Finding Cherry Blossoms
by nevanWe’ve been getting a lot of attention for Ai’s 2008 Tokyo cherry blossom article, so I thought I’d write a quick guide to using Yahoo Japan and their hanami prediction pages. Yahoo has loads of great content for Japan, but navigating through the Kanji can be difficult. I always use their weather service, but this is the first year I’ve ever tried their sakura map. And now with the sakura in full bloom, choosing where to spend these precious days is important business!
Starting at the top, we have a Japan cherry blossom map where you can click on your prefecture. It shows the current state of cherry trees throughout the country. Find your prefecture by the map or the kanji around it, and the next screen is a cryptic looking list of places.
When I saw this first, I was expecting a list of Tokyo’s ku, but it’s quite sensibly arranged to show the major parks of the area. I don’t know a lot of the names, so I found it useful to run this page though Google Translate which gave a pretty good success rate at reading the kanji. Here’s the page for Tokyo parks with cherry trees.
Clicking on a park name, it tells you all the information you need to know, like the train line, a small map. It even tells you the different kinds of sakura you can see there, like Yamazakura, Ooshimazakura, Satozakura. I never knew there were so many! More important information, like whether or not you can buy beer and sake is there too.
Here’s a few of the bigger Tokyo parks, linked through google translate:
Ueno Koen
Inokashira Koen
Yoyogi Koen
Chidori Koen
And finally, here’s a page with sakura webcams where you can see the present bloom in a number of parks around Japan.
Enjoy the precious few days of sakura!
Related articles:
- Sakura 2008 (Cherry Blossom Viewing Guide)
- Edible Sakura
- Finding Funnies in Tokyo
- Hankos
- Shape of the Yamanote Line
Tags: areas, cherry blossom, cherry blossom viewing, hanami, japan, japanese, map, ohanami, sakura, Tokyo, translate