It had been more than 10 years since we visited Japan during the sakura season. Back in 2002, digital photography was still in its infancy and I had one 2-megapixel point-and-shoot camera to use. Then, we covered only Ueno Park, the Sumida River and Hakone.

Having become an "advanced hobbyist" in digital photography, I took the hanami this year at the top of my bucket list.

We booked our airline tickets in early January 2013, made our hotel bookings shortly (and changed the locations a number of times without penalty) and purchased our Japan Railpass tickets before our departure from Singapore.

As the months passed before our departure date, we were alarmed when we read that the warm weather in Japan had come much earlier, forcing the cherry blossoms to appear a week earlier than our arrival date. We had no choice, however, except to hope for the best--that we would still see some of these flowers.

We landed at Haneda airport around midnight of Monday, April 2 and rested at an excellent airport hotel. We spent the whole of April 3 and 4 in Tokyo, shooting mainly in Ueno and Kawaguchiko. In the morning of April 5, we left for Osaka. For the next 5 days, we used Osaka as our temporary home base to make four trips to Kyoto and another day long trip to Hiroshima and Miyajima. We left Osaka for Tokyo on April 10, staying overnight at an airport hotel, and then left for Singapore in the morning of April 11.

In Kyoto we revisited some sites (from our autumn trip in 2004) like the Heian Jingu, Arashiyama, the Bamboo Forest, Togetsu Bridge, Tenryu-ji, Kiyomizu-dera, Ryoan-ji and visited some new ones like Lake Kawaguchiko, the Kyoto Imperial Palace Park, the Botanical Garden, Nijo Castle, and the Hirano Shrine. We completely missed out the Gion District where the maikos and geishas live and a few other famous places like Kinkaku-ji and Philosophers' Path.

Overall, inspite of catching only the tail end of the hanami, we were quite pleased with what we saw. I also had many opportunities to shoot local and foreign tourists dressed in traditional clothes, including a few wedding couples.

We know that this is not the last time we will visit Japan during hanami.

We hope this album will encourage you to follow our footsteps to visit Japan to chase the sakura.