To Walk With You Under the Cherry Blossoms 【Beautiful Japan #5】

dbooster (64)in #japan • 7 years ago (edited)

If you are a nature person, then later March/early April is absolutely the best, most beautiful time to be in Japan. Why? Cherry Blossoms!

This river is lined on both sides by hundreds of cherry blossom trees* for over 7 kilometers (4.35 miles). It makes for quite the show. This is nothing special: most cities in Japan have hundreds of cherry trees everywhere too. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that Japan turns pink in early spring.

The cherry blossom has been the prefered flower of Japan since the Heian era (794–1185), so they have been celebrating like this for a long time. The most common cherry blossom in Japan, and the one that you see in this photo, is Yoshino Cherry (染井吉野 someiyoshino) which is something of a recent variant, having only been created in the 1800s. It has a slight pink hue, but is mostly white to the naked eye, and doesn't have much of a smell. The trees need a lot of water, so are almost always grown close to rivers.

Having lived in Japan for over a dozen years, I have many many more photos of cherry blossoms to share. Stay tuned!

Footnotes:

*: The city claims the number is slightly over 1000. I didn't feel like counting to confirm if that's true or not.

Don't miss the other great photos in the Beautiful Japan photo series!

#1 - The Shogun's Keep
#2 - Gate to the Shogun's Shrine
#3 - The Golden Torii
#4 - Across the Universe

Thank you for reading. :)

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I post one photo everyday, as well as some misc posts such as haiku, videos, more Japanese history, and so on. Let me know if there is anything about Japan you would like to know more about or would like to see.

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