Kyoto is a popular travel destination. At Kyūgetsu for instance, we host travellers from all over the world to our tea ceremony workshops. That is why in this part of the blog we share some of our local insights on Kyoto. We hope that this may help you to make your stay more engaging.

THE SIGNIFICANCES OF JAPAN’S CHERRY BLOSSOMS: PART THREE

Here, we shall encounter Japan’s cherry-blossom as not only unstable in what it has been seen as embodying. Throughout Japanese cultural history, it has simultaneously embodied instability – instability of authority, of sex as ‘necessarily’ procreative, and of gender.

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THE SIGNIFICANCES OF JAPAN’S CHERRY BLOSSOMS: PART ONE

Both in Japan and elsewhere, cherry-blossom is commonly assumed to be the country’s national flower. In fact, and although a cherry-floret figures on every hundred-yen coin, this matter has so far received no legal ruling. And this cannot be unrelated to the fact that, in Japan, cherry-blossom forms a locus of conflicting, or contradictory, significances.

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BEST PLACES TO SEE CHERRY BLOSSOMS IN KYOTO

This article offers a list of our suggestions for places to visit in Kyoto during cherry blossom viewing season. My personal suggestion is to aim for the end of the season when the cherry petals float through the air and elegantly dance their way to the ground. This is a phenomenon that is often alluded to in classical poetry, and that captures the Japanese preference to savour beauty not at its prime, but in the transitional periods.

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