April 07

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Alt Cherry

Posted by on April 7, 2014 in Just another day in Japan, Seasonal Goodness | Leave a comment

So, during cherry blossom season, people naturally flock to places with maximum pink fluffiness. But if you don’t have any real blooming cherry trees of epic proportions, how do you avoid being the location equivalent of Forever Alone? Behold the ingenuity of even the stodgiest of institutions…

If you're the mighty flagship Mitsukoshi department store, you light up the entire front of your building with pink spotlights.

If you’re the mighty flagship Mitsukoshi department store, you light up the entire front of your building with pink spotlights.

If you're Legoland, you change all the trees in your models to little square cherry trees.

If you’re Legoland, you change all the trees in your models to little square cherry trees.

If you're the Fuji Television building, you program all the windows on one side to play a lightshow of cherry trees and cherry blossoms.

If you’re the Fuji Television building, you program all the windows on one side to play a lightshow of cherry trees and cherry blossoms.

If you're Tokyo Tower, you turn from orange to pink for the duration of The Season.

If you’re Tokyo Tower, you light up pink for the duration of The Season.

And even if you're a behemoth Japanese bank, during cherry blossom season you throw a light show of rotating flowers onto your stately be-columned main branch.

And even if you’re a behemoth Japanese bank, you project a lightshow of pink flowers onto your stately be-columned main branch.

And people ask me why I love Japan. Go figure.

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And what should you read while chasing alternative cherry blossom sites? A novel set in Tokyo

“A genuinely gripping crime thriller which wrong-foots and perplexes the reader throughout, drawing us in emotionally . . . Highly recommended.” –Raven Crime Reads

For nine years, Tokyo Detective Kenji Nakamura thought his mother’s death was an accident. Then he gets a call, and his life begins to unravel. Because if it wasn’t an accident…what was it? Read more