Hanami

This is going to sound awfully clichéd, but have you ever been somewhere and felt as if you’ve stepped into a fairytale?

Japan’s brush with sakura is fleeting. It has to be. To paraphrase Robert Frost, nothing this impossibly, wonderfully pink can stay.

Through summer and autumn you don’t even notice them. They’re just trees like any other trees. And, like any other trees, they strip themselves bare of their leaves in the winter. Just ordinary trees.

And then . . . a single petal. A single blossom, half-glimpsed, perched on the end of a twig. The tourists queue to capture the memory on film. Within a week, the cherry blossoms have spread, like a rumour, to the four corners of Kansai. Standing ancient, majestic and alone at Kyoto’s Yasaka Shrine. Bending their sad limbs over the waters on the Philosopher’s Walk. Raising their black arms into a canopy of pink and white in the Peony Garden at Himeji Castle.

And beneath the canopy, and beneath the evening blue sky that can be glimpsed between the petals, a carpet of blue tarpaulin, upon which the locals gather to look at the flowers, and sing karaoke (badly), with their eskies full of beer and sake, and steak sizzling on their barbecues. The Japanese have never looked more Australian.

This, my friends, is why God invented the digital camera! Click the images below for slideshows . . .

The beginning: Kikumasamune Sake Brewery, Nada-ku

Tenryuji Temple, Arashiyama

Heian Shrine, Kyoto

The Philosopher's Walk, Higashiyama

Yasaka Shrine, Gion

Evening at Himeji Castle

Osaka Castle

The last of the cherry blossoms: Sumaura