What to Put on Your Wedding Website When Guests Are Flying to Japan
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A wedding website for a local wedding answers two questions: where, and when. A wedding website for guests boarding an eleven-hour flight has to answer about thirty. Get it right and your inbox stays quiet. Get it wrong and you will spend the six weeks before your wedding replying to the same message from different people.
Here is what actually needs to be on the page, in the order guests look for it.
1. The date, written so nobody has to convert it
Write the date in full — Saturday, 18 October 2027 — not 10/18/27. Outside North America that reads as the eighteenth day of the tenth month to some people and nothing at all to others.
Then add the ceremony start time with the time zone spelled out: 2:00pm Japan Standard Time (JST, UTC+9). Japan does not observe daylight saving, so the gap between your wedding and your guests' home clocks will shift twice a year while they are planning. Give them the fixed number and let them do the arithmetic once.
2. The airport, not the city
"Fly to Tokyo" is not enough. Tokyo has two international airports, and the wrong one can cost a guest two hours and a train fare on the day they are most tired.
- Tokyo — Narita (NRT) is further out; Haneda (HND) is closer to the centre.
- Kyoto — has no airport of its own. Guests fly into Kansai (KIX) near Osaka and take the train.
- Osaka — Kansai (KIX) for international arrivals; Itami (ITM) is domestic.
Name the airport you want them at, give the code, and say roughly how long it takes to reach the venue from there. Three lines of text, and you have removed the single most common planning mistake.
3. Somewhere to stay, at three prices
Do not send guests a list of twelve hotels. Send them three: one comfortable, one modest, one memorable — and for each one, the walking time to the nearest station rather than the distance in kilometres. Distance means nothing to someone who has never seen the street.
If you have held a block of rooms, say the deadline for booking it in bold. If you have not, say so plainly, so nobody waits for a code that is never coming.
4. How to get there, in characters they can point at
Give the station name in English and in Japanese. A guest standing at a ticket machine can show the Japanese to a member of staff and be pointed in the right direction in seconds. It is the single most useful thing you can put on the page, and almost nobody does it.
The same goes for the venue address. Add a map link, and add the venue's phone number — a taxi driver will take the phone, call, and get directions.
5. What the weather will actually be doing
Guests pack for the country they imagine, not the one they are flying to. A sentence about the season saves them from arriving in the wrong clothes.
- Late March to early April — cherry blossom, cool mornings, a coat in the evening.
- June — the rainy season across most of the country. Umbrellas, not raincoats.
- July and August — genuinely hot and humid. Linen, and a fan.
- November — autumn colour, crisp and dry. The most comfortable month to wear a suit.
6. What to wear, said out loud
"Cocktail attire" travels badly. Say what you mean: whether jackets are expected, whether the ceremony is outdoors on gravel or grass, whether shoes come off anywhere.
That last one matters more than it sounds. If any part of the day happens on tatami or inside a temple building, guests will be asked to remove their shoes. Tell them in advance and they will choose socks they are happy to be seen in.
If you are holding the ceremony at a shrine or temple, add one line about covered shoulders and knees. It is not a rule everywhere, but it is never wrong, and guests would rather be told than guess.
7. Money, cards and getting online
Japan is easier to pay in than it used to be, but it is not cashless. Three lines will do it:
- ATMs inside convenience stores accept most foreign cards.
- An IC travel card — Suica or Pasmo — covers trains, buses and convenience stores. Most phones can hold one.
- Carry some cash anyway. Small restaurants and shrines often take nothing else.
Add a note about data. A travel eSIM bought before departure means guests land already connected, and a connected guest is a guest who finds the venue.
8. Gifts — the question nobody wants to ask you
This is where guests are most anxious and least likely to say so.
At a traditional Japanese wedding, guests do not bring a wrapped present. They bring money in a decorated envelope, and the amount follows a convention that visitors have no way of knowing. If you are following that custom, explain it in two sentences and give a figure. If you are not, say that too — "Please don't bring anything. Your flight is the gift." — and mean it.
Whichever you choose, put it in writing. Every guest who has to ask a mutual friend is a guest who nearly did the wrong thing.
9. An RSVP deadline that works backwards from flight prices
The usual advice is to close RSVPs a month before the wedding. For an international wedding that is far too late — by then the affordable seats are gone and your guest list is being decided by an airline.
Set the deadline early enough that a guest who says yes can still book a sensible fare, and say why on the page. People meet deadlines they understand.
10. One page, not ten
Every extra click is a chance to lose someone. Guests will open your website on a phone, at a bus stop, once — and then never again until the week of the flight. Everything above belongs on a single page they can scroll, screenshot and send to whoever is travelling with them.
That is the whole test. Can one person read it once, on a phone, and book a flight without messaging you? If yes, the website has done its job.
Travel requirements change. Ask your guests to check the current entry rules for their own passport before they book, and put a line to that effect on the page.
Every rockStudio wedding website invitation is built around this structure — timings, directions, dress, gifts and RSVP already laid out on one scrolling page, ready for you to change the words and the photographs in Canva. If you are still working out when to tell people at all, start with when to send your save the dates. If you have not made one before, our step-by-step guide to building a wedding website in Canva covers the whole process, from choosing a template to publishing the finished page.