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Demo covers: Tokyo × 2, Mt. Fuji (snow), Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, Seoul. All entries have GPS — shows full map route, 2-country stats, weather variety including snow. Deploy/reset instructions in docs/demo/README.md. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
24 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
24 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: 'Sakura in Ueno Park'
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date: '2026-03-26 10:00'
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template: entry
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published: true
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hero_image: ''
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lat: '35.7155'
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lng: '139.7753'
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location_city: 'Tokyo'
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location_country: 'Japan'
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weather_temp_c: 14
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weather_desc: 'Partly cloudy'
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---
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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.
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The blossoms were at maybe seventy percent. Enough to understand what the fuss is about.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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