Japan in April is the month of the cherry blossoms. In Kyoto the cherry trees of the Keage Incline arch overhead in a long canopy of blossom, and in Maruyama Park the great weeping cherry is lit after dark while families sit beneath it on blue sheets with their supper. The Japanese word for it is hanami, the looking at flowers, and in April the whole country keeps it.
kyoto
Kyoto in blossom
The weeping cherries in the garden of Heian Shrine are the ones the Makioka sisters travel to see each spring in Tanizaki's novel, and families still come to them in kimono. Along the Philosopher's Path the trees lean over the canal for two kilometres (a mile and a quarter), and the water carries their fallen petals slowly downstream.
In the south-east of the city, on the second Sunday of April, Daigo-ji remembers a flower-viewing party Japan has talked about for four centuries. In the spring of 1598 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the general who had unified the country, brought some thirteen hundred guests to the temple and had seven hundred cherry trees planted for the occasion. The temple's Hotaiko Hanami Gyoretsu recreates the procession in costume, under the trees of the same precinct.
the dances
The spring dances of the geisha districts
April is the season of the odori, the public dances of Kyoto's geisha districts, and three of the five dance in these weeks. The Kitano Odori of Kamishichiken opens in the last days of March and runs into April. The Miyako Odori of Gion Kobu, first staged in 1872, fills the month at the Gion Kobu Kaburenjo, the district's own theatre, and closes each performance with the whole company on stage together. Across the river, the geiko and maiko of Miyagawa-cho dance the Kyo Odori.
The programme changes every year. At the Miyako Odori the special-seat tickets include a bowl of matcha, whisked and served by maiko before the curtain rises.
the north
The season moves north
From Kyoto the blossom climbs north and into the mountains. In Gifu, the old town of Takayama keeps its spring festival on 14 and 15 April, when the tall carved floats of the Sanno Matsuri stand in the streets of the merchant quarter and are lit with lanterns after dark. Far to the north, the castle park at Hirosaki in Aomori has some two thousand six hundred cherry trees of about fifty kinds, and when the petals fall the moats turn pink with them, a surface the Japanese call hanaikada, a raft of flowers.
Hokkaido comes last, in the first days of May, and the northern cherry, the Ezo-yamazakura, flowers there a deeper pink with its leaves already open.
the table
Bamboo shoots and cherry leaves
At the table, April is the month of takenoko, the young bamboo shoots. The most prized in Kyoto come from the groves of the western hills around Nagaokakyo, where the farmers spread straw and clay over the ground each winter so the shoots grow pale and tender beneath it, and they are sold as shiroko, white shoots. They are dug in the morning and cooked the same day, simmered with wakame seaweed or grilled with a little soy. Sakura-mochi, rice cakes wrapped in a salted cherry leaf, are sold by the confectioners of Kyoto for as long as the trees are in flower.
the weather
April weather: hanabie and hanagumori
The Japanese have two words for the weather of the blossom. Hanabie is the cold snap that returns for a few days while the trees are in flower, and hanagumori is the soft, white, overcast sky of the season, under which the blossom looks paler still. Measured against the Meteorological Agency's thirty-year averages, April in Tokyo means 19.4°C (67°F) in the afternoon and 9.8°C (50°F) after dark; Kyoto runs half a degree warmer by day, 20.1°C (68°F), and a little colder at night, 9.2°C (49°F). Sapporo, still waiting for its own blossom, is at 11.7°C and 3.4°C (53°F and 38°F).
the calendar
The new working year and Golden Week
The school and financial year starts on 1 April, when the new employees of the great companies walk to their first day in identical dark suits, and the last days of the month open into Golden Week, the run of national holidays that makes early May the busiest week of the year for travel inside Japan.
Read the Cherry Blossom Forecast 2027 →
the journeys
Cherry blossom tours of Japan in April
The Classic Cherry Blossom Tour of Japan, from 30 March to 10 April 2027, gives Kyoto three nights in Gion, a short walk from the theatre where the Miyako Odori is danced. A hanami picnic from a Michelin-starred kitchen is laid in the park of the Kyoto Imperial Palace, with cold sake poured on rugs beneath the trees, and on the eighth evening a private teahouse room belongs to the guests, where geiko and maiko dance, pour and lead the old games of the ozashiki. The days in Kyoto include the cherry canopy of the Keage Incline, and before Kyoto it gives two nights to Mount Fuji, in a suite with its own open-air onsen and the mountain across the lake.
At the end of the month the north has its own journey. The Cherry Blossom Tour of Hokkaido, from 28 April to 10 May 2027, opens at Matsumae, a castle park of two hundred and fifty kinds of cherry, and crosses the island to Sapporo. Each tour is limited to 8 guests, and its Tour Directors travel every mile of it beside them.