Tamamo Park, Spring 2024 (part one)

These days, I don’t post nearly enough, and yet I’m starting a multi-part post. What’s wrong with me?

I realized a couple of days ago that I haven’t posted a single Sakura picture here! I have on social media, but not all of you follow me there (you should, though).

So yeah, this year’s cherry blossom season has been a bit insane. It was planned to be around March 20-25th which is the earliest ever. Global warming is the culprit, but what people misunderstand about global warming is that it’s not just getting warmer, all weather patterns are getting messed up with all sorts of consequences (most of them terrible and at the existential threat level) including messing with the date of cherry blossoms.

February was way too warm, but March was way too cold, and the cherry blossoms blossomed… whenever they could. Some trees were in bloom very early, but most ended up being in bloom late. And by “late”, I mean “right on time”. Don’t forget that cherry blossoms are supposed to be in bloom around April 10th, not in March. It’s global warming that skewed our perception of the thing (the frog in boiling water metaphor.)

Anyway, this long introduction to tell you that we went to Tamamo Park two weeks ago for reasons totally unrelated to the cherry blossoms, but…

Well, first things first:

 

The tower above, located right next to the south-east entrance is the Higashi-No-Maru Ushitora Yagura, or simply the Ushitora Tower. It’s a pretty nice tower but it’s not as popular as the Tsukimi Yagura. If I remember correctly, it’s not the original and it was rebuilt at some point. It may be why it’s not as popular. I always forget its history. I really need to memorize it one of these days.

If I talked about cherry blossoms in length earlier, it’s because while the flowers were pretty much gone everywhere else we got a nice surprise to find a few trees still in bloom:

 

One interesting thing I never noticed before was there are actually different species of cherry blossoms in the park. That’s nice.

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure I’ve ever been to Tamamo Park during cherry blossom season before, or maybe a looong time ago.

 

 

There were even not one but two groups of people celebrating the flowers one last time this year.

And as it was quite late in the afternoon and they probably arrived quite early, they were all quite loud… Yes, celebrating the cherry blossoms usually involves certain quantities of alcohol.

 

But we were not there for the flowers (as I said we didn’t even know there were some flowers left).

We were there for this:

The freshly remade Sakura Gomon!

Well, “freshly”… It was completed two years ago, I believe, but for a bunch of random reasons, it took us as long to finally make it there. And what are two years when it took about 80 years to rebuild the gate?

Oh, I forgot to mention for those not too familiar with the Takamatsu lore: Tamamo Park is the name of the park that is on the grounds of Takamatsu Castle.

But the details are for another day (hopefully soon)…

 

To be continued…

 

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