This rainy day elopement in Japan fell inside a season with its own name. From late March into April a long spring rain settles over the Pacific side of the country, and Japan calls it natane-zuyu, the rapeseed rain, after the yellow nanohana that flower while it falls. Japanese dictionaries list it as a season word for haiku. A country that names its weather after its flowers isn’t inclined to treat a wet day as a ruined one.
The couple flew in from country Victoria for two nights at Jinya, the ryokan in Tsurumaki Onsen at the foot of the Tanzawa mountains, and the rain came with them: full, steady, committed rain that settled in for the day. Standing that afternoon in a field of the very flowers the rain is named for, our bride gave the day its verdict. “Yeah, I actually love the rain.”
Before the wedding, they described themselves to us as “big picture” people, two people who wanted to be themselves and enjoy their day “care free and in love”. They told us how they talk to each other, too: they can lock eyes and know exactly what the other is thinking, nearly always because of a private joke. Plenty of couples hope for that. Few can say it so plainly, and fewer still hold it all day in the rain. They even left the music for their film to us, with a line we’ve kept: “it only makes sense to trust you with the music as well.” That trust is a gift to a team. It’s also, we suspect, what let the weather into the day as a guest.
They’ve known each other since they were twelve, in the same homeroom in their first year of high school. They grew up as friends and finally got together at seventeen. Years later her first message to us had the lightness of two people who have known each other that long: they wanted to holiday in Japan, she wrote, and “might as well get married along the way!” They took care of the paperwork at home before they flew. Japan, they told us, was their real wedding.
Mt Fuji came out at sunrise that weekend. We kept it to ourselves, so the first time they saw it was in their film. That felt right. When the film arrived, she wrote that it was “a beautiful surprise to have Fuji included in the footage”, and that they’d have regretted missing it had they known on the day. Her shrine stamp book, the goshuin-chō she can’t pass a temple or shrine without adding to, has a Snoopy hidden on every page and, when it comes to Fuji, a work in progress. The film gives them the mountain they missed, and the rest of the day again at the pace they lived it, rain and all.
Two Nights at Jinya, Tsurumaki Onsen
Jinya has been receiving guests since 1918, when it opened as a villa for the Mitsui family, and its memory goes back further than that: the ground it stands on was once a samurai camp, which is what its name means. The inn names its rooms after people from The Tale of Genji, and the hall they married in front of, Genji-kan, was rebuilt from a building about three hundred years old. It’s a place laid down in layers by people who meant it to be stayed in.
So they stayed. Two nights is what turns a ryokan from a venue into somewhere you live for a while. By the morning of the wedding they’d already slept there, eaten there and learned their way around, and Jinya already knew them. Getting ready in a room that’s already yours is its own kind of calm. Nobody has to find their feet, and the hours before a wedding can be spent on each other rather than on the building.
A First Look With the Blossom Just Out
Early April put them right at the opening of the cherry blossom, a narrow window to land in from the other side of the world. Blossom forecasts shift with every warm week, and anyone who has planned around hanami learns that the trees keep their own calendar. That spring it ran in their favour, and her bouquet answered it in pink.
There’s a quiet reversal in it for a couple from Victoria. April at home is autumn, the days drawing in. They flew north into the opposite season and arrived at its very start, in a country where April is when the school year and the working year begin, and the cherry blossom comes out to meet it. Of all the times to start a marriage, it’s hard to think of a better one than the week a whole country agrees to begin again.
A first look suits two people who talk with their eyes. There’s no aisle in the way and nobody to perform for, just the moment one of them turns round and the private joke starts again. She had the first line, and it was a good one: “I’m wearing heels and I’m still not tall enough.”
A Koto in the Rain at Genji-kan
They married in Jinya’s garden at the foot of Genji-kan, with the old hall’s dark timber behind them and the rain working through the garden beyond. A koto played for them, live and unamplified. The player had told us beforehand that he wanted to play it naturally, just the koto, and afterwards he wrote to say the rain had soaked the garden into a ceremony with real atmosphere. We’d put it the same way. Rain darkens old timber, deepens the green of a Japanese garden and quietens everything else, and a hall made from a building three centuries old is at its most itself on a wet day.
Their ceremony included san-san-kudo, the sharing of sake from three cups, three sips each. The sake was Zarusō Hōrai, brewed since 1830 by the Ōya Takashi brewery in Aikawa, with groundwater from the Tanzawa mountains, the same range Jinya sits beneath. Its name carries a second story. Hōrai is the mountain of the immortals in old Chinese legend, and Japanese weddings have long set it on the table as the shimadai, a decorated stand modelled on Hōrai, with pine, bamboo and plum, cranes and turtles. So their three small cups held a little of two mountains: the legendary one in the name, and the Tanzawa in the water.
Paper Cranes and a Thousand Years
That’s where the cranes come in. Before the ceremony, the two of them sat down with our team and folded paper cranes. One of them called it a way to “transfer the stress onto a piece of paper”, and origami has had worse descriptions.
In Japan the crane is the bird of long life. The old saying gives the crane a thousand years and the turtle ten thousand, and Japan has long used both as emblems of celebration, which is why they keep company with Hōrai on the shimadai. Even the town carries one: Tsurumaki is written with the character for crane. When the vows were done, the cranes they’d folded went up with the petals and came down over the kiss. A thousand years is a lot to ask of a piece of paper. They made theirs by hand, together, in the last hour before they married, and there are worse ways to begin on a thousand years.
Into the Rain It Was Named For
In the afternoon we took them out of Jinya to a field we know nearby: a slope of nanohana under a single great cherry tree, with cloud low on the hills behind. It was the rapeseed rain falling on rapeseed flowers, the season and its namesake in the same place at the same moment, and they stood in the middle of it under one umbrella. That’s where she said she loved the rain. One of them added, “I think we just won, but in a different way.”
They had. A dry day would have given them a fine field. The rain gave them the field the season is named after, at the exact moment it’s named for, and a light no one can book: soft and even, with the yellow louder than it ever is in sun. An elopement in the rain only works if the couple is willing to walk out into it. These two went first.
A Rainy Day Elopement in Japan, After Dark
By the time they came back to Jinya it was dark, and the rain hadn’t let up. They finished the day the way they’d spent it, the two of them alone, at dinner in a private room called Kiku, chrysanthemum, which the inn had found a way to keep for them. That’s Jinya’s hospitality in one gesture: a quiet room, held for two.
We’d never promise a couple sunshine in Japan, in spring or in any season. What we can promise is a day that doesn’t depend on it, and people who know where the rain looks best. When we’re planning an elopement in Japan for April, Japan’s spring rain is part of the season we’re planning for, as surely as the blossom. And our photography and film are made to keep a day like this whole, the sound of it as well as the light.
A rainy day elopement in Japan asks one thing of a couple: to decide that the day they got is the day they wanted. Japan named this rain, wrote it into its poems and grew a field of yellow flowers under it. These two walked out into it together and made it theirs.
The morning after, before a single photograph had reached them, they wrote that they were over the moon with how the day had gone: “the rain, the shine, the mud, the laughs and the tears!!” Later, with the photographs in hand, she put it more simply: “It just felt like we all just got to hang out for the day with a side of wedding action.” Before any of it happened, they had given us their own words for what they wanted. “A day just for us, a life just for us.”
