Japan cherry blossom season is short, and it moves. The trees open first in the south, reach Tokyo and Kyoto in late March or early April, and travel north over the following five or six weeks until they arrive in Hokkaido around the start of May. In any one place, full bloom lasts about a week before the petals begin to fall. For those few days hanami, the custom of gathering beneath the trees with food and drink, brings parks, riverbanks and castle grounds to life, and watching how people mark the season is as much a part of it as the trees themselves.
The difficulty is that the dates shift from year to year by a week or more, and the first forecasts are released in January, well after the best ryokan and hotels have filled. We plan around this rather than against it. A journey of two to three weeks starting in late March, beginning in Tokyo and Kyoto and moving north to Kanazawa or to Hirosaki and Kakunodate in the Tohoku region, gives several chances to meet the bloom at its peak, so an early or late season shifts the highlight to a different town instead of missing it altogether.
Rail is the natural way to travel. The shinkansen links Tokyo, Kyoto and Kanazawa in roughly two to three hours per leg, and luggage forwarding services carry suitcases from one hotel to the next overnight, so travel days are made with a light day bag. A night or two in a ryokan, a traditional inn with tatami rooms, an onsen bath and a multi-course kaiseki dinner, gives the journey a different rhythm from the city hotels. Dinner in a ryokan is served at a set time, so we plan arrival times around it.
Cherry blossom season suits travellers who are comfortable with crowds and prepared for them. Ueno Park in Tokyo and Kyoto’s Philosopher’s Path draw very large numbers at peak bloom, and early mornings are when they are calmest. Hirosaki Castle, with around 2,600 trees along its moats, and Mount Yoshino in Nara, where tens of thousands of trees bloom in stages up the mountainside, offer the same spectacle with more room. This is also Japan’s busiest and most expensive season, and from 29 April to 5 May Golden Week, a run of national holidays, fills trains and hotels across the country.
Travel rewards attention. Five for Fridays is our monthly letter from Ron: five things about the world worth knowing before you go – or before you decide where.
