An Intimate Morning Ceremony at Hakone Japanese Garden

Portraits Across the Hakone Japanese Garden

After the ceremony, family photos and couple portraits moved around the estate grounds. Hakone has been here since 1915, the oldest Japanese-style residential garden in the Western Hemisphere, and its Hill and Pond Garden gives you the water, the pines, and the old wooden structures without needing to move far between groupings. Allen stood alone under the bamboo-slat roof of a garden pavilion, the light coming through the slats, and later laughed with a groomsman under the maples — one in navy with a red diamond-print tie, both mid-grin.

Ten guests meant the portraits stayed close and unhurried, the two families folding in together before the gardens filled with the day's visitors. The wooden bridge over the pond, the stone lanterns along the path, the viewing pavilion above the water — the estate put every setting right there for the asking.

Cake and Toasts at a Japanese Garden Minimony

The celebration that followed was built for the ten people there: toasts and a cake cutting to close out the morning. The cake came from Marvel Cake — a two-tier in cream and blush with a torn gold-leaf seam between the layers, topped with fresh strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and blueberries and a couple of pink roses, a pink peony and a white garden rose set at the base, all on a round wood slab with the garden green in the window behind it.

By the time the cake was cut, the morning had threaded every one of the ten guests through the middle of it — each of them had already held the rings before the vows. It was the day Min and Allen had asked for from the start: small, close to the ground, and spent with the handful of people who mattered most.