An old Chinese story, first written down in the Tang dynasty, says the person you’re meant to marry is tied to you from birth by a red cord no one can see. In the version their celebrant told at this red thread wedding ceremony at Mt Fuji, the thread can be stretched by distance or tangled by life, but it never breaks.
Theirs had already been stretched a little. They’re a couple from Wales who met working at the same restaurant during the pandemic, neither of them expecting to fall in love, and who wrote to us with an idea to elope in Japan, “just us two”. The spring they first hoped for was already full. They came back a year later and asked for the next one. Choosing to wait a whole year for a season tells you a great deal about two people, and about the kind of wedding they meant to have: unhurried, and entirely on purpose. Japan had been a lifelong dream for them both, the culture, the food and the anime they had watched since they were children, and they wanted this to be the day they promised, wholeheartedly, to be together no matter what.
When we asked what had to be part of the day, they named four things: the cherry blossom, Mt Fuji, the shrine and the string. Their elopement in Japan held all four. Each of them, it turns out, carries a much longer story than a single morning can.
Their film moves at the pace they lived the day, and it’s set to “Romantique” by Jordan Critz, one of the two pieces of music they sent us before they flew. They chose songs the way they chose everything else, by the detail: of the other one, they told us they loved the moment, a minute and a half in, when the birds and the violins arrive. Our photography and film are made as one piece of work for days like this, when the sound of a place matters as much as the sight of it.
A Red Thread Wedding Ceremony at Mt Fuji
The story behind the red thread is called The Inn of Betrothal. A young traveller named Wei Gu finds an old man sitting on temple steps, reading a book by moonlight. The book, the old man explains, is a register of marriages, and the bag at his side holds red cord, which he uses to tie together the feet of those who’ll one day be husband and wife. He became the Old Man Under the Moon, and his name is still a word for matchmaker. When the story reached Japan, the cord moved from the ankle to the little finger, the same finger children hook together when they make a promise.
The couple married on an open lawn above a lake in the Fuji Five Lakes, in what their celebrant called a spring a little colder than usual, with the mountain behind them wrapped in its own weather. They read their vows from small cards. Then came the thread, tied between them, and before long it had tangled, and both of them were laughing. Of all the ways a legend can be honoured, we like that one best. It skipped the part about destiny and went straight to the small print.
The thread had been there all morning in smaller forms. They got ready apart and exchanged gifts across the distance: perfume for her, personalised cufflinks for him. It’s a modest gesture, and the kind we notice: on the morning of their wedding, each of them was still thinking about what the other would love.
A thread is a good image for a marriage because it’s soft. It doesn’t hold by being rigid. It holds by being tied, and tied again, and laughed at when it knots. Fuji kept its summit in cloud for the whole of the ceremony, which is its right on any morning it chooses. By the time they walked back across the grass as a married couple, the snow on its upper slopes was starting to show.
Lake Shoji, Where Mt Fuji Holds Its Child
Lake Shoji is the smallest of the Fuji Five Lakes, barely half a square kilometre of water, and from its northern shore it offers a view with its own name. Mt Fuji stands behind the smaller, darker cone of Mt Omuro, and the pair look like a mother holding a child. It’s known as Kodaki Fuji. The name is closer to the truth than it sounds: Omuro was born from an eruption on Fuji’s own flank, so in a real sense it is the mountain’s child. The lake itself was shaped by Fuji too. In the ninth century, lava poured into an older and larger lake and left the shoreline that’s here today.
In 1895 an Englishman, Harry Stuart Whitworth, who later took Japanese nationality, spent a year travelling the foothills of Fuji in search of the place with the finest view of the mountain. He found it here. He opened a Western-style hotel overlooking the lake, called the area the Switzerland of the Orient, and for the first time the Five Lakes had something that drew travellers from abroad.
He spent a year looking for the view. They spent a year waiting for the season. Lake Shoji has been rewarding that sort of patience for well over a century, and its shore is still largely free of building. What the couple met there was what Whitworth met: clear water, a hard wind off the mountain and Fuji, finally out of its cloud, holding its child across the lake.
Cherry Blossom Season at the Foot of the Mountain
The cherries around the Five Lakes flower weeks after Tokyo’s, at the mercy of altitude and of whatever the spring decides to do. In a colder year than usual, nobody can promise where the blossom will be on a given day. In spring we watch it ourselves in the days before an elopement rather than trust a forecast, because the difference between a tree in bud and a tree in flower is one warm afternoon.
What they found was the full range of it: deep pink blossom with Fuji clear above, and long avenues of weeping cherry, shidarezakura, whose branches fall like curtains to the grass. On the old calendar, the five days they married in are called niji hajimete arawaru, the rainbows begin to appear. After winter, the air is finally damp enough to bend the light.
Japan plans its spring around a fortnight it can’t control. Building a wedding inside it is a decision to give your day to something that won’t wait for you. They’d already waited a year for it. It waited, just long enough, for them.
The Blossom and the Rock: A Sengen Shrine Blessing
The Sengen shrines that ring Mt Fuji honour Konohanasakuya-hime, whose name means the princess of the flowering trees. At the head shrine, which counts more than thirteen hundred Sengen shrines across Japan, the cherry is her sacred tree. One of her stories is a marriage story, and it comes in two halves.
When the heavenly prince Ninigi asked to marry her, her father, the mountain god Oyamatsumi, offered him both his daughters: the blossom princess and her elder sister, Iwanaga-hime, the princess of enduring rock. Ninigi kept the blossom and sent the rock home. And so, say the old chronicles, the lives of the emperors, and in one telling everyone’s, became as brief as blossom on a tree. In later centuries Iwanaga-hime was worshipped in her own right as a guardian of long life.
A wedding in cherry blossom season sits right on that old fault line. Blossom is why people come, and it’s also why the moment can’t be kept. We’ve always thought a vow is an attempt to have both sisters: to choose the blossom, and to ask it to last like stone. The couple went to the shrine for a blessing after their own ceremony, in a hall among cedars and white cherries, where a priest led them through the rite and they offered the evergreen branches a Shinto blessing asks of you. The shrine was one of their four, and it closed a circle the morning had opened. Their celebrant had told an old Chinese story about a thread. The priest stood for an older Japanese one, about a marriage, a mountain and the blossom.
What the Lava Grew
The same eruptions that drew Lake Shoji’s shore decided what was in their lunch. Around four fifths of Yamanashi is mountain, and much of the land around Fuji lies on old lava, where rice never did well. So people here grew wheat, and they kept a dish that the rest of Japan let go. Hōtō, broad flat noodles simmered in miso with vegetables, came over from China in the Heian period and faded almost everywhere as rice spread. In Yamanashi it stayed, and it’s still what you eat when the wind comes off the mountain.
They ate it in a small local restaurant, the groom still in his suit, at a long wooden table under hand-written signs. It’s one of our favourite things about an elopement. With no guest list to host and no reception to run, the day can make space for the ordinary pleasures of a place, and the ordinary pleasures are often where a place is most itself. The afternoon took them up to a lookout above the valley, with the whole of Fuji now clear above the town.
Tangled, Never Broken
The day ended where gardens in Japan tend to end things, under a weeping cherry, among clipped pines and stone lanterns, in the long light of the afternoon.
The red thread legend is usually told as a story about finding each other. We think the more useful half is the part their celebrant didn’t skip: stretched by distance, tangled by life, never broken. That’s where most of a marriage is lived. These two had already proven they could wait for something. On the morning they married they proved they could laugh at a knot. Of the four things they asked for, three belong to the mountain and the season. The string is the one they keep.
A month later, when the first photographs reached them, she wrote that the experience had been “life changing”, and that the rest of their trip through Japan had helped them understand each other better. When the film arrived, his reply was shorter: “We were both blown away!”
