At this Tokyo Bay wedding, the moment the ceremony ended, everyone got on a boat. The couple had married outside on BANK30’s terrace, beside the water at Takeshiba. Cocktail hour would use rather more of that water than usual.
While their guests were out on the bay with drinks in hand, Dee, Sumiko and the production team turned the ceremony space around and prepared the room inside for the reception. By the time the boat returned, the next part of the evening was waiting. Later, the couple would dance in front of digital artwork the groom had created himself.
They’re both graphic designers, from Los Angeles, and now living in Paris. You could see their eye throughout the day: the black suits and navy satin, the autumn flowers, the way the spaces they used gave each part of the celebration a different energy. Their wedding moved through Tokyo with a very clear idea of who it belonged to.
Getting Ready in a Building With Another Life
K5 was a very good place to begin. We’re rather fond of a hotel that gives you a sculptural red-orange sofa, a huge paper lantern and beautiful light before anyone has even put a wedding dress on.
In the bride’s room, she and her friends were laughing together on the bed in their robes. At the window, sunlight threw the shadows of plants across her. Later, the long veil spread around her friends’ navy satin dresses, and that extraordinary sofa had a bride on it.
The building has had quite a change of occupation. K5 occupies a former bank annex built in 1923, close to the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It became a hotel in 2020, with the Swedish architects Claesson Koivisto Rune bringing Japanese and Scandinavian influences into the existing structure.
Kabutocho’s history is tied to finance, but places like K5 have helped give people new reasons to spend time here. We love that capacity in Tokyo: a building can keep something of its former life while becoming part of somebody’s entirely different future. A century after it was built, this one was full of friends getting ready for a wedding.
The bride wore Vivienne Westwood, and the gown was magnificent. Its sculptural structure gave the whole look such presence, with the long veil, red lipstick and gold earrings completing it beautifully. We loved how completely herself she looked in it.
Beside her, the groom wore a black turtleneck beneath a double-breasted suit. These two really did know how to get dressed. The bridesmaids wore navy satin and helped arrange the veil.
This is one of the pleasures of working with people who have a developed visual language. Their designer taste gave us plenty to be excited about. So did the ease and laughter around them. When you photograph people with a strong sense of style, you want to understand what they love and give it the attention it deserves. You also want to stay close enough to catch what happens when they forget how beautiful everything around them is and simply enjoy themselves.
There would be plenty of that.
A First Look With an Audience
The groom arrived at K5 with his groomspeople, his boss among them, all in black. They gathered along the stone wall outside while the bride approached with her bridesmaids. Their first look happened on the pavement, with a small and extremely invested audience.
When he turned, her friends threw their arms into the air. Someone watching covered her face with her hands. The couple held each other, and everybody around them seemed to have a feeling about it.
We LOVE photographs like these. Your eye goes first to the couple, then starts discovering all the other people who are delighted for them. A friend’s face can tell you so much about the relationship at the centre of a wedding. Here, the affection was arriving from every direction.
Kabutocho gave us hard sunlight and deep shadow, the K5 sign against stone, patterned tiles beneath a lantern and palms. The couple looked incredible in all of it. But the photograph could change completely when one of them laughed or pulled the other closer, and that was the pleasure of being there with them.
A black Tokyo taxi carried them towards Takeshiba. At BANK30, the wedding party gathered on the broad pale steps, the navy satin and black suits around the bride’s autumn bouquet: dahlias, rose hips, turning leaves and dried stems.
Then the guests started arriving, and the couple had to disappear for a while. Even a wedding this stylish occasionally involves hiding from your friends.
A Tokyo Bay Wedding on the Terrace
BANK30’s terrace gave them a long aisle beside the glass wall, with the water close by. Mustard velvet chairs, autumn flowers and dried grasses warmed the space, with a blush drape at the end of the walkway. It was beautifully considered.
The flower man arrived dancing and throwing petals.
We have a great deal of affection for someone willing to commit this fully to an entrance. He brought the guests straight into the spirit of the celebration, and the bride was laughing. Before the couple had even married, the aisle already had a personality.
There is something lovely about a wedding that lets people enjoy themselves so openly. Laughter makes room for tenderness too. You can be wiping your eyes one moment and cheering the next, surrounded by people who understand why both responses belong there.
The couple married outside, then came back through confetti with her bouquet raised above her head. Beyond the terrace, their boat was waiting.
We’ve planned a very different celebration in a Tokyo garden, and this is one of the reasons we still find the city so exciting to work in. Couples can make remarkably different experiences here. These two had chosen a waterfront ceremony and then taken the next possibility quite literally: everyone was going out on the water.
Cocktail Hour, Out on the Water
We are strongly in favour of a cocktail hour that involves taking all your friends onto Tokyo Bay.
The guests boarded at the WATERS takeshiba pier beside BANK30, and soon everyone was gathered on the open upper deck with drinks in hand. The city opened out around them. Rainbow Bridge stretched across the water, the light softened, and the people who had just watched them marry were now sharing a sunset on the bay.
What a way to spend that first part of being married.
There is a particular pleasure in seeing a familiar city from the water. The buildings fall back into a skyline; you begin to understand the distances between them. For a while, Tokyo becomes something you can take in together, with enough room around you to appreciate its scale.
And the company changes the view. A beautiful sunset is one thing to remember. A beautiful sunset with your new husband or wife and a boat full of people who have come to celebrate you acquires a very different place in your life.
November in Tokyo had been especially good to them: a bright, dry day, strong light on the streets and that softer sky over the bay. The bride had a cream coat around her now. Friends crowded together on deck, and the couple sat close beneath the boat’s canopy, with the bridge framed behind them.
Back on shore, Dee, Sumiko and the production team were clearing the ceremony setup and preparing BANK30 for the reception. The guests had left one experience and would return to another, with the cruise giving them something wonderful to enjoy in between.
This is part of the care we mean when we talk about omotenashi. Think far enough ahead for someone else to enjoy where they are now. Make the connections work. Give them the freedom to stay in the moment because the next one is already being looked after.
Here, that meant letting everybody enjoy their drink on the bay while a very good party took shape on land.
The Groom Made the Dance Floor His Own
BANK30 gave the evening its gold-lit ceiling, deep colours, projection wall and room for a proper party. The speeches were funny. At the pink-lit bar, bartenders in sequinned jackets sent bottles through the air while the bride clapped, the groom filmed and a bridesmaid watched with her mouth open.
There are wedding receptions where people settle politely into their seats. This one had other ideas.
For the first dance, the groom’s digital artwork filled the wall behind them. He had designed it for this night, and now he was dancing with his wife in front of it. Soon, their friends would be dancing there too.
We thought this was incredibly cool. It was also personal in a way that became more apparent as the room filled.
If you spend your working life making things, there is something quite moving about bringing that part of yourself into your wedding. All the choices, experiments and hours of attention become something the people you love can experience. Here, his work surrounded them while they celebrated. Something that had begun as an idea had become a place for everybody to be together.
We loved watching the room take it up. The light fell across faces and moving bodies; people threw their arms into the air; the bride danced hand in hand with a guest in kimono. The artwork remained his, but the night happening inside it belonged to everyone.
And the dance floor was magnificent.
Navy satin in motion, hair flying, friends gathered around the bride, guests in kimono and hakama joining in. Someone had arranged glow sticks into a starburst on his head and was pointing straight towards us. There was pink, red, orange and green light, and the sort of wholehearted dancing that makes you very pleased to have chosen this profession.
This is where knowing your craft matters enormously. Everything is moving, expressions appear and disappear, and several good photographs may be happening at once. You need the experience to respond and enough interest in people to keep looking. We had absolutely no difficulty with the interest.
There were quieter photographs too: the couple beneath the orange BANK30 neon, a kiss among the palms, their hands reaching towards each other across a narrow slice of light in a dark corridor. Those moments belonged to the same evening. A little space together, then back into the roomful of people they had brought to Tokyo Bay.
A Room Full of Their People
Some photographs from this Tokyo Bay wedding were recognised by World’s Best Wedding Photos and AsiaWPA. We’re proud of that, and especially of the circumstances in which they were made: inside a real celebration, responding to people who were busy having their wedding. The life of the room gave the work its substance.
Dee and our planning team brought the day together, and we photographed it. Tomato Red Motion made the film. Each part of the work followed a celebration whose personality was evident long before the dance floor filled.
What stays with us about this Tokyo Bay wedding is how much of themselves the couple allowed into it. We loved their taste. We loved the boat, the artwork, the ambition of a day that could contain so much of Tokyo. But the thing that made it such a joy was how fully they and their friends inhabited it. The cheering on the pavement mattered as much as the architecture behind them. The hands reaching across the dance floor mattered as much as the light.
A wedding becomes an unusually vivid picture of a couple’s life with other people. You see who can make them laugh, who is moved by their happiness, who will dance with them long after the formal part of the evening has finished. For a few hours, all those relationships are visible in the same place.
These two gave us so much to work with, and so much to care about. Their Tokyo Bay wedding was beautiful, ambitious, funny and full of affection. We were very happy to be in the middle of it.
Before the Wedding, Another Part of Tokyo
Four months earlier, we’d spent an evening with them at Tokyo Midtown for their pre-wedding shoot. We worked with light crossing concrete, a huge steel spiral, a pavilion over still water, and the two of them sitting inside the opening of the sculpture Myomu. Getting to know them there gave us time to discover how they occupied a space together, an understanding we could bring back when those spaces were full of everyone else.
