---
title: 'Sakura in Ueno Park'
date: '2026-03-26 10:00'
template: entry
published: true
hero_image: ''
lat: '35.7155'
lng: '139.7753'
location_city: 'Tokyo'
location_country: 'Japan'
weather_temp_c: 14
weather_desc: 'Partly cloudy'
---

I arrived at Ueno Park at ten in the morning thinking I would beat the crowds. I was wrong. Several thousand people had the same idea, and the same Instagram instinct. But here is the thing about cherry blossom season in Japan — the crowds are almost part of it. Families with picnic sheets. Couples with matching outfits. Office workers in suits sitting on blue tarps eating convenience-store onigiri. Everyone doing the same thing: looking up at the same trees.

The blossoms were at maybe seventy percent. Enough to understand what the fuss is about.

I walked the park from one end to the other and then sat under a particularly generous tree for about an hour just watching people react to something beautiful. There is a Japanese word for it — *hanami* — which translates roughly as "flower viewing" and is more or less an entire cultural practice. You do not rush past the blossoms. You sit with them.

Later I found the Tokyo National Museum at the top of the park. Three floors of Japanese history, almost entirely in Japanese, which I cannot read, but context is its own language. A display case of Edo-period swords. Painted screens showing mountains I now recognise. A reconstructed tea house in the garden, closed for the season but visible through the glass.

Dinner: tonkatsu on a side street off Ueno-Okachimachi station. The woman who runs the counter has been there for at least thirty years by the look of it. She refilled my miso soup without being asked, twice.