37 Frames Blog · Destination Weddings Japan

In the summer of 1982, Japan’s Forestry Agency started a campaign. It wanted people to go back into the country’s forests, to look at them properly again, and to support the slow work of growing them. It needed a name. So it borrowed the shape of two words everyone already knew. Kaisuiyoku is sea bathing. Nikkōyoku is sunbathing. The agency put shinrin, forest, in front of th...

Spend long enough around Japanese literature, or the internet, and someone will tell you the story. Natsume Sōseki, the novelist whose face was once on the thousand-yen note, was teaching English when a student translated “I love you” word for word. Sōseki corrected him. A Japanese person would never say that, he explained. They would say tsuki ga kirei desu ne. The moon is b...

On 29 March 2023, one of our couples took a wooden boat along the Shingashi River in Kawagoe, under cherry trees in full bloom, with petals falling into the water around them. On 29 March 2024,

For several summers in the mid-2010s, Asuka Book, the album company, took us around Japan to speak to the country’s wedding professionals: Tokyo and Fukuoka in 2014, Sapporo and Osaka

The story goes that the poet Simonides of Ceos was dining at a banquet in Thessaly when he was called outside to meet two young men at the door. While he was gone, the roof of the hall came down. Afterwards, nobody could say for certain who had been in the hall. Simonides could. He remembered where everyone had been sitting.

Cicero tells the story in On the Orat...