The Week Everything Turns Pink
You smell it before you see it — something faintly sweet in the cold March air, mixed with grilled dango smoke from a cart you haven’t found yet. Then you turn a corner and there it is: a tunnel of pale pink over the Meguro River, petals drifting onto the water like confetti nobody threw. Cherry blossom season in Japan doesn’t announce itself with a bang. It just appears, and suddenly everyone is outside.
Chasing the Front
The Japanese Meteorological Corporation releases forecasts starting in January, and by March half the country is refreshing sakura tracking apps like it’s election night. The sakura zensen — the bloom front — crawls northward from Kyushu, and the 2026 predictions put it roughly here:
- Tokyo: Late March, probably around the 24th-28th for first bloom. Full bloom a week later.
- Kyoto: Early April, sometimes a few days behind Tokyo, sometimes not. Depends on the year.
- Tohoku: Mid to late April. Hirosaki Castle up in Aomori is usually among the last major spots.
The thing nobody tells you is that mankai — full bloom — lasts maybe five or six days before the petals start falling. There’s actually a word for that too, hanafubuki, flower blizzard. Some people prefer it to full bloom. I get it.
Weather throws everything off. A warm week in early March can push Tokyo’s bloom earlier; a cold snap can delay Kyoto’s. The forecasts are educated guesses. Check them a week before you fly, then check again when you land.
The Famous Spots (And Why They’re Famous)
Tokyo has too many good spots to list properly, but three stand out. Ueno Park is the classic — 800 trees, big crowds, blue tarps everywhere, a vaguely chaotic energy that’s either fun or exhausting depending on your tolerance. Shinjuku Gyoen costs 500 yen to enter and bans alcohol, which means it’s calmer, greener, and full of families with elaborate bento spreads. The Meguro River is the Instagram one — cherry trees arching over both banks of a narrow canal, lit up at night.
Kyoto does it differently. The Philosopher’s Path is a two-kilometer canal walk lined with trees, and it’s genuinely beautiful if you go early. By noon the path is shoulder-to-shoulder. Maruyama Park has the famous weeping cherry — a single massive tree lit up at night, surrounded by food stalls and people drinking under tarps. Arashiyama is gorgeous but the bamboo grove crowd spills into the cherry blossom crowd and it gets intense.
For something quieter: Yoshino Mountain in Nara Prefecture. Around 30,000 trees planted in layers up the mountainside, blooming from bottom to top over about two weeks. It’s less convenient to reach — you’re looking at a train-plus-cable-car situation — but the scale of it is hard to describe.
How Hanami Actually Works
The image in most travel guides — friends on a blanket under the blossoms, neat bento boxes, everyone smiling — is real, but it skips the logistics. At popular spots like Yoyogi Park or Ueno, someone from the group shows up at 7 or 8 AM to claim a spot with a blue tarp. They sit there for hours. This is considered a normal thing to ask of a junior coworker or the youngest friend in the group.
Once everyone arrives, out come the konbini supplies. During sakura season, convenience stores go all in: sakura mochi, sakura Kit-Kats, sakura-flavored everything. Some of it’s good (the mochi), some of it’s marketing (sakura Pepsi — I’ll leave that to you). Lawson and 7-Eleven near major parks stock extra onigiri and beer because they know what’s coming.
A lot of office hanami parties happen on weekday evenings. It gets loud. If you want the peaceful contemplation version, go on a weekday morning or find a neighborhood park that isn’t in any guidebook.
The Honest Part
Cherry blossom season is also peak tourist season, and everything that implies. Hotel prices in Tokyo and Kyoto jump — sometimes double — and availability gets thin fast. You want a hotel in central Kyoto during first-week-of-April? Book it in January. Not exaggerating.
Trains are more crowded than usual. The Yamanote Line during hanami weekends is its own kind of experience. And popular spots like Ueno Park on a Saturday afternoon… imagine a music festival but with trees.
Weather is unpredictable. Spring in Japan swings between 8°C mornings and 20°C afternoons. I’ve seen people in down jackets and people in T-shirts at the same park on the same day. Layers are the only strategy that works. Rain is common — a sudden shower during hanami is basically tradition at this point. Bring a compact umbrella.
Also: the timing might just not work out. You book your trip for late March, targeting Tokyo’s bloom, and then a warm February pushes everything a week early. It happens. Having a flexible itinerary helps — if Tokyo has already peaked, Kyoto might be starting.
Getting There and Getting Around
Flights to Tokyo (Narita or Haneda) or Osaka (Kansai International) are the standard entry points. Booking early makes a real difference during this season. Trip.com usually has decent fare comparisons for Asia-Pacific routes — worth checking alongside your usual booking sites.
Within Japan, a 7-day or 14-day Japan Rail Pass pays for itself if you’re doing Tokyo-Kyoto-and-beyond. The math is simple: a Tokyo-Kyoto round trip on the Shinkansen costs about 27,000 yen; a 7-day JR Pass is 50,000 yen and covers everything else too. You can pick one up through KLOOK before you go — they mail it or let you collect at the airport.
For local getting-around, IC cards (Suica or Pasmo) work on basically every train and bus in the major cities. Load one up at any station.
After Dark
Nighttime cherry blossoms — yozakura — are a different experience entirely. Many parks and temples set up spotlights under the trees during peak bloom, and the effect is almost theatrical. Chidorigafuchi in Tokyo is probably the most famous: you can rent rowboats on the moat and drift under illuminated branches. The queue for boats can hit 90 minutes on weekends, though.
Kiyomizu-dera in Kyoto does a special nighttime illumination that’s worth the effort, though ‘effort’ here means showing up early and waiting in a long line on a cold evening. The trees against the temple’s wooden stage, lit from below — it photographs well, but honestly it’s better in person because the photos never capture the scale.
Smaller spots are often more rewarding after dark. Neighborhood shrines with just a few trees and a single lantern. No crowds, no queues. You have to stumble into them, which is part of the point.
Planning the Trip
If you want someone else to handle the logistics — guided hanami tours, reserved picnic spots, day trips to Yoshino — KKday runs a bunch of sakura-specific packages during the season. Not cheap, but they solve the ‘showing up at 7 AM to hold a spot’ problem. For SIM cards or pocket WiFi (you’ll want data for those bloom-tracking apps), AeroBile does airport pickup rentals.
A loose packing list: layers, rain jacket or umbrella, comfortable shoes you’ve already broken in, a portable picnic mat (the 100-yen shops sell them everywhere), and a camera that handles low light if you’re planning yozakura visits.
One Last Thing
On the train back to the hotel after a long day of walking, I noticed a single petal stuck to my jacket sleeve. It had been there for hours apparently — through the park, through lunch, through two train transfers. Somehow it survived all of that. I left it there.
