Good evening,
Spring is in full swing here in Japan, with the peak of the sakura already behind us in Tokyo and just about to end in Kyoto, where I’ve just returned from. In true Tokyo fashion, sakura brought mostly rain and unseasonable cold. But at the very tail end of full bloom, the sun finally appeared, elevating the joy of Tokyoites, who greet this fleeting season each year with the same explosive excitement, as if for the first time. Experiencing the city's mood shift and witnessing that joy always melts my heart, honestly, even more than the blossoms.
Until this year, I had always kept a bit of distance from the sakura season, mainly to avoid getting hurt. Its fleeting nature, with peak bloom lasting only four to five days, a high chance of uncooperative skies, and increasingly unpredictable bloom dates, makes the season, a symbol of hope, renewal, new beginnings, and, more importantly, the transient nature of life, somewhat ironically, a perfect recipe for disappointment if you plan your travels around it.
And this spring, like many other Turks, I already had much bigger reasons for disappointment than the delicate, beautiful, yet reliably unreliable sakura. Well, perhaps “disappointment” isn’t the right word after 22 years; a steadily deepening grief would be more accurate. A grief that deepens year after year, now seemingly reaching its peak with recent events (imprisonment of the current president`s strongest rival and twice elected mayor of Istanbul) that may either drag our country, where spring is perpetually delayed, even further into darkness, or finally bring an end to two decades of systematic assaults on democracy and secularism.
The only reason we can still talk about hope in this grim situation is the admirable efforts of the youth (with Pikachu among them), who bring not only determination and fearlessness, but also their ever-admirable sense of humour, lifting the country’s spirits, against all odds, in the face of an authority that has deprived them of hope for their future.
My grief, as someone who chose and had the opportunity to live outside her own country, partially muting the emotional weight of life under an increasingly authoritarian government in her day-to-day reality, is somewhat of a disenfranchised and unearned one. Still, despite recognizing the naivety of my wish in today’s global political climate, I sincerely hope you are forever spared from the pain of watching your country descend into despair under authoritarian rule, haunted by the constant thought of how it was and what could have been, and the regret, guilt, grief, and anger that come with it.
But, with the excuse of a photo break, let’s move on to lighter things. I was tempted to link the new beginnings that sakura signals with the situation in my country, tying all of the above back to the main topic of this newsletter. However, that would likely come across as, at best, a bit cheesy, and at worst, self-serving. Instead, simply acknowledging the momentarily numbing power of escapism brought on by nature, and my frequent indulgence in it, might be the more honest, if still somewhat self-serving, approach. So yes, back to the sakura.
Unlike the autumn season (and the travel rituals I (obsessively) built around it), my sakura outings had, until this year, been limited to Tokyo. More specifically, to my neighborhood, with its two parks: Mizumoto, home to hundreds of cherry trees, and Shinozaki, with fewer but a particularly picturesque cluster of sizeable ones. There were also occasional lunch-break visits to the ever-lovely Koishikawa Botanical Garden near our office, which hosts 130 cherry trees.
But this year, I decided to fully lean into sakura season by visiting more spots around Tokyo and even taking a few long weekend trips. As proof of my commitment, I even did the unthinkable: I visited Kyoto during peak bloom, famously beloved, but infamously crowded, especially this time of year, adding one more head to the sea of visitors. And I survived to tell the tale.
So, this month’s letter is a diary-style account of a recent three-day trip to Kyoto: one day spent exploring the city's famous sakura spots, and the other two on day trips - one to Takao, an hour north of Kyoto, and the other to Mount Yoshino, two hours to the south, where I witnessed the most majestic sakura scenery I’ve ever seen, something I was naively unprepared for.
Day 1: A Forest Walk from Takao to Arashiyama
After spending the Saturday in Tokyo’s Mizumoto Park among thousands of hanami picnickers, all still able to enjoy a fairly secluded experience thanks to the park’s vast size, I took one of the earliest Shinkansen out of the city on Sunday, heading to Kyoto Station to catch the 9:30 a.m. public bus to Takao, a ride of about an hour. The plan for the day was to (re)hike one of the most beautiful sections of the Kyoto Trail that I had hiked in November (as I was curious to see it in spring) walk to Arashiyama through Saga, and then make my way back to the city on foot.
My arrival in Takao coincided with the start of heavy rain. Trusting the Japan Meteorological Agency’s forecast that it would last only an hour, I decided to wait it out in a café that would be considered retro anywhere else, but felt entirely ordinary in Japan.
Once the rain stopped (yes, exactly in an hour), giving way to sunshine that would last throughout my three-day trip, I began my hike along the Kiyotaki River. The short, one-hour trail I had to myself was spectacular, even without a single cherry tree in sight, with scenery not much different from my pre-koyo autumn hike—though the brief but intense rain had made the forest feel more vivid, the moss looking fresher than usual.
After another quick coffee stop in Kiyotaki, the route soon joined a vehicle road, thankfully not a busy one, that led me to Saga, the well-preserved old town just before Arashiyama, which somehow attracts only a fraction of the crowds despite being mere steps away from one of Japan’s most visited spots.
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