We asked about the first dance. The answer came straight back.
“No first dance. We just want to do the mochi pounding!”
That told us most of what we needed to know about these two. Their May wedding in Japan was shaped less by convention than by taking part. They wanted to make the flowers rather than simply choose them. They wanted a koto, playing music that belonged to their own lives. They wanted their guests drawing fortunes, eating wagashi in the garden, and gathering round a wooden mortar to make mochi together.
Japan was part of it in ways that could be touched, heard, tasted and shared.
A May Wedding in Japan, After the Blossom
There is a version of spring in Japan that gets far less attention than the blossom. Cherry blossom tends to dominate every conversation about spring weddings here, and we understand why. We’ve spent an unreasonable portion of our lives watching sakura forecasts.
By May the sakura has gone and the landscape has moved on. The maples are in new leaf, the gardens deepen into green, and the season has a name of its own: shinryoku, the fresh green of early summer. For a May wedding in Japan, it’s a beautiful time to arrive.
At Jinya, the old inn at Tsurumaki Onsen, it’s one of our favourite seasons of all. The garden feels newly awake. Light filters green through the maples above the pond, and the air is warm without yet belonging to summer. It’s the kind of place where the setting does much of the work quietly: tatami, shoji, timber, water, old trees and the season changing outside.
For this wedding, the garden was the thread running through the day.
Making the Flowers
She didn’t want to hand the flowers to someone else. She wanted to make them.
So we had seasonal stems waiting at Jinya the afternoon before, and she spent it on the deck outside her room with her friends, surrounded by buckets, flowers and all the practical business of making beautiful things. Her approach came from ikebana, where space, line and balance matter as much as abundance.
There is something particularly lovely about making part of your own wedding in the place where it will happen. By the morning of the ceremony, those flowers already held the memory of an afternoon spent together.
We have no photographs of the making. Her friends had made her promise: no cameras until everyone had been through hair and makeup. A fair boundary.
The next day, one of the arrangements stood at the ceremony beside their rings, vow books and sake set. That evening it went upstairs to the dinner table. The same flowers travelled through the wedding with them.
A Ceremony to Their Own Soundtrack
For the ceremony they chose a koto, the long Japanese stringed instrument whose sound can feel at once delicate and deeply atmospheric. Then they made it entirely their own. Rather than a repertoire chosen because it sounded traditionally Japanese, they picked music from the films and stories that meant something to them, and thought about how each piece would sound on the koto.
Guests arrived to Always With Me from Spirited Away and A Town with an Ocean View from Kiki’s Delivery Service. He walked in to Katawaredoki from Your Name. She walked through the garden to Anytime Anywhere, from Frieren. And once they were married, they left together to Merry-Go-Round of Life from Howl’s Moving Castle.
It’s one of those combinations we love: something deeply connected to Japan, filtered through their own history with it.
A close friend led the ceremony in the garden. Beneath the new maples, beside the pond, they exchanged vows and rings and tied a handfasting cord, in a ceremony that felt personal without needing to announce it.
Fortunes in the Garden
Afterwards, everyone stayed outside. The koto came too, playing the pieces that hadn’t fitted into the ceremony, while Jinya served matcha and wagashi in the garden and yakitori came off the grill on the veranda.
And then there were the fortunes. At shrines and temples across Japan, an omikuji is a paper fortune drawn to glimpse the luck ahead, and an unlucky one is traditionally tied up at the shrine rather than carried home.
They had found a real omikuji box and made their own version. About twenty fortunes they’d written themselves waited in a wooden bowl, folded and tied with red and white string. And because fate can occasionally use some negotiation, an unlucky draw came with a challenge that could be completed to improve it.
It was playful, and it also said something about the wedding as a whole. The Japanese details weren’t there to be looked at. Guests had something to do with them.
Mochi Instead of a First Dance
Which brings us to the wooden mallet.
Mochitsuki is the old way of making mochi: steamed rice pounded in a great wooden mortar, one person bringing down the mallet while another turns and wets the rice between strikes. It takes far better timing than it looks. It’s also very difficult to watch passively.
The mortar was never going upstairs to dinner, so we set it up in the hall beside the garden at the end of cocktail hour. Once the mallet appeared, the wedding gathered round it. The two of them went first, in happi coats, bringing it down together. Then their family and friends took their turns, one after another, until the rice became the smooth, elastic mochi everyone had been working towards.
It was served with kuromitsu, the dark sugar syrup, and sweet black sesame. By then there was no better argument for skipping a first dance. Our team was sticky to the wrists.
Around One Table
Dinner moved upstairs for kaiseki, course after seasonal course, continuing a day in which Japan had been present through the season, sound, ritual and food, and the simple act of making things together. The arrangement from the ceremony appeared again among the floating candles. The best man and the maid of honour each spoke, and two small cakes waited for the end of the night.
And everyone sat together at one table. That says more about this wedding than any guest count could. These were the people who had travelled to Japan with them, who had watched them marry beneath the May maples, drawn fortunes from a wooden box, heard familiar music transformed by a koto and swung a mochi mallet before finding their way upstairs.
There’s a particular intimacy in giving a wedding enough space for everyone to experience the same things together, and to take part in them.
That’s what stays with us most about this one. A wedding at Jinya in the deep green of May, after the blossom had gone. A bride who made her own flowers. A ceremony scored by the stories they loved. Fortunes in the garden. Mochi made by many hands.
Nothing was borrowed for effect. They came to Japan with curiosity, affection and a clear sense of what mattered to them, and built a wedding that let those things meet. In the middle of shinryoku, beneath all that new green, they made it entirely their own.
