In the last week of March, along the canal beneath Kyoto's eastern hills, the first pale flowers open over water still cold from winter. They come a few at a time, small points of light on bare grey branches, then in their hundreds overnight. The tree that looked dormant on Monday carries a loosened canopy by Friday.
Read across the whole country, Japan's cherry blossom season runs for more than three months. It opens in Okinawa in January, crosses Kyushu and western Honshū through March, reaches Kyoto and Tokyo around the turn of March into April, climbs to the Fuji Five Lakes in mid-April, and closes in Hokkaidō in early May. Read in a single city, full bloom lasts a handful of days.
The date in any one place is set by winter cold, spring warmth, height above the sea and distance to the north.
the front
The front that crosses the country
Japanese meteorologists speak of the blossom as a movement. The sakura zensen, the cherry blossom front, is the line that advances up the archipelago as warmth returns, bending with altitude as much as with latitude. It is among the most closely watched weather in Japan, and the thing being measured is a flower no larger than a coin.
The movement begins far from the pale avenues of Kyoto and Tokyo. In Okinawa the cherry is kanhizakura, a deeper pink flower that hangs downward like a small bell, and it opens in the cool of the subtropical winter, in January, along castle ruins and hill roads. While Honshū is still in plum and camellia, Okinawa has finished with cherry altogether.
On the main islands the front that everyone watches belongs to the Somei Yoshino. It reaches Kyushu and Shikoku in March, moves through Hiroshima, Osaka, Kyoto, Nara and Tokyo in the last days of March and the first days of April, then continues north through Kanazawa, Sendai, Aomori, Hakodate and Sapporo. A warm spell draws the front forward, and a cold week keeps the buds closed a little longer.
Altitude moves the dates as surely as latitude. The Fuji Five Lakes sit high enough to flower after Tokyo has turned green, and in Tōhoku the castle towns are in bloom while the slopes behind them are still bare.
the measure
How first bloom and full bloom are declared
The national excitement rests on an exact language. Kaika means first bloom; mankai means full bloom. At each city's standard observation tree, first bloom is announced when five or six flowers have opened, and full bloom when roughly eighty per cent of the buds on that same tree are out. Tokyo's benchmark tree stands in the grounds of Yasukuni Shrine. Kyoto's grows in the grounds of the city's meteorological observatory.
A standard tree gives each city one date to compare from year to year. A sheltered temple court will open a day or two ahead of it, and an exposed avenue a day or two behind.
The system works because the Somei Yoshino is a clone. Raised by the gardeners of Somei village, north of old Edo, in the nineteenth century, it has been propagated by grafting ever since, so the trees along a river or a castle moat are genetically identical and answer the same warmth on the same days.
The forecast is an institution of its own. The Japan Meteorological Agency issued cherry blossom forecasts for the whole country from 1955 until 2009, and from 2010 the work passed to private forecasters, who publish their maps from January and revise them as the buds swell. An old rule of thumb holds that Tokyo's Somei Yoshino open when the running total of daily maximum temperatures from the first of February reaches six hundred degrees Celsius. The modern models are finer, but they follow the same principle as the tree: winter cold sets its dormancy, and accumulated spring warmth releases it.
the narrow middle
When Kyoto and Tokyo reach full bloom
The two capitals, old and new, flower almost together. The first flowers open in the last third of March, full bloom comes around the turn into April, and the petals fall within the following week.
The exact date shifts from year to year. In 2021 Kyoto reached full bloom on 26 March, the earliest date in a record that reaches back, through court diaries and temple ledgers, some twelve hundred years; in other springs full bloom in the city has come in the second week of April.
In Tokyo the blossom follows the water: Chidorigafuchi along the palace moat, the Sumida River through the old riverside city, and the lawns of Ueno. In Kyoto it follows the basin: the embankments of the Kamo River, the great weeping cherry of Maruyama Park, the canal at the foot of the eastern hills. Both cities stretch the season at its edges, the weeping cherries opening ahead of the main wave and the dense yaezakura arriving after it.
Full bloom is only one of the season's best hours. Shichibu-zaki, seventy per cent bloom, has freshness and space. Mankai fills every branch. The first days of petal fall, when the flowers still cling but the air has begun to move them, are for many Japanese the high point of the season. The word for what happens then is hanafubuki, flower blizzard: the moment when a gust takes a whole street's petals at once and scatters them across water and shoulders, at the height of the season.
the map
Reading the country by latitude
The broad map reads in bands. Kyushu, Shikoku and western Honshū carry the first main bloom in March: Fukuoka, Kumamoto, Kagoshima, Matsuyama and Kochi, then Hiroshima and the Inland Sea in softer maritime light. Kansai and Kantō form the centre, from late March to early April, with Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, Kobe, Tokyo, Yokohama and Kamakura inside one fortnight.
The next layer lies in altitude. Nagano, Matsumoto, Takayama, the Kiso Valley and the Fuji Five Lakes open later than the plains. Beneath Mount Fuji, around its lakes, the blossom opens with snow still bright on the summit.
Tōhoku carries the mainland bloom into late April, among castle moats and the streets of old samurai towns. Hirosaki's moats fill with fallen petals, Kakunodate's weeping cherries hang over the dark timber walls of former samurai houses, and at Kitakami two kilometres of riverside trees run beside the water.
Hokkaidō closes the map in May, a second spring with a character all its own.
the variance
Why the dates change from year to year
The dates move because the tree answers the weather. The bud opens when the warmth it has gathered crosses a threshold. Cities hold more heat than the countryside around them and run ahead of it, and river corridors, slopes and cloud all leave their mark on the map, which is why one bank of a river can open before the other and a sheltered garden comes ahead of the avenue outside its wall.
Once the flowers are open, the weather decides how long they stay. Calm, dry days lengthen full bloom; rain and wind bring the petals down sooner. A cool spell after first bloom slows everything, and a burst of warmth can carry a city from first flowers to full bloom in three days.
The intervals are worth knowing precisely. From first bloom to full bloom takes about a week. From full bloom to heavy petal fall takes three or four days in rough weather and a week in calm. The whole visible season in one city, from the first open flowers to the last of the fall, spans roughly ten days to two weeks.
second chances
Early, late, and the second spring
The edges of the season have pleasures of their own. Late March in the capitals is a time of swollen buds and a few open branches, with people already gathering beneath trees that are not yet full. Mid-April belongs to the late varieties and the higher places, when denser pinks arrive in Kyoto and the mountain lakes come into flower.
In late April the season moves to Tōhoku, and in early May it crosses the Tsugaru Strait to Hokkaidō, under colder skies and mountains still carrying snow.
The forecasts give the dates. The finer knowledge belongs to the ground: which side of the river opened first, which temple keeps its late varieties, which garden is lit after dark. At night, yozakura, the blossom lit by lanterns and floodlights, shows the same trees white against a black sky. Rain flatters a cherry, darkening the bark, weighting the petals and making the stone paths shine, and wind brings the hanafubuki.
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The Classic Cherry Blossom Tour of Japan spends its twelve days in the cities at the centre of this calendar. It opens with three nights in the centre of Tokyo, gives two nights to Mount Fuji and three to Kyoto, with a hanami picnic in each of the two capitals, then crosses to the old onsen town of Kinosaki on the Japan Sea coast before two last nights in Osaka, across the river from the castle park.