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Japanese weather site reveals the secret to knowing when a sakura cherry blossom will fall

Oona McGee Apr 12, 2017
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This quick and easy technique for spotting a soon-to-fall blossom is surprising even the most ardent cherry blossom lovers in Japan.

Ever since sakura season officially began in Tokyo last month, people everywhere have been heading out to parks and famous sites to enjoy hanami picnics and soak in the beauty of the pale pink blossoms.

Sadly, the flowers will soon fall after their short blooming season, as they do every year, and now one of the insiders-in-the-know has revealed a way to predict when that will happen. Japanese weather forecasting site Weathernews recently revealed the technique to spotting a soon-to-fall blossom with this Tweet on their official Twitter account.

ここが赤くなったら桜の花が散るサイン！現在、咲いている桜の3〜4割が花散りサインを出していました。
↓桜の花色調査結果https://t.co/7dIcKSwSRp pic.twitter.com/d6aB69euXX

— ウェザーニュース (@wni_jp) April 5, 2017

According to Weathernews, if you look at the centre of flowers on the popular Yoshino variety of sakura trees carefully, the ones that are a while away from falling (pictured left in the image above) will have a greenish tint to them. The ones that are about to fall will take on a reddish hue in the centre (pictured above right).

We decided to scroll through our own collection of photos to see if this proved to be true. Sure enough, these flowers below, which were photographed at Tokyo’s famous sakura sightseeing spot, Chidorigafuchi, on 4 April, three days before the area was declared to be in full bloom, show no redness in the centre at all.

Image © RocketNews24

On the other hand, this sakura tree, pictured in a nearby area of Tokyo on 10 April, revealed green leaves, along with flowers in various stages of bloom, from unopened buds through to green-centred blossoms and, interestingly, an increasing number with visibly red centres.

Image © RocketNews24

Twitter users were surprised to hear about this flower-viewing technique used to predict the fall of the blossoms.

“Wow – I’ve never heard of this before.”
“Well, I certainly learnt something new today.”
“I can’t believe I didn’t know about this until now!”
“This is great information!”
“I’ll be looking at the blossoms differently from now on!”

To see how the blossoms were faring around the country, Weathernews gathered information from 4,396 people on 5 April, who provided the below results showing the number of red and green on blossoms seen in the following regions (below, top to bottom): Kyushu, Shikoku, Chugoku, Kinki, Tokai, Koshinetsu*,* Kanto.

According to the chart, there were a lot more green-hued blossoms in each region, meaning the sakura were still mostly blooming. Now, however, a week later, the blossoms are currently falling in Tokyo, creating great carpets of pink following recent days of windy, rainy weather. Let’s hope the blooms can hang on for a little while longer until the sunshine returns – then we can conduct our own investigation on the trees to see how much time we have left to enjoy this year’s hanami season.