Bar Crawls, Shrine Vows, and a Supercar – Caitlin & Josh’s Tokyo to Lake Kawaguchiko Elopement

The Night Before

This is what a multi-day elopement looks like in practice. Not just a photographer who shows up on the morning and leaves when the light goes. Someone who is actually there – the evening before, in the city, with you – so that by the time the day itself arrives, the camera isn’t a foreign object and the person holding it isn’t a stranger.

Caitlin and Josh had found Not Suspicious – a bar near Senso-ji in Asakusa, a short walk from the temple and a long way from the tourist-facing version of Tokyo nightlife. They took me along. We started at Sumida Park, moving through the quiet of the riverside in the dark. The Skytree was lit up across the water. The park had the kind of stillness that Tokyo’s outdoor spaces get at night when the foot traffic clears out.

Then Senso-ji. At night, when the lanterns are lit and the crowds have thinned, Senso-ji looks like a completely different place from the one photographed a million times over. The Kaminarimon gate in the dark, the long approach through Nakamise without a single tour group in it, the main hall lit from below – it’s genuinely one of the best versions of Tokyo that exists, and most people who visit the temple never see it because they don’t come back after dark.

Then drinks at somewhere that made no claims about its own credibility, which is exactly the right kind of bar.

These are not bonus images at the end of a gallery. They’re part of the story – portraits made in the alleyways of Asakusa the night before a wedding, in a city that photographs well at any hour if you’re moving through it with the right people.

It set the tone for everything that followed. This was never going to be a meditative, slow-moving elopement. It was always going to move.

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Caitlin & Josh

They met in 2018 at a local cafe. Caitlin was a barista. Josh was in the kitchen. It started the way most honest things do – shared shifts, post-work drinks, time accumulated without much design around it. Josh fell for her infectious laugh and the way she handled even the most difficult customers without losing her warmth. Caitlin knew when Josh spent an entire weekend helping her move apartments without a single complaint, including the moment her heavy bookshelf got stuck in the stairwell.

They chose to elope because the traditional planning process had started to feel like a production – one they were increasingly performing in rather than actually living. Decisions accumulated. The day drifted away from them. So they redirected: their relationship, their adventure, their rules. Tokyo made sense. They move through the world with curiosity and energy, and a city that demands full attention is exactly the right backdrop for a couple like that.

Caitlin and Josh also chose to complete their legal ceremony in Japan – making them the only couple across all three of my April 2026 Japan shoots to legally marry in-country. The location they chose for it was Nezu Shrine, in the rain.

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Tokyo as an Elopement Location

Tokyo is not the obvious first instinct for an intimate elopement. It’s vast and fast and crowded in ways that can feel at odds with the kind of privacy a wedding day should have. But that same scale is also what makes a Tokyo elopement genuinely interesting when you approach it with intention.

The city contains things that have no equivalent elsewhere: ancient shrine forests tucked into residential neighbourhoods where the moss is thick and the traffic noise disappears completely, narrow atmospheric alleyways in Asakusa and Yanaka that reward slow walking, rain-slicked streets at night that catch the neon in ways that only exist in this specific city. A Tokyo elopement can be as quiet or as electric as the couple in front of the camera – and usually it becomes both over the course of a long day.

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The Day

Getting ready happened in a traditional Japanese home in the city – wooden screens, warm interior light, a makeup artist, the particular stillness of a Tokyo morning that hasn’t fully started yet. Caitlin and Josh prepared separately before their first look, which had the contained energy of two people who’d been building toward something and were finally right at the threshold of it.

The vow exchange – and the legal ceremony – took place at Nezu Shrine. One of Tokyo’s oldest and genuinely least-visited major shrines, Nezu is a long way from the Senso-ji crowds. Paths wind through thousands of small torii gates into an interior that is quiet in a way that feels almost impossible given what surrounds it. For a legal elopement ceremony, it was the right choice: meaningful, grounded, private, and exactly right in the rain.

From Nezu, they collected a rented supercar from the city.

The drive from Tokyo to Lake Kawaguchiko takes you out of the metropolitan density and west into the mountains, arriving in the Fuji Five Lakes region with Mount Fuji eventually appearing above the tree line. In a sports car, in the rain, with Caitlin and Josh in the front – it was the kind of transit that becomes part of the day rather than a gap between the parts that matter.

Lake Kawaguchiko in the rain and the fading light is a different place from the postcard version. The mountain disappears into cloud. The colour temperature drops. The lake surface is textured and dark. We made portraits here in that overcast light, which is something else entirely – moodier, more atmospheric, less obviously perfect and more genuinely interesting for it. Ramen for dinner. Portraits by a Lawson convenience store with the car parked outside, which sounds incidental and photographed exactly as well as you’d hope.

The final images were made under a cherry blossom tree at night – dark, still, petals catching what little light was available. Completely right for this day and these two people.

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Planning a Multi-Location Japan Elopement

If you’re the kind of couple who sees Japan and thinks “there’s no way we could actually pull that off” – I’d push back on that pretty hard. Caitlin and Josh made this day work because they planned it properly and then held the plan loosely enough to let the day be what it was. That’s really the whole job.

The Shinkansen from Tokyo to the Fuji area is under two hours. A drive, if you want to do it the way they did, is roughly the same. Japan’s transport infrastructure makes multi-location elopements genuinely practical – you just need someone who knows how to build a day around it.

If you’re thinking about a legal ceremony in Japan like Caitlin and Josh did, there’s a full breakdown of how that actually works – the paperwork, the timeline, the shrines that allow it – in the complete guide to eloping in Japan.

And if you want to talk through what your own Tokyo elopement could look like, single city or multi-location, the Japan packages are here. Or just send me a message. I like talking about Japan.