Due to the chilly weather this year, Tokyo’s cherry blossoms arrived later than normal, so on Thursday, locals and visitors flocked to the city’s most popular locations to experience the full bloom.
The gorgeous dark trees, called sakura in Japanese, were bursting with pink and white flowers that overflowed over the Imperial Palace’s moat, drawing tourists in to take pictures or just enjoy the scenery.
“Cherry blossoms are so symbolic and make everything around you feel joyful and beautiful,” Michitaka Saito, 68, told AFP.
“It makes me feel that I’ve made a good start on the year ahead,” said Saito, who makes an annual visit to Chidorigafuchi Park beside the moat in central Tokyo.
Sakura season, which symbolizes both new beginnings and the transient impermanence of life, generally falls around the start of Japan’s fiscal year.
Enjoying the cherry blossoms with her husband Sadao, according to 76-year-old Eiko Hirose, “means I’m healthy, and he’s good, and we all have a good time”.
“We take it for granted that we can see it next year again, but who knows? Something may happen,” she said.
The Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA) declared on Thursday that the country’s most common and popular “somei yoshino” variety of cherry tree was in full bloom, four days later than average for the city.
Although the government blames the cold weather for this year’s delayed blossoms, it has issued a warning that, over time, climate change is causing the delicate petals to appear sooner.
The sakura from previous year peaked on March 22, having flowered as early as March 14, which is a record date shared by 2020 and 2021.
“Since 1953, the average start date for cherry blossoms to bloom in Japan has been becoming earlier at the rate of approximately 1.2 days per 10 years,” the JMA says.
“The long-term increase in temperature is thought to be a factor” as well as other reasons such as the urban heat island effect, according to the agency.
Since border restrictions from the pandemic era were eliminated, tourism to Japan has increased dramatically. On Thursday, a large number of foreign visitors were also taking in the landscape.
The 35-year-old New Yorker Kamilla Kielbowska scheduled her third trip to Japan around the blooms.
“We arrived here on, I believe, March 23. And I was joking… ‘OK, we gotta go to this park straight from the airport, I cannot miss sakura.'” But “it was super cold, and no trees were blossoming. And I was a little bit sad, but hoping that I’ll still see them in full blossom before I leave.”
“It definitely lived up to expectations,” she said, calling the sight “marvellous” and “very magical”.
The economic impact of Japan’s cherry blossom season, from travel to parties under the blossoms, is estimated by Katsuhiro Miyamoto, professor emeritus at Kansai University, to be 1.1 trillion yen ($7.3 billion) this year, rising from 616 billion yen in 2023.
