The brief visit of Sakura

Almost as quickly as it started, sakura season in Japan is over, and all that remain of Osaka’s beautiful cherry blossoms are the discarded petals that litter virtually every street of the city. The past two weeks have been my first sakura experience and having entered into the period slightly sceptical of the excitement with which ordinary Japanese approach it, I have emerged a fully-fledged convert.

Virtually every stretch of water in Osaka, along with myriad city streets are lined with cherry blossom trees, and for just a few short days each year they deliver a spectacular blast of pink to welcome in summer across the city. There can be little doubt that the few days in which the cherry blossoms flower represent a special time in Japan. The visual beauty of the flowering cherry blossoms is, however, just one half of the sakura experience. For the Japanese, sakura season is all about ‘ohanami’, which though loosely translated as ‘flower watching’, has developed today to mean something closer to ‘eating and drinking to excess amongst the cherry blossoms’.

Although there are countless spots across Kansai to enjoy Sakura I limited my excursions to within Osaka. Alas, my life as a professional tourist is over and I have a pesky job now which restricts my opportunities for travel. There are plenty of places to enjoy sakura around the city though, nowhere more so than Sakuranomiya which, as the name suggests, is home to a particularly large stretch of sakura trees. It also plays host to the annual Osaka regatta which, though not exactly Henley, provides a nice distraction for the hordes of people enjoying ohanami on the banks of the river.

In the north of the city Bampaku-koen provides another great ohanami spot in the grounds of the expo 70 commemoration park. The park is surrounded with sakura and is overlooked by ‘The Tower of the Sun’; an enormous statue that formed part of the World Exhibition in 1970. Thanks to the size of the park and its abundant sakura it is the ideal location for ohanami, and the various parties taking place under the cherry blossoms are particularly impressive here. When the Japanese do picnics they do them properly! There are full size BBQs, tables and chairs and incredible food offerings, as well as vast quantities of sake and beer!

For now though sakura season is over for another year, I just hope the tradition of BBQs by the river continues for the rest of the summer!

Escape to the country

For those who have spent any length of time in a big city, a need for escape will be a familiar story. Having spent a little over two months living in one of the biggest cities in the world I found one such escape a couple of weeks ago in the form of a week in Shizouka assisting on an environmental ambassador exchange programme. In the process I got to tick two more things off my bucket list; I saw Mt Fuji AND I went on a Bullet Train!

The first obstacle of the week was to get to Shizouka though which is situated about two hours away from Osaka by Bullet train. Having perfected the art of buying cheap advanced tickets in England it’s come as a bit of a shock to me that train companies in Japan don’t really offer discounts, making train tickets here an expensive luxury. There’s more than one way to skin a cat though and for those who can’t afford the train there is an overnight bus service from Osaka to Shin-Fuji for half the price of the train. On the downside it takes a little over three times as long!

For the outward journey I took the latter option and despite the relative comfort of Japanese buses the nature of an overnight bus trip inevitably means arriving tired and hungry. While the nearby McDonald's (seemingly the only place open in Shin-Fuji at 5.30 in the morning) dealt with the hunger it took something a bit more spectacular to deal with the tiredness; Mt Fuji. This was the first time that I had seen the mountain outside of the pages of books and magazines and the image that greeted me was even more spectacular than I had imagined with the peak densely covered in snow and glowing in the crisp spring sunshine. Mt Fuji doesn't simply dominate the skyline, it owns it. 

Growing wasabi

The source of Japanese hay-fever!

Green Tea plantation

I was lucky enough to see a lot more of Fuji-san (as it's known to locals) over the week with the views visible from my first nights accommodation - the home belonging to a family friend of Eri's who organised much of the environmental ambassador programme - particularly special. The programme  itself catered for ten Japanese, and two girls from Hawaii, taking in the forest and the ocean together with the urban sprawl of Shizouka. Although I was pretty much redundant in my role as 'Cultural Assistant' (primarily due to the fact that 90% of the people on the trip didn't speak English) I did get to have an enjoyable week and I even learnt quite a lot.

Fuji-san

Did you know for example that 75% of Japan is covered in forest, which in an age of Co2 awareness is an astonishing fact. Unfortunately as I was to find out the vast majority of this forest was planted artificially following the extensive rebuilding programmes in Japan after WWII and although the fir trees that were planted do a pretty good job of removing Co2 in their first 60 years of life, beyond that they do little more than contribute to the high pollen levels prevalent in Japan that cause such suffering for those with hay-fever. Thanks to the abundant supply of cheap imported timber the Japanese timber industry is all but dead and alas there appears to be little prospect of the government reviving it, even as a means of Co2 removal.  

 

As you probably guessed from the opening paragraph of this blog my journey home from Shizouka was a considerable improvement on the outward journey and even though it cost an arm and a leg, going home on the bullet train was completely worth it. OK, so I suppose the bullet train is just another train, but that's hardly the point. I remember as a primary school child being utterly amazed by stories of the speeds that bullet trains carried passengers across Japan, indeed the images of Japan that I had as a child were filled with blurred passenger trains speeding past a snow capped Mt Fuji. In the space of just a few days in Shizouka I was finally able to bring these images to life.

[Day 70] Learning Japanese?

Yep that’s right, after 70 days in Japan I’m taking my first meaningful step towards learning Japanese. OK, so buying the book is the easy bit but I am determined, I WILL LEARN SOME HIRAGANA!  

In fairness, I’ve picked up far more Japanese than I expected to but there’s a limit to how far pointing at a menu will get me in the future, sooner or later one of my guesses is bound to result in something horrible turning up on my plate! 

Japanese is an easy language to learn though… right?