Cherry Blossom Planner
Most sakura pages tell you when Tokyo blooms. The useful question is the other way round: you already have dates — which cities will be in blossom while you're there? Enter your trip below and every city gets an honest verdict, including the ones you'd have to be lucky to catch.
How to read the verdicts
- Peak — your dates cover the city's average full-bloom day. This is the postcard: whole trees open, petals still on the branch.
- In bloom — you overlap the flowering window but not the peak day. Still genuinely worth going; early bloom and the falling-petal days are beautiful in different ways.
- Too early / too late — the gap in days. Anything inside about five days is a coin flip in a real year, and the tool says so.
The flowering window runs from kaika (first bloom, the sample tree opening) to about five days past mankai (full bloom, roughly 80% open). That's usually 10–13 days per city, and the wave moves south to north over six weeks — which is the whole trick: if your dates miss Kyoto, they may well hit Kanazawa or Sendai.
Blossom trips need tighter planning than normal trips
Sakura season is the one time Japan genuinely sells out. The printable Japan Travel Planner has the booking timeline that says what to lock in and when — flights, hotels, and the reservations that vanish first — plus daily pages with a backup-plan row for the days the trees aren't cooperating.
Where the numbers come from
The Japan Meteorological Agency keeps designated sample trees in each city and records the day they open and the day they reach full bloom. The dates here are the published 1991–2020 normals — the 30-year averages for those same trees. They describe the city's typical timing, not any particular year, and not any particular park: a sheltered temple garden can run days ahead of a windy riverbank in the same city.
Two things the averages hide. Sapporo's late date is partly species — its observed tree is often Ezo-yamazakura, which flowers later than the Somei-yoshino used almost everywhere else. And the recent trend is earlier: several of the last ten years opened ahead of these normals in the big Honshu cities.
Once you have a shortlist of dates, the itinerary builder turns them into a route, and the cost calculator prices it — set the season to Peak, because blossom season really is the expensive one.
Trip snapshot, 7-day route skeleton, and a before-you-fly checklist — sent to your email, free. Get it free