It rained on Tokyo every day from the 27th of August to the 2nd of October. Thirty-seven days in a row, the longest run the city has ever recorded, and the first September in history with rain on every single day. Right in the middle of it, on a Wednesday, a beautiful couple married at Jinya, a wedding venue in an old inn an hour from Tokyo, with almost seventy of their people staying under its roof.
It poured all day. Ask them now, and they wouldn’t have it any other way.
Some of the weddings we love most belong to couples who welcome whatever weather the day brings. They understand that the day is theirs, rain included, and that the rain becomes part of the story they’ll tell for the rest of their lives. A sunny day would have been beautiful. This one could only ever have been theirs.
This was akisame, Japan’s autumn rain, carried by the front that settles over the country as summer lets go. Most years it passes through. This year it stayed, and it came to the wedding. The only break came two nights earlier, a small one over the crossing in Shibuya, and it ended in a sunset. Most venues are chosen for how they look on a dry day. Jinya is at its most surprising when the weather turns.
A Gothic Fairy Tale, Planned From Australia
Their brief arrived in March, and it’s still one of our favourites. “Ethereal, a little bit gothic, dark forest energy.” White lilies, orchids, “big waxy candles and moody colours.” And, in case we had any doubt: “Not really kitschy, pastel people.” They had a name for it themselves, half joking. A subtle vampire theme. When we briefed the florist, we wrote it as four ideas: brooding romance, a dark fairy tale, romantic gothic and old-world decadence. Underneath, one line in capitals: nothing that looks like Halloween, nothing that looks like a costume. The palette followed: plum, burgundy, wine and aubergine, with a single thread of midnight blue running through it.
Jinya as a Wedding Venue in the Rain
Every wedding we plan at Jinya has a rain plan. When we first took ceremonies out into the inn’s garden, the promise of one is what made it possible, and it has never been optional since.
On a dry day, a couple at Jinya gets two worlds. Vows in the garden or under the trees, then into the old inn for everything after: cocktails in the tatami room out on the terrace, dinner beneath the open beams of the Genji room. Sun or rain, those rooms are part of the day.
Their ceremony was always going to be indoors. Months before, she’d chosen the inn’s newly renovated restaurant for her vows, because the smaller tatami room, beautiful as it is, couldn’t hold seven bridesmaids and everyone else besides. The rain brought almost everything else inside: cocktail hour from the terrace, the couple’s portraits, the bridal party from Jinya’s long walkway. When it eased to the lightest it had been all day, we took the chance, and the groomsmen made it out to the pond in the rain.
A venue shows what it’s made of on a day like this. Jinya has the space for a wedding of seventy to move indoors without anyone feeling squeezed, and the character to carry the whole day once it’s there. Old timber, paper screens, long corridors, gardens framed in glass. Outdoors, you stand inside the garden. Indoors, the garden becomes the view: wet, very green, and held in every window.
Moving chairs is easy. The part of a rain plan that matters is the place itself: as good inside as it is out, so the day you get is never the lesser version. It’s the first question we ask of any venue before we plan a wedding in Japan there.
The Ceremony
Two white plinths with rough white vases stood either side of them, and arrangements hung at the top of the aisle. The flowers had been dyed into the palette, lisianthus and hydrangea and amaranth, and arranged the way she’d asked for in planning: with space left empty on purpose, “balance without symmetry”, and room for what she called “the dark side of beauty”. It’s ikebana thinking, the empty space doing as much work as the flowers, arrived at from the gothic side.
Her bouquet was a long cascade of deep red, anthurium and calla lily, “almost like a blood red against the white lace”, in her words. Seven bridesmaids in navy each carried a single calla lily with a different second flower, tied with long ribbon in navy or purple. His mother wore navy too. His buttonhole trailed amaranthus.
Two pieces by Charlie Grey played them in, with the rain keeping time on the roof. In the front row, one chair stayed empty, with flowers and a framed photograph, for her mother. The rings came up the aisle on a small pillow that honoured his grandmother.
It was a ceremony with a few Jewish celebrations, and Japan had a place in it too. He wore a white kippah, and the two of them shared sake from red lacquer cups in san san kudo, Japan’s ritual of three cups and three sips that seals a marriage. Jewish weddings have always had a shared cup of their own, so the two sat easily side by side. It ended the way Jewish weddings end, with the breaking of the glass and the whole room cheering.
Under the Old Orange Lights
Cocktail hour moved in from the terrace, and the light changed with it. Inside an old inn on a rainy afternoon, the light is the lamps: low, warm and orange, glowing against the grey beyond the glass. Photographers fret about light like that. Everyone else loves it.
The rain took the terrace, but it couldn’t take Japan out of the afternoon. Bringing Japan into a wedding was never only about the garden or the view. It’s in what people taste and the hands that make it, and in small rituals done with care for guests who’ve come a long way. So there was matcha, made in front of guests as they knelt on the tatami, yakitori from the grill, and Japanese sweets on blue-patterned plates. Guests remember being looked after like that long after they’ve forgotten the view.
And this is the side of Japan that only rain brings out. On a bright day, Jinya gives you its gardens and its rooms, and they’re beautiful. On a wet one, it gives you something harder to name. The sound of water on old roofs and in the garden. Shoji screens glowing from the inside. A whole wedding drawn a little closer together, because that’s what rain does to people in a house. Most people who visit Japan never see it like this.
A Reception in the Genji Room
The Genji room was dressed in plum velvet and black lace, with ribbons in navy and burgundy spilling over the edges of the tables, and tall ivory tapers on crystal candlesticks, twenty or more to a table. Flowers in crimson and violet sat among them, and figs lay cut open on the velvet. The menus were printed in silver on purple washi. Inside every masu cup of sake was a single character: 愛, love.
Above it all, the open beams. She told us the tables had “a really beautiful Japanese feel”, and that was the balance we were after: the gothic and the Japanese meeting in the same room, neither one dressing up as the other. Not long after they walked in, the two of them took the mallets to a kagami biraki barrel, the Japanese way of opening something new, and it burst into gold and silver streamers over their heads. Then the whole room raised its masu to them.
Their first dance was Enya’s Caribbean Blue, a waltz they’d choreographed, under blue light, ending in a lift and a spin, and it was incredible to watch. For a couple whose brief began with “ethereal”, it couldn’t have been anything else. Then their parents came onto the floor, his mother with him and her father with her, the two dances side by side, and those were the most emotional minutes of the night. Later came the hora, and after it the last song, Rudimental’s Waiting All Night. Then the music stopped, the way it does at Jinya, and the house was theirs.
It Was Meant to Rain
They’d come a long way, and the rain had kept their own portraits under the eaves all day. So a week later we offered to bring them back to Jinya for a few photographs outside, in the sunshine, if it ever arrived. The bride wrote back: “It would have been nice to get a sunshine shot but honestly, we both felt that in the end it was meant to rain and it made the mood so magical on the day!” Her husband called the whole week “such a dream”.
They didn’t need the sunshine photographs. The rain had already given the day its shape.
Japan’s autumn rain arrives every year. This year it stayed for thirty-seven days, and on one of them it came to a wedding, and nobody asked it to leave.
A few more moments, in no particular order. A day like this never comes back from the beginning. It comes back in flashes.
