A koto has thirteen strings, and each one rests on its own movable bridge. To play a different piece, the player slides the bridges along the instrument and it retunes itself around the music. For this Tokyo autumn elopement, a koto player we work with often set his bridges for Beach House and Nina Simone. The songs were a different mood from anything we’d asked of him before. He took them on, and sent a recording ahead so the couple could hear what their music was about to become.
They’re a Texas couple, and theirs was an elopement in the truest sense: the two of them and our team, in a private garden in Tokyo at the turn of December. Private people by their own description, they’d got engaged back home in the place of their first date, and then went looking for the opposite. They wanted to marry “somewhere completely opposite of Texas since marriage is the start of a new adventure for both of us.” Everything about the day was sized to two people and chosen by them. The music was theirs. The cake was the smallest size the baker makes, framboise and pistachio, finished in white with deep bordeaux flowers matched to her bouquet, and an iced cookie of their pug beside it. It takes a particular clarity to cross the Pacific for a day nobody else will attend, and then fill it with things only the two of you would recognise. We loved them for that clarity from their very first message.
We think it’s also the best way to bring a wedding to Japan. The days we’re proudest of don’t trade a couple’s life for a postcard of this country, and they don’t carry home over unchanged either. They translate, the way a koto player translates a song.
Thirteen Strings, Retuned
The koto came to Japan from Tang China in the Nara period and was first played in gagaku, the music of the imperial court. Its strings run the length of a body made of paulownia wood, and the bridges, called ji, are what make it so open. Move them and the same thirteen strings can hold a different scale, a different century, a different country.
On 27 November 1920, at the Yurakuza theatre in Tokyo, the koto master Miyagi Michio, blind since childhood, gave a concert of new work with the composer Motoori Nagayo. The shakuhachi player Yoshida Seifu billed it as a great concert of shin nihon ongaku, new Japanese music, and the name stuck to a whole movement: bringing the harmonies and forms of Western music into the koto’s world. Miyagi later spent the second half of his life in Shinjuku, where his memorial hall became the first in Japan built for a musician. The private house where this couple married was finished in that same year, 1920. A century on, the instrument was still doing what Miyagi asked of it: meeting music from somewhere else and making room for it.
Their songs asked a lot of it. Beach House, the dream-pop duo from Baltimore, carried her into the garden with “Space Song”. After the vows, their “PPP” played on through the kiss and the walk back out. During the portraits came “Who Knows Where the Time Goes”, the song the English singer Sandy Denny wrote in the late 1960s, which Nina Simone made her own on a live record released in 1970. It had already crossed one ocean and one tradition before it reached thirteen strings in a Tokyo garden: a song about time, on an instrument that has been in Japan for some thirteen centuries, beside a house a hundred years old.
A Garden With No Audience
With no guests, there were no speeches. The only words of the day were the ones they’d written for each other, and they read them to each other in the garden, with nobody waiting on the other side of a door. We’ve written before about what an elopement actually is, and this was the clearest form of it: two people, a place that asked nothing of them, and all the time they wanted. They kept one Japanese ritual inside it, san-san-kudo, sipping in turn from red lacquer cups the way couples here have sealed a marriage for generations.
The house itself is one of the places we open to couples quietly. It’s an authentic pre-war Japanese house, with tatami rooms, shoji screens and a garden laid out to be walked slowly, the kind of place Tokyo has very few of now. Its name stays with us. When we plan an elopement in Tokyo, this is where we’d want a day like theirs to begin: somewhere with a history, no crowd, and a house that has been doing the same quiet work for a century.
Tokyo’s Maples at Their Peak
Tokyo’s maples are among the last in Japan to turn. The Japan Meteorological Agency’s average date for the city’s maples to colour falls at the very end of November, so the first days of December are when its gardens are often at their deepest. This garden was at its peak on their day. Colour like that can’t be booked. You choose the season, and the place does the rest.
They married on the first day of a five-day season that the old calendar calls tachibana hajimete kibamu, the tachibana begins to turn yellow. The tachibana is Japan’s native citrus. Because its leaves never fall, it has long stood for permanence, and it has been planted in palace grounds since the Heian period. So the calendar marks the week when an evergreen’s fruit starts to turn gold, at the very moment the maples are at their fullest. It’s a fitting week to make a promise.
We like to leave a pause in a day for two, a stretch with nothing scheduled. Theirs was in the tatami rooms: light food, the cake, and an hour to be married without anyone needing anything from them. An elopement can easily turn into a photo shoot with vows in the middle. The pause is what keeps it a wedding.
Kabukicho, Named for a Theatre That Never Came
Their day had begun high above Kabukicho, at a hotel window facing the towers of Nishi-Shinjuku, and the city is where it ended up too.
The neighbourhood’s name dates from 1948. As Tokyo rebuilt after the war, the area was planned around a new kabuki theatre, and it was renamed in anticipation. The theatre was never built. From the 1950s, cinemas and playhouses went up one after another instead. One of them, the Shinjuku Milano-za cinema, closed at the end of 2014, and a new tower now stands on its site, with a theatre inside that still keeps the Milano-za name.
A few streets away, the life-size Godzilla head that looks down over Kabukicho’s streets sits on the eighth-floor terrace of the Shinjuku Toho Building, which opened in 2015 on the site of the old Shinjuku Koma Theatre. Walk Kabukicho with that in mind and it reads differently. The district that never got its kabuki theatre has been building and rebuilding stages ever since, and the newest ones stand on the footprints of the old.
So Kabukicho is a neighbourhood named after a promise it didn’t keep, which went on to become something livelier on its own terms. For two people whose day had been planned to the song, it was the right place to finish: the part of Tokyo that has always made its own plans. As the light went, they crossed Shinjuku the way people who live here do, through the big crossings, under the lanterns of Omoide Yokocho, and out beneath the red gate of Kabukicho Ichibangai.
We think of this part of an elopement as the day’s second half, and a necessary one. The garden held the vows. The city let them be a married couple in public for the first time, in a place where nobody knew them and everyone was going somewhere. Our photography is built to keep both halves, the quiet and the noise, because a marriage is lived in both. They’d asked for exactly that from the start: “the combination of the big city and the nature landscape.”
What the Time Was For
The song they chose for the portraits is a question. This couple came close to answering it. Their time went into a garden at the peak of its year, the songs they love retuned for thirteen strings, a pug in icing, and a neighbourhood that never became what it was named for. When their album reached Texas the following spring, they wrote that it was “perfect and more beautiful than we could have imagined.”
We’ll always argue for an elopement that is unmistakably the couple’s own, in a place that is unmistakably itself. Japan doesn’t ask you to leave your life at the door. It moves its bridges and plays your song.
