A very Japanese wedding

A wedding in late November had at first struck me as some sort of madness.  There’s a proper time for dragging friends and relatives across town and country, and November isn’t it.  Well it’s seldom that I’m right, and so it proved yet again.

Mount Takao, just west of central Tokyo, and the chosen venue of our friends’ wedding, is simply spectacular in late November, just as the autumn is getting it on, and the multi-coloured mountainsides are lit up by the low sun.

Not far from Takaosanguchi station is Ukai Toriyama, which is nominally a restaurant but in scale is more like a village of thatched cottages and tea-houses plotted around traditional gardens, ponds and streams.

The bride and groom in shiromuku and hakama

Imagine an entire village like this

It was all beginning to make sense now

One quick change later, the happy couple