The brief was one sentence, and it arrived years before the day: “We want something that is what we’ve done when we visit Japan, like playing arcade games and having yakitori but in wedding outfits.” By the time they wrote that, they’d already been planning with us for more than two years. The wedding in Japan they’d booked was gone. This was what they wanted instead, a day of wedding photos in Tokyo.
A Wedding in Japan, Booked in 2019
They found us at the end of 2019. They both loved Japan, and they were planning to honeymoon here anyway. “So thought we might as well get married there.” They wanted something small, a non-religious ceremony and a meal, and, even then, “definitely not a run of the mill ‘weddingy’ venue.” We met over brunch in Ginza at the very start of 2020, a few weeks before the world closed.
Then the pandemic did what it did to so many plans. The first date moved a year. Then another. Family couldn’t travel, and she wouldn’t marry without them: “it wouldn’t be a wedding without everyone we love there to celebrate with us.”
In the end, they let the Japan wedding go. They married in Edinburgh, on the date they’d always wanted, with their dogs there too. “Japan and you guys were always our first choice,” she wrote. “We just had to make do with Edinburgh but at least that meant we could have our dogs involved.”
Wedding Photos in Tokyo, at Last
They kept a day with us in Tokyo, though, and they knew exactly why. “It really means so much,” she wrote, “because otherwise it feels like the pandemic would have robbed us of so many big life things.” They didn’t want a re-run of a wedding. They wanted something that felt like them in Japan: fun, motion, real streets, “more journalistic”. In her words, a chance to “recapture some fun and joy from the experience the pandemic stole.”
They came in cherry blossom season, as part of the honeymoon they’d been promising themselves for years. It was a soft, cloudy day, which is our favourite kind for blossom. It sounds backwards, but sun bleaches cherry blossom out, and an overcast sky lets the pink come through.
Cherry Blossom, Then the Trains
We started under the blossom in a Tokyo garden, in their everyday clothes, and saved the wedding clothes for the streets. Then they changed, and we took them into the city they love. Shinjuku first, then Takadanobaba, riding the trains in between in their wedding clothes. Platforms, carriages, crossings, a wedding dress moving through places that weren’t built for one. Tokyo is very good at not looking twice, and that’s exactly what made it work. Nobody performed. They just walked through their favourite city, married.
The Arcade Games of Their Childhood
Then Mikado.
Takadanobaba’s Game Center Mikado is a legend among arcade people, rows of old machines kept alive by people who love them. Dee asked them for a private window for a couple in wedding clothes, and when the answer came back yes, this is the email we got:
“I cannot believe you got Mikado Game Centre to say yes! Literally couldn’t sleep with excitement. You’re a true miracle worker! They’re ICONIC. The games are also the games of our childhood so the nostalgia joy is going to be mega.” We had been waiting for the right couple to bring there and are so thankful the Mikado opened their doors to us all.
Inside were the machines they’d grown up playing, still running, still loud. But the thing we remember most is the air hockey: the two of them in their wedding clothes, leaning over the table, playing to win. It was surprisingly competitive. We didn’t ask who won.
What the Waiting Was For
“It’s truly mad that it has taken four years for it,” she wrote, a few days before. Letting the Japan part go would have been the easy thing when the wedding went. They kept it, moved it, waited, and finally came back to spend a day doing the things they’d always done here, only this time dressed for the occasion. The pandemic took a wedding from them. It didn’t get the rest.
