One of the most famous openings in Japanese literature is a train coming out of a long tunnel into snow.
Yasunari Kawabata wrote it in Yuzawa, in Niigata, in the 1930s, and called the book Snow Country. The tunnel is real. It runs under the mountains between Gunma and Niigata, and the weather differs on either side. Winter wind crosses the Sea of Japan, picks up moisture, and drops it as snow on the mountains. You can leave a dry, bright day at one end and come out into deep white at the other.
Their snow elopement in Japan began on that side of the tunnel.
The Duality of Japan
They first wrote to us in February 2023 and followed along for almost two years before the day. They already knew Japan well. They’d been back again and again, the way some people keep returning to one place until it decides something for them.
What they asked for was, in their words, “the amazing duality of Japan.” Snow, water and a torii for the ceremony. Then “city lights and claw machines.”
We loved that brief. Most couples choose one Japan. They wanted both, on the same day, and they wanted to feel the switch.
A Snow Elopement in Japan, at Izumi House in Niigata’s Snow Country
They stayed at Satoyama Jujo, in the hills of Minamiuonuma, a short way from where Kawabata wrote, and married at Izumi House, a villa in the same Satoyama family. When she first saw it during planning, she called it “an absolute dream from a fairytale.”
Her getting ready room at the villa was glass from floor to ceiling. While her hair and makeup were done, she sat looking out over the valley, white all the way down. It’s one of the parts of that morning we remember most clearly: a quiet hour, a view that big, and the day still ahead of her.
It had been an enormous winter for snow, even by snow country standards. That January was the snowiest month Yuzawa had seen in over a decade. The garden at Izumi House was part of why we’d chosen the villa: it had a torii, and a torii was in her very first email. By the morning of the wedding, the garden had simply gone under metres and metres of snow.
So they married on the path leading up to the villa, under a soft grey sky. They’d asked for snow. They got all of it, and married between two walls of it taller than either of them.
They led the ceremony themselves. Their own vows, written on scrolls. Rings in a box made to look like a book. A handfasting, then a first dance to their own songs. Afterwards, she summed it up better than we could: “big smoochy smooch andddddd first dance, voila, married hehe.”
That’s the whole spirit of it. Deeply meant, and not remotely solemn.
It was cold. Of course it was.
Back Under the Mountains, to Tokyo
Then they did Kawabata in reverse.
Still in their wedding clothes, they took the shinkansen from Echigo-Yuzawa back towards Tokyo, under the same mountains Kawabata’s train came through, out of the snow and into the city. That morning they’d been standing in deep white. By the afternoon they were in Akihabara, under the signs, feeding coins into claw machines.
Snow in the morning, neon before dark. Japan does quiet better than almost anywhere, and it does noise just as well. They wanted to marry inside both, on the same day.
For this half she’d sent us a mood list: “moody, fantasy, foggy/misty, romantic, mystical, dreamy, ethereal.” What they wanted, from the very first email, was a fairytale. Snow country gave them the beginning. Tokyo DisneySea gave them the ending. They’d booked a night at the new Fantasy Springs Hotel for all of us. So the last photographs of the day were simply friends with a camera: Fantasy Springs, and Ariel’s corner of the park, the two of them in matching jackets that read The January’s.
January wasn’t only the month they married in. They chose it as their married name. Most couples keep a wedding date. These two took theirs as a surname.
BOOOM WE ELOPED
Nobody at home knew. They’d planned an Australian celebration for later, with all their people, and kept Japan a secret until it was done. Then they told everyone, in their own words: “BOOOM WE ELOPED.”
Afterwards, she wrote that the photographs made them feel “all the feelings all over again.” The film, she said, has been “rewatched by us times a million.” And: “I miss my dreamy snowy wonderland!”
And there’s one more chapter still to come: a celebration in Australia in April, with everyone who’d been kept in the dark, and us with a beautiful invitation to be there as well. Every good fairytale needs a party at the end.
