Two weeks chasing the cherry-blossom front across Japan by bullet train — from the lantern-lit Meguro River and a thousand torii gates at Fushimi Inari to bowing deer in Nara and Mount Fuji, finally clear, on the last morning. A first-person example of the kind of trip anyone could archive on Boromlia.
<p>I start in old Tokyo, beneath the giant red lantern of the <strong>Kaminarimon</strong> 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 <em>o-mikuji</em> paper fortune, get a bad one, and tie it to the rack to leave the bad luck behind.</p>
<p>My first <em>hanami</em>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Two hours fifteen on the <em>Nozomi</em> bullet train, gliding south at 285 km/h. Somewhere past Shin-Fuji the whole carriage turns to the right-hand windows at once — <strong>Mount Fuji</strong>, snow-capped and enormous, for about ten perfect seconds before it slides away.</p>
<p>I climb the sacred mountain of Inari through the <em>Senbon Torii</em> — 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Togetsukyo</strong> ('Moon-Crossing') Bridge over the Katsura River with the wooded mountains rising behind.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>As the lanterns come on I wander Gion, Kyoto's old geisha district, past the wooden machiya townhouses of <strong>Hanamikoji</strong>. For a heartbeat a <em>geiko</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>A day trip to Nara, Japan's first permanent capital, where 1,200 tame <em>sika</em> deer roam the park and actually <strong>bow</strong> 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.</p>
<p>By night I'm in Osaka, the nation's kitchen, under the neon canyon of <strong>Dotonbori</strong> and its famous running Glico man. I graze along the canal: <em>takoyaki</em> octopus balls scalding from the griddle, <em>okonomiyaki</em> savoury pancakes, a skewer of kushikatsu — and heed the sign's one firm rule: no double-dipping the sauce.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Fuji is famously shy, wrapped in cloud most days — but this morning, from the shore of <strong>Lake Kawaguchi</strong>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>