The sakura forecast

I invited myself to Japan when I saw Jay over the holidays: he mentioned he was going in April; I calculated that it would be a good time for me to take time off, asked if I could come along, checked ticket prices, found that I had almost enough frequent flier miles to get me there (only had to buy 10,000 more), asked my supervisor's permission once I got back to work, and booked the flight. The rest of the team had already set the itinerary, so I jumped in while we were making hotel reservations (quite a painful process, if you recall from pre-trip posts). Once we tamed the hotel beast, I jumped into learning Japanese by way of Rosetta Stone and some books that a number of friends had lent me. The act of learning Japanese--and I use "learning" generously; "f*ing around with..." more accurately describes what I was doing--offered the illusion of planning for the trip. I/we engaged in little other planning, apart from buying guide books and getting a rail pass. You'll recall that, not long before the trip, I told you that the last e-mail I'd sent to Jay concerned a video that required his attention, rather than anything to do with the upcoming trip.

Jay was the most proactive; he outlined our itinerary in a spreadsheet, with some ideas of what to do in each place. The lack of more detailed planning wasn't a problem--it allowed us flexibility in the face of weather and other circumstances. And since we had the cities/towns down, it was easy enough to improvise when we arrived.

The one thing that Jay stayed on top of was the sakura forecast; the week before the trip, he regularly e-mailed with the latest predictions: we'd hit some of the peak in Tokyo, miss sakura altogether in Kyoto, etc. I shrugged. I live in DC and bike to work around half of the tidal basin, so I see sakura every year. Sure, it's aesthetically pleasing, but hardly enough so to justify the hordes that crowd my city and my commute on account of it. So Jay kept me posted on the sakura forecast, and I shrugged.

As it turned out, we hit peak sakura everywhere, and it was f*ing amazing. It is one reason that I took so many pictures of trees: they were just beautiful. Not to knock the also-beautiful DC cherry blossoms, but the cherry blossoms in Japan were all over the place (so you could mostly enjoy them without tripping over (or biking over) people), and they enhanced the look of everything else around. Just when we thought we'd seen enough sakura, we found it adorning yet another scene, in a completely different way. One of my best pictures captured cherry blossoms floating in, and reflected in, the canal along the Philosopher's Path in Kyoto.


There was one point where we couldn't care less, and that was when Jay and I went for a hike on Miyojima. I'll tell you right now that my biggest disappointment of the trip (now that Jay has been "reblackburied") is that my camera batteries all ran out on Miyojima, and I missed some amazing photos. But not as many as would have been there had we come on a sunny day. Actually, it was pouring down rain most of the day, but I pressed for a hike up the sacred mountain, and Jay opted to come along. Because we both have a short memory about how our hikes often end in tears, because he queens out on me (his words, not mine) and starts whining ten minutes in about how he's going to collapse (and then whines about how fat he is, at which point I remind him that while I disagree with his assessment, if he's concerned, he'd do well to stop whining and keep hiking, and lay off the donuts once we return).

Jay: Wah. I'm going to collapse [or something]
A.: I never know whether to take you seriously, because you always say you're going to collapse. Ten minutes into our hike at Harper's Ferry this summer, you started whining.
Jay: And you always threaten to never hike with me again--why don't you ever follow up on that?
A.: Because I forget every time.
Jay: It's like Taco Bell.
A.: ??
Jay: I always forget what it does to my stomach.

So we hiked, and Mount Misen was beautiful even in the fog and rain. But we were both tired, wary, soaked. And in vending machine withdrawal.

A.: Look at that sakura!
Jay: I've never cared less.

Shortly afterward, there'd be more beautiful sakura, and I'd never cared less.

But we certainly did still care during our first days in Tokyo, and we were very much up for hanami. On our first full day in Town, we walked through Ueno park and gawked at other people engaged in hanami. It was, in Jay's words, bananas. And in Susan's words, bananas, on steroids. Two days later, we got to do proper hanami in Shinjuku Gyoen, and I think I already told you that it was absolutely perfect.



It was still kind of "ghetto hanami," because we used garbage bags in lieu or a tarp or blanket, but it worked. Some of the locals thought it was the funniest thing--they laughed at/with us and waved hello. Some took pictures of the crazy gaijin and their ghetto hanami.

Jay and I would also do night hanami in Kyoto, along the river. I'm not sure whether it counts as hanami since we sat on benches rather than the ground.

As good as seeing sakura was tasting sakura--we tried sakura ice cream, sakura mochi, mochi sakura (not to be confused with the sakuramochi), and sakura in mystery forms. And let's not forget sakura KitKats.