Some months after he proposed, she wrote to us with a quiet request. Could we go back to the shore of Lake Kawaguchi, to the place where he’d asked, and bring her some pebbles? Not stones from Japan, or from the lake. From that shore. He wasn’t to know.
We were heading back to Fuji anyway. So we did.
Most of what a Lake Kawaguchiko proposal leaves behind is photographs and memories. This one also left a handful of stones, and the stones are where the story ends up. So that’s where we’ll start.
The Stones From the Lakeshore
Finding the spot was easy. We’re at the lake in every season, and the shore was where he’d left it.
She chose ith, a Japanese bridal jeweller that also works in Singapore, where the two of them had once lived for two months. The ring was made in Japan. An artisan ground the pebbles down and set them into a small cavity in a ring for him, sealed in under metal. The shore at Kawaguchiko is inside it.
In November, in New York, she gave it to him over yakitori, with flowers, balloons, and an album of photographs going back to the day they met. The stones, she told us, “allowed us to incorporate the wonderful memories of our engagement into this ring”.
The jeweller invited us to film the whole process.
Couples carry a lot home from a proposal in Japan: the ring, the photographs, a story they’ll tell for years. It’s rare for anyone to carry the ground they stood on. He’d given her a ring by the lake. Months later, she gave the lake back to him.
A Surprise Proposal, Hidden Inside a Photoshoot
He first wrote to us in March. He was planning to propose to his girlfriend at Lake Kawaguchi in April and he wanted it photographed. Just over a month is not much notice in a Japanese spring, and our spring that year was already full. But we were due at Kawaguchiko the next day for another job, which left one afternoon free at exactly the right lake. His reply: “crazy the timing works out!”
She knew there’d be a photoshoot. It had been booked through the coordinators planning their trip, and she even helped choose the places we’d go, which means that in a small way she helped plan her own proposal. She just didn’t know why one of them mattered more than the others.
We like this kind of surprise. A proposal in Japan usually needs a plan, a photographer and a good sense of where the light will be. Call it a photoshoot and none of that has to be hidden. Only the question.
It also changes our job. Most of the work of a surprise proposal happens before anyone arrives: where to stand, where the light will fall, where a photographer can wait without looking like they’re waiting for anything. On the day, we have to be ordinary until the moment isn’t. She’d met a photographer for an afternoon shoot by a lake. That’s all she saw, right up until he asked.
Mt Fuji in Spring, and the Wind off the Water
Kawaguchiko is the best known of the Fuji Five Lakes, and for good reason. From its north shore, Fuji sits straight across the water, close enough to fill the sky. That’s why people come, and why so many of them arrive with a ring in a pocket. It’s also why the lake can be busy. A good proposal spot here is the one with Fuji in the right place and nobody walking through the frame. We know a few, and we keep them to ourselves.
He asked her at a favourite spot of ours on the lakeside at Kawaguchiko. Fuji was clear, still carrying the winter’s snow well down its slopes. The wind was up off the water and the lake was choppy.
She said yes.
Wind is the one thing at the lake nobody can book or cancel. That afternoon it turned out to be a gift. It put movement into almost every frame, and it never let anyone stand still for long.
Away from the shore there’s a stand of tall grass, left gold by the winter and not yet overtaken by the new growth. By then the light was warm, coming low through the stems. There’s a stretch after any proposal when the ring gets more attention than the mountain. We leave room for it.
By evening, the sun was going down behind the mountains, and the light went soft and warm through the trees.
Then Fuji again, pale against a pale sky, above the new green of the trees. Spring at Fuji is hazier than autumn. Japanese has a word for it, harugasumi, the spring haze, and it’s why the mountain in these frames looks drawn in pencil rather than ink. Late April at the lake sits between seasons. The snow on the mountain is still winter’s, and everything below it has already moved on.
Back where they were staying, roses were waiting, and dinner was shabu-shabu. That night he emailed us again, and for the first time he copied her in, as his fiancée.
The Morning After the Proposal
She wrote to us the next morning. “THANK YOU so much for such a surreal and magical afternoon!!” She thanked us, too, for “all the wonderful coincidences of good weather and seeing cherry blossoms”.
Surreal is the right word. One minute it’s a photoshoot by a lake. The next, it isn’t.
One phrase of hers has stayed with us: “freeze all of our feelings into these photos”. It’s a better description of the job than most of the ones we’ve written ourselves.
When the photographs came, she wrote that we’d “captured the essence of our love and joy”. Later, when her mother came from Peru and her sister from London, the family held a viewing party. A cousin’s verdict: “it felt like we were watching a movie!”
A question asked at a lake in Japan. A ring made in Japan, given over yakitori in New York. A family gathered from Peru and London to look back at one windy afternoon at Kawaguchiko. None of that was in anyone’s plan when he first wrote to us, and all of it started with an afternoon we only had free because we were already on our way to the lake.
What You Take Home From Kawaguchiko
A proposal at Fuji is usually remembered as a view, and that’s fair. Fuji over the lake is hard to forget. But a view stays where it is. You can photograph it, film it and frame it, and it’s still at Kawaguchiko when you fly home.
What she understood, months later, was that a place can travel if someone goes back for it. Some of that shore is in New York now, sealed into a ring made in Japan: a few pebbles from a lake most people only ever photograph.
We’re glad we went back.
