepting each other as partners for life, accepting each other’s families, and a willingness to work things out together for as long as the marriage lasts. In Japan, red and white together, kōhaku, are the colours of celebration, so for a moment on that path two traditions were wearing the same colours.
Mid-September keeps Jinya’s garden in deep summer green, a couple of months before the maples turn, and the afternoon light comes down through it in pieces. It’s a season that gets less attention than autumn here. We think it deserves more: the garden at its fullest, the summer heat only starting to ease.
A Knot That Tightens When Pulled
In Japan a noren is more than a curtain across a doorway. It carries a house’s name, and the word has come to mean the house’s standing, the trust it has built over years. When a long-serving apprentice was allowed to open a business of his own under part of the old name, it was called noren-wake, dividing the noren. So there’s something right about walking into your first evening as a married couple beneath a noren that carries your names. It’s the sign of a new house.
Between their names hung a knot. Dee designed the noren in three panels, carrying their own wedding identity and the mizuhiki across all three, and it was made here in Japan. The awaji musubi is one of the knots of mizuhiki, the paper cord tied around gifts, and it’s chosen for weddings because it’s hard to undo once tied, which makes it right for a celebration meant to happen only once. Pull on both ends and it grips tighter. The same knot was marked on the wooden masu cups beside their initials, cups the couple, Jinya and our team developed together, with each guest’s name engraved on their own. Of all the images a couple could choose for a marriage, a knot that holds harder under strain is one of the more honest.
Later came mochi pounding and a sake barrel opened with mallets. Neither is a ritual you watch from a chair; both ask the whole room to lean in, and this room did.
Lanterns on the Way Out
The inn says its drum both greets guests and sees them off. Here the goodbye is part of the hospitality, not an afterthought. At the end of the night their people lined a garden path with paper lanterns and sent them through. A day that began with guests arriving along one path ended with those same guests standing either side of another, holding the light.
That’s the part of a destination wedding we find hardest to describe and easiest to see. By the end of a day like this, nobody on either side of that path is there as an audience. They’re the ones holding it up.
On the old calendar they married in tsubame saru, the five days when the swallows leave Japan for the south. It’s a season named for departures, and it suited a night that ended in a send-off. Then the DJ took over, and the camp became a dance floor.
What Started Here
Since that September, other couples have walked Jinya’s path, and each walkway ceremony we’ve designed there has been its own. But an idea at a venue doesn’t become real because a planner can see it. It becomes real when a couple is willing to walk it first, in front of everyone they love, with no photograph of anyone else doing it to reassure them.
That’s a particular kind of trust, and it’s the kind we plan weddings in Japan to deserve, with our photography and film made as part of the same work: we hold the structure, so the couple only has to walk. This couple walked first. Every couple who takes that path now is walking a little way behind them.
Their own path kept going. After the wedding we flew to New York, where they had moved, to photograph them again, this time with a baby on the way. They live in London now, and we can’t wait to catch up with them there for the next chapter.
