1.7 KiB
title, date, template, published, hero_image, lat, lng, location_city, location_country, weather_temp_c, weather_desc
| title | date | template | published | hero_image | lat | lng | location_city | location_country | weather_temp_c | weather_desc |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sakura in Ueno Park | 2026-03-26 10:00 | entry | true | 35.7155 | 139.7753 | Tokyo | Japan | 14 | 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.