Takayama in the Spring – A One Shot Story

As I write this the first days of March are quickly giving way to the promise of another magnificent Spring in Japan. Every photographer should have late March-early April marked in their planner or digital calendar. Spring in Japan means the coming of cherry blossom or sakura season, which usually starts in southern regions of the country in early March and works its way north by mid-April.

But usually – and the emphasis is on usually – Tokyo’s sakura season hits its peak in late March or early April if it’s been a particularly cold winter. This year’s forecast predicts the first pink blossoms will show on March 24 and the peak will show on April 1.

The sakura forecasts are usually spot on, though last Spring, I planned a trip to Japan around the official forecast. It wasn’t to be. The blossoms opened a week late and I and ended up leaving on the day when they began to show.

I was much more fortunate some years before when I took my aunt to Japan. By then, she needed to get around in a wheel chair. I pushed her “across” Japan, from Tokyo in the East to Wajima in the West. But a few days into our trip we arrived in Takayama, a small city in central Honshu (the main island) that has a particularly stunning historic district. I’d never been there before, but it was high on my aunt’s list of places she wanted to visit again.

I’ve been blessed to have traveled to Japan many times over the past 30 years, and even worked in Tokyo as a foreign correspondent. But this trip with my aunt was a special travel experience – she and I went on our first trip to Japan together in 1968. I was in high school at the time. As it turned out, our trip to Tokyo and Takayama was her last trip to Japan.

I decided to shoot film to document our trip. It was a simple kit – a Nikon N65 (F65), a Nikkor 28-105mm F3.5-4D zoom, and a stock of Kodak Portra 400 UC, a then-current emulsion whose rich colors are now sadly but a memory. When we got back to Hawaii after two weeks traveling across Japan, I got the film processed and had the lab make 4×6 prints. I then bought the nicest traditional-style photo album I could find, ordered a packet of old-style photo corners, and put together a real photo album. This photo of Takayama was among the photographs in the album.

At my aunt’s funeral service two years later, many of her friends told me that when they got together, my aunt would always show them the photo album and share stories about our trip. It doesn’t get much better than that for a photographer.

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