At a glance
Couple: Lily-Rose Palmer & Joi Fukuyama
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Wedding date: 7 November 2025
Planning timeline: 18 months
Planner: Jenny Chiu of Jenny Chiu Weddings
Key decision: Engaging a Japan-experienced planner before booking anything else
Primary lesson: In Japan, the planning process itself shapes what’s possible, so start early, and let an expert lead.
Japan sits near the top of many couples’ destination wedding lists, and it’s easy to understand why. The combination of architecture, nature, food culture, and sheer aesthetic care that runs through everyday Japanese life translates into wedding settings that feel so extraordinary. But couples who begin planning a wedding in Japan the typical way they’d plan one in their home country, like in Singapore, where they look into the venue first, planner second, timeline whenever, often find themselves running into walls they didn’t expect.
When Lily-Rose Palmer and Joi Fukuyama began planning their Tokyo autumn wedding, they did something that would prove more important than any other single decision: they hired their planner first. Jenny Chiu of Jenny Chiu Weddings came on board in April 2024, a full 18 months before the November 2025 wedding. That head start was crucial to their entire wedding plans.
Why the timeline is longer than you think
Eighteen months can feel like a long runway when you’re newly engaged and excited, but for a destination wedding in Japan, particularly one that involves a non-standard ceremony programme, it is absolutely necessary. Joi and Lily’s wedding was a case in point: because their programme departed from the format that Japanese venues typically run on weekends. Tokyo venues tend to run back-to-back weddings across Saturdays and Sundays, each slotted into a well-rehearsed sequence. Anything that requires greater flexibility, such as a different ceremony structure, an international celebrant, a programme that doesn’t follow the standard sequence, is only possible for venues to accommodate when it isn’t competing with their weekend schedule.
This is information most couples simply don’t have going in. Knowing which venues will entertain a non-standard programme, and on which days, requires the kind of relationships that take months to build. Jenny had already begun doing site visits and building those connections in Tokyo before Lily and Joi even came to her. These are research she’d invested in at her own cost, in anticipation of exactly these opportunities.
For Lily and Joi, the autumn season added its own logic to the 18-month window. Autumn in Tokyo, when the maples and ginkgos turn deep red, amber, and gold, is one of the most sought-after times for celebrations in the city. The couple designed their entire aesthetic around that foliage, choosing bridesmaids’ dresses, tablecloths, and florals to echo the colours visible through their venue’s floor-to-ceiling windows. To secure a venue during peak season that would also accept a non-standard weekday programme, they needed to be in conversation long before most couples would think to start.
What a Japan-experienced planner actually does
Lily’s advice on the subject is unambiguous: “If it’s in budget, I will always say hiring a wedding planner is 1000% worth it. There were certain elements at our wedding that we were only able to have because she was able to coordinate it for us.”
That framing about the elements that Joi and Lily could only have “because of her” is worth sitting with. Behind the polished result was a planning process that Jenny describes as running several weddings simultaneously. When the original venue for Lily and Joi’s after-party turned out to prohibit brass instruments (meaning no saxophone and no live jazz), Jenny spent months negotiating before it became clear the restriction couldn’t be lifted. The issue wasn’t the venue’s own preference but pressure from neighbouring businesses, and no amount of goodwill could resolve it. What saved the day was the fact that Jenny had been running a second venue search in parallel the entire time. The after-party moved to a venue that welcomed the saxophone. Lily and Joi were delighted. The instrument ban had been quietly resolved without any of the anxiety landing on them.
This is what destination wedding planning actually looks like in practice: not a clean linear sequence, but multiple conversations running at once, with a planner who understands when to escalate, when to pivot, and when to simply absorb the difficulty so the couple doesn’t have to.
Choosing a venue: what to know before you fall in love
The most common mistake couples make when planning a destination wedding is choosing a venue before they understand its requirements. In Japan, this matters more than most other places.
Japanese venues operate with a strong preference for predictability. Jenny describes it directly: if a programme requires flexibility and adaptability, anything that sits outside their established sequence, many venues would simply rather say no than risk delivering something imperfect. This isn’t an obstruction for its own sake. It reflects a genuine commitment to precision; the same quality that makes a well-run Japanese wedding feel extraordinary is the very thing that makes some venues cautious about the unfamiliar.
Venues that are genuinely open to international couples tend to signal this in visible ways. A bilingual website with a real English-language inquiry channel, not just a translated homepage, is a reasonable starting indicator. So is a track record of working with planners from outside Japan. Before committing to any venue, ask your planner directly: have they worked there before? Does the venue have experience accommodating non-standard programmes? And if your vision includes anything unusual, such as live instruments, a non-Japanese celebrant, a ceremony structure the venue hasn’t seen before, ask that question in the first conversation, not the fifth.
The bottom line
A wedding in Japan is not a project to begin six months out. It’s also not a project to begin without someone who knows the terrain. Not just linguistically, but operationally.
Joi and Lily’s 18-month timeline, combined with engaging Jenny before booking anything else, gave them the space to build a wedding that honoured both their cultures and ran with precision. Jenny assembled a team spanning multiple countries, including a bilingual planner from Australia with prior in-house experience at Japanese venues and a local bilingual coordinator on the ground. Every vendor received detailed bilingual run sheets. The challenges that arose were handled before the couple ever had to worry about them.
The practical takeaway is straightforward. If Japan is your destination, your first booking should be your planner: someone with direct relationships in the Japanese market, experience reading which venues will work for your vision, and the ability to run multiple contingencies at once. Once that person is in place, the rest of the decisions become clearer and most of the planning complexity lands exactly where it should.
Read the full story of Joi & Lily-Rose’s Tokyo celebration -> here.
