Some couples arrive with a venue already chosen. This one arrived with an open map. They’d followed our work on Instagram for a while, they wanted spring or summer, and they were happy for Japan to decide the rest. So we proposed somewhere new: a Niigata elopement, in a private garden in Shibata, with an onsen town to come home to and sake country all around. Their reply is one we’ve kept: “We put our full faith in you!”
We take a sentence like that seriously, because it describes the job better than we can. Couples planning a wedding in Japan are surrounded by places that all look good in a photograph. What they’re really asking for is judgment: which place will feel like theirs, and why. Niigata sounded like theirs before they’d seen it. It’s rice country and sake country, on the Sea of Japan side of the main island, well off the routes most first trips to Japan follow. For two people who call themselves adventurous, that was the point.
A Polar Bear and a Reindeer
They met in December 2019 at SantaCon in downtown Cincinnati. He was dressed as a polar bear and she was dressed as a reindeer. He was talking to her brother when she walked over and introduced herself, and a week later they went on their first date. We collect first-meeting stories, and very few tell you as much, as quickly, about the couple you’re about to plan for.
They’re from the Kentucky side of the river from Cincinnati, and they describe themselves as easy going, goofy, outgoing and adventurous. They love to travel, to find a new restaurant, and to spend time with their dog, who was beside them when he proposed on a walk by a lake near home. He had always wanted to travel to Japan, so they asked themselves a simple question: why not get married here, and make the honeymoon part of the same journey?
Why elope? They put it better than we could: for “the adventure and intimacy of it just being the 2 of us.” Their wish list had five lines: a private place for their vows, nature, some city, a great dinner, and lots of pictures. Every line is about how the day would feel, and none of it is about how it would look to anyone else. That’s what an elopement is at its best, a deliberate choice to give the day entirely to each other.
Somewhere We’d Never Been
Their first note mentioned cherry blossom season, as most first notes about Japan do. Then they let it go, and we loved them for it, because it opened the whole country. The blossoms draw everyone to the same few weeks and the same famous places. Without them, we could plan around the couple instead of the calendar.
Our proposal was Niigata, an idea we’d been shaping for a while: a private historic garden, an onsen town, and sake country around both. It would be the first elopement we’d ever photographed there. They love the local breweries and wineries back home, and they told us it felt very fitting, and that nobody having done it before only made it better. When we plan an elopement somewhere new, that kind of trust is what lets us build it properly.
Niigata has more sake breweries than any other prefecture in Japan, close to ninety of them, and it’s the country’s leading rice prefecture. Those are really one fact. Sake starts in the paddies, and the snow that buries Niigata every winter comes back as the water. For two people whose idea of a good weekend at home includes a local brewery, sake country was never a theme. It was simply the right place for them to begin.
Tsukioka Onsen, Found by Accident
They spent two nights in Tsukioka Onsen, a hot spring town in the rice fields on the eastern edge of the Echigo Plain, a short drive from Shibata. Its beginning is our favourite Niigata story. In 1915, men drilling for oil struck hot water instead, a spring of more than 50 degrees, and a public bath went up beside the well. The town grew around it.
The water is a weakly alkaline sulphur spring, emerald green, and one of the richest in sulphur anywhere in Japan. The town says it will blacken precious metals and that it’s kind to the skin. People once looked at the colour of the water, it’s said, to guess the next day’s weather.
We think about that oil well more than we probably should. A whole town exists because somebody treated a failed plan as a find. Our couple had the same instinct. They came for the blossoms, let them go, and found a place they could never have searched for, because nobody had put it on a list yet.
In late May the fields around Tsukioka have just been planted and still stand in water, so for a few weeks the whole plain holds the sky. On the evening they married, the two of them walked the raised paths between those paddies, in the fields that will one day become somebody’s sake.
Sekisensou, a Private Garden in Shibata
For the vows, we chose Sekisensou, a private historic garden in Shibata, the old castle town a short drive from the onsen. The Mizoguchi lords ruled from Shibata for more than 270 years without ever being moved elsewhere, and in their day this ground was where the domain’s samurai trained in riding and archery. The garden came in the early Meiji years, and its name came from a poem: in 1921 Shibata’s first mayor, also known as a poet, visited at the age of 84 and wrote a few lines about a garden whose hill and waterfall are each a pleasure to look at. Sekisensou doesn’t open its gate to the public. We arranged it for the two of them alone, and for one day it was theirs.
Its next owners tie it to Tsukioka. The house became the villa of the Ishizaki family, who refined oil in Niitsu, so the garden where they married and the onsen where they slept both owe something to the oil under this part of Niigata. Its detached rooms and tea room are now Registered Tangible Cultural Properties, and since 2011 the garden itself has been a Registered Monument.
It’s a garden of water and stone. The Shibata River runs right through the middle of it, a public river crossing private ground, which the garden itself calls very rare; until the early Showa years, rafts of timber still floated down it. The water winds beneath slabs of stone laid as bridges, its banks built up with great rocks and moss, old pines trained low over the water, stone lanterns gone green with age, and azaleas coming into flower. The rooms look onto it through old glass, so even getting ready happened with the garden in view. He saw her dress for the first time at a weathered timber gate, which seems right for a garden that rewards patience. Nothing in it shows itself all at once.
Vows and Rings, and Nothing Else
Their plan for the ceremony was one line long: “We will just do our vows and rings.” No officiant, no script, nobody to perform for. They stood together on a stone bridge over the water and read each other words they had written themselves, and we’ll leave those words where they belong.
We’ve come to believe the simplest ceremonies are the most exposed, in the best way. With no officiant to set the pace and no audience to play to, there’s nothing between two people except what they’ve decided to say. It asks more of a couple than a full wedding does, and it gives more back. A private garden is the right room for it.
A small sake cask was waiting afterwards on the red felt by the windows, marked 祝, the character for celebration. In a country that has sealed marriages with sake for centuries, it was the obvious first toast. Their first dance song was Al Green’s “Just for Me”, which could stand as the title of the whole day.
A Bottle With Their Names on It
They’d told us early on how much they love the breweries near home, so the sake had to be more than a toast. Kikusui, a Shibata brewery founded in 1881, made them a bottle with a custom label, their own sake from the town they married in. Wine people talk about terroir, the way a bottle carries the ground it came from. Sake has its own version, made from rice, water and a brewer’s hands, and a label with your names on it ties that ground to a single day. We like a bottle that can travel home in a suitcase and wait for the right night.
The Castle Town That Keeps Things
Shibata keeps its history close together. Omon, one of the town’s old breweries, was founded in 1790 directly in front of Suwa Shrine, and its first sake was named Suwazakari after the shrine. The name Omon came later, from a fourth-generation brewer who came home from study in Germany taken with the crests of Europe’s royal houses and wine estates. The labels still carry a Western shield, and the cup sake spells the name AU MONT, as if it were French.
The brewery also changed who gets to make sake. It took on women brewers at a time when brewing was still almost entirely men’s work, and in 1975 one of them, Shiiya Kazuko, became the first woman to pass Japan’s first-grade brewery technician exam. The novelist Miyao Tomiko researched her novel Kura, about a sake brewing family, there.
Nearby stands the Ashigaru Nagaya, a thatched row house built in 1842 for eight households of the domain’s foot soldiers. It’s the only one of four that survives, people lived in it until 1968, and it’s now an Important Cultural Property.
We love a town like this for an elopement because nothing in it is staged. Sake has been brewed in front of that shrine for more than two centuries, and the foot soldiers’ house was a home within living memory. Two people from Kentucky walked through it in their wedding clothes, stopped at the brewery for a glass, and Shibata simply carried on being itself. That’s the version of Japan we most want couples to meet, lived in rather than arranged.
Tokyo, Two Nights Before
Their wish list asked for some city, and Tokyo gave them its loudest. Two evenings before the garden, they walked Shinjuku as the lights came on, across the crossings and into Kabukicho and the lanes of Omoide Yokocho. Kabukicho takes its name from a kabuki theatre planned after the war and never built. The name, given in 1948, outlived the plan. Omoide Yokocho began in those same years as a market of street stalls on the burnt ground west of the station, and its lanes still run on grilled skewers and counters a few seats long.
Edo had a word for districts like these: ukiyo, the floating world of theatres, lanterns and nights that ran into morning. Two days later the same couple stood on a stone bridge in a garden in Shibata with nobody else in sight. Japan lives in both registers at once, the neon and the moss, and they gave each its own night.
They put their full faith in us, and Niigata repaid it. The places that end up feeling most like a couple’s own are rarely the ones they’d have found by searching. They’re found the way Tsukioka’s water was, by someone digging where nobody expected anything, and two people willing to step in.
