Thank you very much for participating in the Ueno Park Tour held on April 3rd!! We welcomed 17 Guests including three children from USA, England, India, Argentina, Germany and Brazil.
Cherry blossoms, which are the most attractive feature of Ueno Park of this season, has been approaching full bloom by warm weather of the past few days. The timing of the tour was good for us.
The weather was so called “Hana-gumori” or Cherry blossom cloudy at the beginning of the tour, but started to rain toward the end of tour despite our wish. The rain brought us a little inconvenience, but we really hope all of you had enjoyed the tour with us on the day.
As promised, group photos and snapshots of the Tour are posted below. We hope you will be able to remember the tour with these photos!!
Group A
Group B
Group C
Some may have heard the following story by Yoshi during our tour, but please let me mention a little about the mysterious story of cherry blossoms.
Around 1,000 of Cherry blossoms trees with more than 50 species are planted in Ueno Park. Among these, 80% belongs to a single species called “Somei Yoshino”. This cherry blossom was born artificially in late Edo period, more than 200 years ago, and spread throughout the country.
“Somei Yoshino” cherry blossoms is much more impressive compared to others because no matter how warmer or colder the year is, all bloom at the same time and all fall as well. This is because “Somei Yoshino” can only be multiply number of trees not by mating, but by grafting, that is, all of them are clones with exactly the same genes.
Therefore, many botanists have tried to find the original tree of “Somei Yoshino” using genetic analysis techniques and have recently concluded that one of the trees in Ueno Park, No.133 is the closest one to the original. As our tour course passes under the exact tree, it always brought you a good fortune, I believe.
By the way, when we Japanese live in overseas for a long time, we miss cherry blossoms very much. Reason maybe it coincides with graduation in March and enrollment in April in Japan. Cherry blossoms always come to mind in sweet memories of spring. It can be said, we cannot imagine whole life without cherry blossom. Please enjoy “Sakura” season as much as possible during your stay in Japan.
We TFWT guides would like to make your stay more fruitful by our tours. Please visit our website to find your best fit tour of TFWT during your next stay in Tokyo.
Lastly, we would appreciate it if you could give us your feedback in TripAdvisor or other SNS sites. We would like to strive for continuous improvement of our tours based on your kind feedback.
(Posted by Masao)