With the pandemic firmly behind it, Japan is uniformly rated as one of 2024’s most desired destinations, and one of the most tantalizing features of a visit is seeing sakura – cherry blossoms – which paint the landscape in cities and countryside a magnificent pale pink from March through May.

The Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) maintains helpful website that each year forecasts the dates and location of cherry blossom season. And because Japan stretches a thousand miles from south to north, sakura bloom from mid-March through mid-May.

This spring, the cherry blossoms are expected to bloom first in the country’s southernmost island, Kyushu, on or around March 19. They are expected to blossom in Tokyo on March 20, and in Hiroshima on March 21. About a week later, they will open in Kyoto. As spring progresses, cherry blossoms will bloom in Tohoku prefecture in northern Honshu in early April. The season will make its gorgeous way northward, with blossoms appearing in Hokkaido island’s Sapporo in the last days of April, and on May 12 in Hokkaido’s Kushiro.

North Americans have been obsessed with Japanese blossoms for more than a century, ever since Japan gifted the US 3,000 cherry trees to be planted along the shores of the Potomac, where every year, thousands descend on Washington, DC to see the glory of the trees that bloom for just two weeks.

But on a visit to Japan, visitors have two months to enjoy nature’s splendour. For more information on this year’s cherry blossom forecast, click HERE.