{"id":53,"date":"2007-04-05T12:24:34","date_gmt":"2007-04-05T03:24:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/a-cubed.info\/blog\/?p=53"},"modified":"2007-04-05T12:25:27","modified_gmt":"2007-04-05T03:25:27","slug":"cherry-blossom-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/?p=53","title":{"rendered":"Cherry Blossom Time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s the cherry blossom season here in Tokyo. Japan&#8217;s cherry blossom time is famous, and justly so. There would appear to be a number of reasons for this.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The cherry trees produce incredible amounts of bloosm. Not only do the twigs and minor branches produce blossom, but the major branches produce it in places as well. The incredible profusion covers the trees with pink and white flowers.<\/li>\n<li>The cherry trees produce their blossom before producing any leaves, unlike many trees which produce leaves first. This again provides a spectacular sight of just the blossom with no leaves to get in the way of viewing.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s a very short lived affair. As soon as the blossoms start appearing, petals start dropping off, and within a couple of weeks they main bloom is over.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more-->I went to Shinjuku Gyoen National Park, near Shinjuku station in Tokyo, on Saturday 31st March. I wasn&#8217;t the only one. It seems like tens of thousands of Tokyo-ites were with me. Unlike my previous visit to the park, when it was sparsely populated, the place was packed, as you can see in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.a-cubed.info\/gallery\/categories.php?cat_id=16\" title=\"Cherry Blossom Time Photos\">photos<\/a> (that&#8217;s a link) in my <a href=\"http:\/\/gallery.a-cubed.info\/\" title=\"My Photo Gallery\">gallery<\/a>. They had to provide extra people to empty the bins (there were extra rubbish sacks by the bucketload next to the bins) and even change the entry\/exit flows.<\/p>\n<p>Night viewing is also popular and on Monday evening I went to Naka-Meguro where they have a canalised river with treeslining both banks. They put up temporary lighting along the banks so that the cherry bloosoms shine. I only got <a href=\"http:\/\/www.a-cubed.info\/gallery\/details.php?image_id=279\" title=\"Blossom, leaves and blossom without petals.\">one good photo<\/a>, unfortunately.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s the cherry blossom season here in Tokyo. Japan&#8217;s cherry blossom time is famous, and justly so. There would appear to be a number of reasons for this. The cherry trees produce incredible amounts of bloosm. Not only do the twigs and minor branches produce blossom, but the major branches produce it in places as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}