Best Cherry Blossom Spots in Japan (Spring)

A cherry blossom list is really a timing document, and the ranking is subordinate to that. Peak bloom at any given place lasts around a week and shifts by up to a fortnight from year to year with the winter that preceded it; the difference between the best week of the Japanese year and a park full of bare branches is a matter of a few days. So every entry is written to say when, in what order the country blooms, and how much slack you have — before it says anything about how beautiful the place is.

Selection reflects that constraint. A spot qualifies for this list when its bloom is worth planning around and when it is reachable within a window that short. Somewhere spectacular that takes a day to get to is a weak entry, because if you spend that day and arrive after the petals have dropped you have lost the trip's centrepiece; somewhere very good in a city you will already be in is a stronger one. Entries are also chosen so the list spreads across latitudes, since Japan's bloom front moves from the southwest to the north over roughly three months — a list clustered in one region would be useful to a traveller for one week of the year and useless the rest.

Ordering weighs scale and setting against crowd tolerance. The most celebrated blossom sites are extremely crowded in the ten days that matter, and several are more pleasant an hour after sunrise than at any other time; where that is the case the entry says so. A place that stays enjoyable when full ranks above a more spectacular place that does not.

The limitation to take seriously: no date in this list is a forecast. Bloom timings given here are the historical pattern, not a prediction for the year you are travelling, and the Japanese forecasts issued each spring are the thing to plan against in the final weeks. Treat this list as the answer to "where", and the seasonal forecast as the answer to "when".