For more than ten years, they came to Niseko every winter. They were snowboarders from Singapore, and this was their mountain town: the place they knew in powder and cold, and the place where he eventually proposed. Across the valley stood Mount Yotei, which she once described to us as “my favourite mountain in the world”.
When they chose Niseko for their wedding, it was a place they already knew by heart. She’d made the trip from Singapore so many times, she told us, that she “could be a travel planner myself!” Niseko still had something to show them. Their wedding day turned out to be one of the wildest, windiest days we’ve ever worked in, with rain blowing through sideways in light bursts and Yotei hidden in cloud from morning to night. It felt alive, and different, and electric. The next morning, the mountain was back.
Where We Came In
They first wrote to us in September 2023, just over a year before the wedding, and asked us to plan it. We had several long calls, and we loved what they wanted. But after a lot of communication we told them plainly: a wedding of that size, in the middle of our busiest autumn, deserved a planner who could give it everything. We couldn’t, not without taking attention from the couples we were already planning for that season. Every couple deserves their planner’s whole attention, and that includes the ones who have already trusted us with their day. We would rather say so early than discover it late. We introduced them to a planner who works in Niseko often, and they went with our recommendation. It broke our hearts a little, and it was the right call.
Then we did the part we could do. We came north as their photographers, and stayed close the whole way, from those first calls to the morning of the wedding.
The Evening Before, With Yotei in View
Most people know Niseko in white. In October it’s another town altogether. The lifts stand still, the crowds haven’t arrived, and the birch and maple on the lower slopes turn gold and red. For two snowboarders, it was a familiar place in an unfamiliar coat.
The weekend began the evening before with a welcome party and a tea ceremony. They’d invited us to that too: “please do join us for some casual food and drinks if you are free.” A tea ceremony is a good way to begin a weekend away. It can’t be hurried, so for a while everyone moves at the pace of the whisk, and the trip becomes a gathering.
Yotei was there for it, clear across the valley above Setsu Niseko, where they were staying with their friends. The forecast for the next day was another matter. Three days before the wedding, she’d written to us: “It’s getting cold here so bring some warm clothes! Fingers crossed for weather which isn’t looking promising now.”
A Niseko Wedding in the Wind
By the morning the wind had arrived, and it didn’t leave. She got ready in their suite at Setsu, in a tatami room whose windows looked out on mountains that were by then mostly cloud. She’d told us weeks earlier that the groom had already seen the dress, so nobody was guarding any secrets.
Still air makes still photographs. Wind makes everything move: a cape, a veil, the long grass, the people trying to stand up in it. Out in the maples of the hotel courtyard, and later in the open ground below the mountains, every portrait had weather in it. At one point they changed into matching floral puffer suits and kept walking. We will take a day like that over a calm one more often than you would think.
The ceremony was in Setsu’s car park, and we mean that as a compliment. Their planner had found open ground right beside the hotel, so a long guest list could walk out of the door and into their seats, with no buses and no shuttling between locations. By the afternoon it had become a white aisle between banks of pampas grass, with white flowers standing at the end of it. Under her tulle, the bride’s boots lit up.
Yotei should have been behind them. It was the reason she’d hoped for an outdoor ceremony at all: vows facing her favourite mountain. Instead the cloud sat low all afternoon, the wind came in gusts, the rain blew across sideways, and the guests put up clear umbrellas. Her favourite mountain was somewhere behind all that cloud. Everything in front of it was moving.
Afterwards, we looked up the Japan Meteorological Agency’s records for Kutchan, the official weather station nearest Niseko. On their wedding day it logged not a single minute of sunshine, 24 millimetres of rain and gusts of up to 18.5 metres a second, about 67 kilometres an hour. That made it one of the three windiest days that October, with the month’s joint highest average wind, as a passing low pushed the air pressure to its lowest point of the week. The day before, when the welcome party gathered, the same station had recorded seven hours of sunshine. The day after, the wind dropped, the rain stopped and the sun came back. The numbers agree with everyone who was there. None of which stopped the groom and the flower girl from walking down the aisle in matching mirrored sunglasses.
The legal part would happen at home in Singapore. This was the ceremony with everyone in it.
Ten Years of Nagging
Their friends had been waiting a long time for this. In one of her first messages to us, she described the plan as “more of a party than anything crazy formal or scripted”, and explained why: “These are our really really good friends and I think everyone just wants to have a good time now that their 10 years of nagging (us to get married) has come to fruition.” She also promised there would be “A LOT of wine and alcohol”. She was right about all of it.
The party was their idea: a cabaret night inside Setsu, with red velvet curtains, chandeliers, their names in lights above the stage, and a singer in red sequins. The bride changed for it into a green dress with a feathered hem. After a day spent outside in the wind, walking into that room felt like coming in from a storm, which is exactly what it was.
Ten years of friends asking when. When the answer finally came, it came with a stage, a singer and a bottle of champagne big enough to need both arms. Somewhere in the room stood a framed photograph of the two of them kissing in ski jackets, snow outside the window behind them: the Niseko they usually came for.
A couple of weeks later, she wrote to us about the photographs: “The photos are gorgeous and [he’s] already thinking about taking more with you guys. WOW!”
The Morning After
By the next morning the wind had gone. The air was still, the light was soft, and Yotei stood clear across the valley again, the way they’d seen it every winter for more than ten years. They knew that view by heart. The day before had belonged to the wind, and they’d spent it getting married.
