Every Japan photography tour workshop itinerary has sunshine and rainbows written into it, but vital elements that aren’t written down anywhere for a successful itinerary are planning and experience, sadly about 99% of itineraries are written in stone, simply the tour leader can make zero changes to the itinerary once you book your trip.  As your Japan photo tour workshop leader, my way of running itineraries is the complete opposite.   As a true photography expedition pro leader, I can change itineraries on the fly, and I make changes on every workshop I run, to give my clients the best photo opportunities.  Plus I never run photo workshops in a region where I do not know the lay of the land like the back of my hand, and where I have a back-up plan plus a back-up for the back-up in case of foul weather or if any other situation arises.  This is never clearer than when I hear backroom horror stories from colleagues, friends, and clients about cherry blossom photo tours hosted by non-local Japan tour guides that have almost zero photography experience besides using a smartphone, who think midday is the best time for photography. WoW!  Then we have the run of the mill tour companies that advertise stock photography in their pamphlets in print and online.  I’m approached by them regularly to supply them with cherry blossom photos.  I used to sell the odd photo, but I stopped.  For example, my photos of Mt. Fuji and the Chureito Pagoda during the perfect cherry blossoms bloom were used for billboards, brochure advertisements, and online around the world.  The money wasn’t bad, but now at peak cherry blossom viewing season, everyone has to wait in a queue to get the shot, so I stopped giving away locations. I learned my lesson, and I don’t have a desire to be part of creating tourist pollution any longer.  Now I keep those special photogenic locations in my pocket, for clients.  My colleagues in Japan and abroad have started doing the same, tourist pollution is getting out of hand.  And these are but a few reasons I run cross country photo workshops, to get far away off the beaten path into authentic Japan. 

Beyond horrible photography habits, the run of the mill photo agencies create their itineraries based on a rough estimate of ‘inside’ information from their own tourist brochures printed a year or two ago.  Cherry Blossom viewing forecasts are released by the Japan meteorological agency around December or January, and this is the same time I make my final decisions regarding my annual cherry blossom photo workshops, as I go out and check the cherry blossom budding on the trees, and I don’t use a magic 8-ball or Ouija board to make my final route.  I use my over 25 years experience, and the routes I know will 100% guarantee clients the opportunity to experience the perfect cherry blossoms almost every day on my 12-day cross country cherry blossom photo tour adventure.  My annual cherry blossom photo tour and my autumn leaves photo tour take us from the lowlands to the foothills to the highlands.   The key to my successful photo workshops and me guaranteeing the perfect blossoms is we traverse through various elevations, and though several ecological lines, such as the Blakiston’s and the Watase line, which are one factor that dictate seasons, the other is the amount of sunlight a region receives, along with rainfall, and daily temperature. So we are a win-win as these factors let the the flora and fauna know the season has changed and colors bloom, it’s as simple as that.  But actually it’s not, I have to add in seasonal abnormalities, simply I cannot 100% trust average weather predictions, and to be honest I never did, what I do trust is inside info from local friends, and weather charts where I can roughly know the weather 24 to 48hrs out, and that usually gives me enough time to pick our daily route.  And if our lodgings are in the highlands I can easy adjust our itinerary to get to the lowlands and vice-versa.  But if I am in the Mt. Fuji region, and we are going for a morning golden at one of the Fuji five lakes, I will not make my final decision on which lake, until just before we depart from our lodgings, and even then I am constantly checking weather charts and may make a change while driving.  Mt. Fuji is famous for fog banks rolling in, one lake could be totally overcast, while another lake is perfectly clear.  I have been leading Mt. Fuji cheery blossom photo tours as well as Autumn leaves photo tours and winter tours for over 25 years, and I know the regions topography and weather patterns well.

If I did what the run of the mill tour companies did, I would have been out of business 10 years ago. These agencies run cherry blossom tours for up to seven weeks using the same locations, but only participants for one of those weeks will actually be lucky enough to see cherry blossoms in full bloom.  WoW!  I do not want any part of that world!  These agencies schedule everything by dates rather than building any flexibility into their cherry blossom workshop itineraries and only adding one perhaps two locations for the entire workshop!  Anyone with any experience in leading photography workshops knows that cherry blossoms don’t suddenly burst into full bloom at the moment of your arrival.  Mother Nature has her own timing and probably will not coincide with your timing.  The entire country’s sakura reaches full bloom at different times, and many other factors contribute to when the sakura is at its peak for being spotted and photographed.

This is precisely the reason why my cherry blossom photography workshop tours are cross-country adventures.  If the sakura is not in bloom at our first location, then I have a second, third, fourth, fifth, and countless other spots in mind, so participants who join my annual cross country cherry blossom photography tour workshop know they are going to view and photograph sakura in full bloom.  When leading a cherry blossom expedition, you’ve got to be diligent in your pursuit of the perfect bloom.  My photo tour itineraries are born from experience.  Before I ran cross country cherry blossom expeditions, I had a couple of unnerving experiences with cherry blossoms not opening due to unseasonably cold weather, or unseasonably warm weather and the cherry blossoms had already fallen from the trees.  My assistant and I, on a couple of past occasions, had to make itinerary changes on the fly while with participants so they could experience cherry blossoms in full bloom.  The modified itinerary meant canceling hotel reservations, making new reservations, calling friends and colleagues to find where the cherry blossoms were in full bloom, and it took considerable effort and cost.  I felt I had no other choice, as the cherry blossoms were the reason why my clients booked their Japan Cherry Blossom Photo Tour workshop.  Through years of experience leading tours and scouting locations in Japan, I have begun to understand how to integrate the fickle sakura into my photo tours, spanning from Tokyo, Osaka, to the Sea of Japan and north to Morioka,  Aomori and Hokkaido.  As my experience grows, so have my cherry blossom photo workshop tour offerings, in 2025 or 2026, I will be adding a Tohoku focused Japan cherry blossom photo workshop tour adventure, starting about a week or two after my regular cherry blossom photo tour.