Tokyo, Japan:

Tourists and residents packed Tokyo’s top cherry blossom resorts on Thursday to admire the blooms, which arrived later than usual in Japan’s capital this year due to cold weather.

Elegant dark branches filled with pink and white flowers (called sakura in Japanese) spill over the palace’s moat, where people gather to take photos or just admire the scenery.

“The cherry blossoms are very symbolic and make everything around you feel happy and beautiful,” Michitaka Saito, 68, told AFP.

“It makes me feel like I’m off to a good start in the new year,” said Saito, who visits Chidorigafuchi Park next to the moat in central Tokyo every year.

In Japan, the cherry blossom season traditionally accompanies the start of the new fiscal year, representing new beginnings but also the transience of life.

Eiko Hirose, 76, said admiring the cherry blossoms with her husband Sadao “means I’m healthy, he’s fine and we’re all having a good time.”

“We take it for granted that we’ll see it again next year, but who knows? Something could happen,” she said.

The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) announced on Thursday that the country’s most common and popular “Someiyoshino” cherry blossom trees are in full bloom, four days later than the city’s average bloom time.

While the agency blames cold weather for this year’s sluggish blooms, it also issued a warning: In the long term, climate change is making fragile petals appear faster.

Last year’s cherry blossoms began blooming on March 14, tying 2020 and 2021 as the earliest cherry blossoms on record, and bloomed on March 22.

“Since 1953, the average start date of cherry blossom blooming in Japan has advanced by about 1.2 days every decade,” the JMA said.

“Long-term increases in temperatures are believed to be a factor,” along with other causes such as the urban heat island effect, the agency said.

Japan’s tourism industry has been booming since pandemic-era border restrictions were lifted, with international crowds out Thursday to enjoy the scenery.

Kamilla Kielbowska, 35, from New York, plans to travel to Japan for the third time during her cherry blossom viewing period.

“We got here, I believe, on March 23rd. I was joking… ‘Well, we have to go straight from the airport to this park, I can’t miss the cherry blossoms.’”

But “it was super cold and no trees were blooming. I was a little sad but hoped to see them in bloom before I left.”

“It definitely lived up to expectations,” she said, calling the sight “wonderful” and “very magical.”

Katsuhiro Miyamoto, professor emeritus at Kansai University, estimates the economic impact of Japan’s cherry blossom season this year (from travel to party under the flowers) at 1.1 trillion yen ($7.3 billion), up from 616 billion yen in 2023 .

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