Two weeks chasing the cherry-blossom front across Japan by bullet train: the lantern-lit Meguro River, a thousand torii gates at Fushimi Inari, bowing deer in Nara, and Mount Fuji finally clear on the last morning.
I start in old Tokyo, beneath the giant red lantern of the Kaminarimon gate. The approach to Senso-ji — the city's oldest temple, founded in 628 — is a corridor of tiny stalls selling fans, rice crackers and warm melon bread. I draw an o-mikuji paper fortune, get a bad one, and tie it to the rack to leave the bad luck behind.
My first hanami. Thousands of Tokyoites stake out blue tarps beneath the park's 1,000 cherry trees, and I join with a convenience-store bento and a canned coffee. Petals drift into everyone's food and nobody minds — this soft pink chaos is exactly what the whole city waits all year for.
The other Tokyo: on every light change a thousand people step off the kerb at once and somehow nobody collides. I watch the famous scramble from a coffee shop above the square, then go down and cross it three times just to feel the surge of the whole city moving as one.
After dark I walk the Meguro River, where some 800 cherry trees arch over the water and paper lanterns turn the whole channel pink. Couples lean on the railings; stalls sell hot sake and grilled skewers. It may be the most beautiful two kilometres in Tokyo.
Two hours fifteen on the Nozomi bullet train, gliding south at 285 km/h. Somewhere past Shin-Fuji the whole carriage turns to the right-hand windows at once — Mount Fuji, snow-capped and enormous, for about ten perfect seconds before it slides away.
I climb the sacred mountain of Inari through the Senbon Torii — thousands of vermilion gates, each donated by a business, forming glowing orange tunnels up the slope. Most people turn back at the viewpoint; I keep going to the quiet summit, past mossy stone foxes guarding the shrine.
The great wooden stage of Kiyomizu-dera juts out over the hillside on 13-metre pillars, assembled in 1633 without a single nail. From the veranda all of Kyoto spreads out below, framed in cherry blossom. I queue at the Otowa waterfall to drink from one of its three streams — a sip, they say, for love, success, or long life.
Into the bamboo grove on the western edge of the city, where stalks 20 metres tall filter the light to a cool green and creak in the wind. I arrive at dawn to beat the crowds, then cross the Togetsukyo ('Moon-Crossing') Bridge over the Katsura River with the wooded mountains rising behind.
A stone path follows a cherry-lined canal for two kilometres, named for a philosophy professor who walked it daily in meditation. Today it's at peak bloom; fallen petals cover the water so thickly the canal turns solid pink. I stop for matcha and a red-bean sweet at a tiny café along the way.
As the lanterns come on I wander Gion, Kyoto's old geisha district, past the wooden machiya townhouses of Hanamikoji. For a heartbeat a geiko in full white makeup slips between two teahouses and is gone. I end the night along Pontocho, a lantern-lit alley barely wide enough for two, the Kamo River breathing cool beside it.
The Golden Pavilion floats on its mirror pond, its two upper floors sheathed entirely in gold leaf that blazes in the morning sun. Rebuilt in 1955 after a troubled young monk burned it down — a story Mishima turned into a famous novel. I circle the pond slowly, watching the reflection ripple and reform.
A day trip to Nara, Japan's first permanent capital, where 1,200 tame sika deer roam the park and actually bow for a cracker. Inside Tōdai-ji sits the Great Buddha — 15 metres of bronze cast in 752, so vast that a hole in one pillar, said to be the size of its nostril, grants luck to anyone who can wriggle through.
By night I'm in Osaka, the nation's kitchen, under the neon canyon of Dotonbori and its famous running Glico man. I graze along the canal: takoyaki octopus balls scalding from the griddle, okonomiyaki savoury pancakes, a skewer of kushikatsu — and heed the sign's one firm rule: no double-dipping the sauce.
Japan's finest surviving feudal castle — a dazzling white keep that seems to take flight above a moat of cherry blossom, hence its name, the 'White Heron.' Completed in 1609 and never taken in battle, its six storeys hide a maze of gates and firing-holes built to trap attackers. I climb to the top for the view back down the petal-lined approach.
Fuji is famously shy, wrapped in cloud most days — but this morning, from the shore of Lake Kawaguchi, it stands out perfectly: symmetrical, snow-capped and impossibly large above the water. I sit on a bench with a coffee and simply look at it for an hour. The quiet climax of the whole trip.
One last plunge into the neon of Shinjuku — the tiny lantern-lit bars of Omoide Yokocho, a final bowl of ramen at a counter that seats eight. I buy a canned coffee from a glowing vending machine, look up at the wall of signs, and quietly promise myself I'll be back.