How to Word a Wedding Website Invitation for a Wedding in Japan
Every wedding etiquette guide quotes the same two phrases and stops there: "the honour of your presence" or "the pleasure of your company." Pick one, drop it into your template, done — except a Japan wedding raises a question none of those guides answer, and a second problem they never mention at all.
This guide covers both: the wording rule that gets misapplied at shrine and garden weddings specifically, and an address problem that has nothing to do with etiquette and everything to do with how Japanese addresses actually work.
Formal or casual — decide this before you write a word
Every invitation wording rule below assumes you've already made one choice: formal or casual. Formal wording is third person ("request the honour of your presence"). Casual wording is first person and reads the way you'd actually talk ("We're getting married, and we'd love for you to be there").
Neither is more correct. A shrine ceremony followed by a black-tie reception usually reads as formal. A garden ceremony with a barbecue after usually reads as casual, even if the couple is spending just as much. Pick the register that matches the day, then everything else in this guide follows from it.
"Honour of your presence" or "pleasure of your company" — the rule Japan weddings complicate
If you're writing formally, the traditional rule is precise about which phrase to use, and it isn't about how important the ceremony feels. According to the Emily Post Institute's wedding invitation wording guide, "the honour of your presence" is used specifically when the ceremony takes place in a house of worship — a church, a synagogue, a temple. For every other venue, the traditional wording is "the pleasure of your company."
That's a clean rule in the U.S., where "house of worship" maps easily onto a church, synagogue, or temple. It gets harder to apply the moment the venue is a Japanese shrine.
A Shinto shrine wedding typically involves a religious ceremony — a priest, purification rites, sake shared between the couple. To an American guest reading the invitation, it plausibly qualifies as a "house of worship." But the etiquette guides don't say one way or the other, because they were written with churches and synagogues in mind and simply never addressed a shrine. Applying "the honour of your presence" on the strength of "it's religious" is a reasonable guess — but it is a guess, not a documented rule.
Our practical recommendation for shrine, garden, and civil-ceremony weddings in Japan: use "the pleasure of your company." It reads correctly at any venue that isn't a church, synagogue, or temple in the Western sense, so a shrine ceremony is covered by the same wording that covers a garden or hotel ceremony — no separate judgment call about whether a shrine counts. Reserve "the honour of your presence" for the one case the rule was actually written for: a ceremony held in a church, synagogue, or comparable house of worship as your guests would recognize it.
Dates and times: the same rule as anywhere, with one extra reason to follow it
Emily Post's formal wording rules are specific here too: the date is spelled out with no "and" (two thousand twenty-seven, not two thousand and twenty-seven), the day and month are capitalized while the year is not, and "half after" is the traditional phrasing for the half-hour rather than "half past" or "four-thirty." Casual wording can use numerals freely — this rule applies to formal invitations only.
For a Japan wedding, there's a second reason to spell dates out beyond tradition: an international guest list. Formats like 3/6/27 are read as March 6 by a guest used to the U.S. convention and as June 3 by a guest used to the day-month convention used in most other countries, and a wedding drawing guests from multiple countries will have both readings in the same room. Spelling out the month by name removes the ambiguity for every guest at once, which matters more here than it does for a wedding where every guest shares one date format already.
The venue line needs more than an address — this is the part templates skip
Every invitation wording guide tells you to include the ceremony and reception addresses. None of them mention what happens after a guest copies that address into Google Maps for a venue in Japan.
Japanese addresses aren't built the way most Western guests expect. In many areas, street names aren't used as part of the postal address at all, and the address system is instead a hierarchy of administrative areas down to a numbered block and building — with buildings numbered in the order they were built rather than in sequence along the street. A guest can plug in a perfectly correct address and land within the right block while the actual entrance is around a corner, up a set of stairs, or on a floor with no street-level signage in English.
A printed invitation has no room to solve this. A wedding website does. This is the one advantage a Website Invitation has over a card, and it's worth using: alongside the address, add the nearest train station or exit, a landmark a taxi driver or map app will recognize, and a line about whether taxis and ride apps can find the entrance directly. If the venue has an English-language access page, link to it. None of this replaces the address — it's what turns an address a guest can enter into a place a guest can actually arrive at.
If the ceremony and reception are at different venues — a shrine followed by a hotel reception, say, which is common enough in Japan to plan for by default — give each its own address block and its own directions, rather than one combined line under a single heading. Guests who only attend the reception shouldn't have to work out which half of a combined address applies to them, and guests attending both need to know whether transport between the two is arranged or is on them to sort out.
The RSVP line: keep it short, and check where the reply is actually going
Whatever wording you use for the RSVP itself — a formal "the favour of a reply is requested" or a casual "let us know by [date]!" — the line only works if guests know how to respond, and that depends on how you built the site. We covered the specific trap here already: Canva's built-in RSVP form doesn't ask for a guest's name unless you add that field yourself, so an invitation that says "RSVP below" needs a form that explicitly requests a name, or the replies you get back won't tell you who is coming.
As a practical rule of thumb, set your RSVP deadline three to four weeks before the wedding, and state it plainly rather than folding it into the wording — "kindly respond by" reads fine in both formal and casual invitations.
Two templates you can use as they are
Formal, Western-style wording:
Together with their families, [Full Name] and [Full Name] request the honour of your presence at their marriage on Saturday, the fourth of September, two thousand twenty-seven, at half after four o'clock, [Venue Name], [City].
Casual, shrine or garden ceremony:
We're getting married! [Name] and [Name] would love for you to join us on Saturday, September 4th, 2027, at [Venue Name] in [City]. Details, directions, and RSVP on our website.
Whichever you use, the wording is only half the job. Pair it with the venue detail your international guests actually need to find the door, and you've covered what the etiquette guides leave out.