Time to drag out the portable karaoke machine and mournfully warble Sakura, Sakura as you knock back another can of Asahi beer. Time to head to the special sales in department stories, where you can look for lipstick to match the magnificent blossoms; women’s magazines throughout the month are devoted to such arcane arts.

Cocktail lounges come up with ever more extravagant drinks — as long as they’re pink, naturally — such as the strawberry liqueur and lemonade concoction known as a Pink Petal. Outrageously expensive afternoon teas in fancy hotel also become de rigueur.

Crazy, cute and strangely camp, cherry season in Japan is a Barbara Cartland fantasy of pink flowers and purple prose. Wherever you look a profusion of pink and white cherry blossoms trembles against a blue sky, flutters down like confetti, and blankets the ground like a carpet in a fairytale.

The Japanese, made maudlin on too much party sake, quote sad Japanese poems, particularly the famous line: "The Samurai of Japan is like the cherry, which blossoms and dies so suddenly and so beautifully."

There’s something about the cherry blossoms that brings out the ersatz poet and artist in everyone. It only takes a few stunning pink twigs artfully arranged to make it seem that you’re a lifelong expert in ikebana, the genteel art of Japanese flower arranging. Watercolourists experience their finest moment, feverishly painting great swatches of pink in every park.

Tripods sprout like an alien invasion as photographers try to get that one perfect shot of flowers reflected in a pond. Elderly ladies in dazzling kimonos trip along on wooden sandals, posing artfully in a clash of colours under the cherry trees.

Aim for Buddha's birthday

Welcome to the cherry blossom season, the most celebrated time on the Japanese calendar, when the whole nation explodes with cherry blossom fever and Japanese spirits soar.

Timing your visit to Japan to coincide with the cherry blossoms can be difficult if you’re on a tight schedule. The first blooms appear in Okinawa, Japan’s southern islands, in March and the last flowers don’t fade in Hokkaido in the far north until well into May. Depending on the weather, the cherry blossoms make their appearance any time from early to late April in central Japan.

On television the arrival of the blossoms is forecast breathlessly as the wave of flowers creeps up from the south until it hits central Japan like a pink-and-white blizzard. Buddha's Birthday, which falls on 8 April, is a reasonable date to aim for; many Buddhist temples host flower festivals at this time, and many temple grounds — Kofukuji Temple in Nara is one of the most renowned — are planted with cherry trees. Nor are cherries the only plants bursting into flower; camellia, iris, lotus and mustard flowers are abundant.

With the appearance of the earliest buds come special festivals, tea ceremonies, traditional music recitals and costumed processions in honour of the cherry flowers, all of which continue until the last few petals drop off the trees.

A famous festival at Odawara Castle features an open-air tea ceremony and a parade of children in festival attire, as well as night viewing of the blossoms by lantern light. In Yokohama's Japanese-style landscaped Sankei-en Gardens there are performances of the traditional koto harp as the park's two thousand cherry trees erupt in pink profusion.

Kyoto is the place to be

But when it comes to cherry culture, Kyoto is the place to be. The teahouse at its Heian Shrine hosts a cherry-viewing tea ceremony every day in April, while Kobu Kaburenjo Theatre showcases special dances in honour of the flowers, featuring geisha and classical Japanese music.

A final ceremony associated with the season is the Cherry Blossom Festival held at Daigo-ji Temple, an enormous complex in the middle of Kyoto founded in the ninth century. The festival commemorates a grand hanami party thrown here in 1598 by the Shogun Hideyoshi Toyotomi, and the highlight is a procession of people in gorgeous traditional costumes, followed by a sumptuous hanami celebration.

Hanami — or parties for viewing the cherry blossoms — needn't be formal; for many, culture is the last thing on their minds. True, even the Prime Minister of Japan hosts a hanami party (in the grounds of Shinjuku Gyo-en Garden in Tokyo, where there are thousands of trees, but thousands of spectators too) but most are informal family affairs.

Local families swarm into parks, laying down blue tarpaulins under the trees and unpacking family picnics. Soon everyone is tucking into little salads, pickled ginger, tempura and delicacies such as chicken balls with white sesame seeds.

The really disorganised settle for pizzas ordered from the delivery boys who wander through the crowds in public parks at cherry blossom time. The most culture you might get here is a free flow of sake and the reverberating sounds of portable karaoke machines, as kids run about throwing cherry petals over each other like confetti.

Where to throw a hanami

The best places for hanami are well-known local parks and castle grounds. The parks of Osaka Castle have over four thousand cherry trees and a carpet of fallen petals. (Somewhat less known, but just as magnificent, are the castle’s apricot trees, which blossom earlier in the season.)

Kema-sakuranomiya Park boasts four kilometres of riverbank lined by cherries, and other fine spots in Osaka in spring are Expo ’90 Commemorative Park and Sumiyoshi Park, although experts claim the best cherry trees of all are to be found around the Ministry of Finance building. Sendai and Nagoya castles, as well as the cities of Nara and Yoshino, are also celebrated for their profusion of cherry blossoms.

The cherry capital of Japan

Even Tokyo looks quite beautiful during the cherry season. Ueno-koen Park is the most famous and popular site for hanami. It has over a thousand trees and many are hung with lanterns at night. Other favoured spots include Yasukuni Shrine (where the blossoming of two particular trees determines when the Meteorological Agency declares the Tokyo season open), Koishikawa Koraku-en Garden near the Tokyo Dome, and Chidorigafuchi Park, where the trees are particularly impressive illuminated at night.

Still, Kyoto is undoubtedly the cherry capital of Japan. Not only does it provide the best flower displays in the whole country, but it’s also a worthy destination in itself at any time of year.

Japan’s capital from 794 to 1868, Kyoto is home to several dozen gardens and as many museums, three palaces, and some two thousand temples and shrines, many dotted with flowering cherries. A thirty-minute walk along Biwako Canal offers one of the best displays. The route, which follows the water and is closed to traffic, is known as the Philosopher’s Path.

The canal is lined on both sides with cherry trees and the walk is truly spectacular — as everyone in Kyoto knows. Try and make it here early in the morning or in the evening to avoid the crowds of strollers, otherwise it will be hard to find the peace for any philosophising.

Another famous place in Kyoto for viewing the pink flowers is Maruyama Park, and several of its trees are illuminated at night. Geisha in colourful kimonos are often seen wandering the park and the old Gion area of town in the early evening.

In Kyoto you'll also notice that there are, in fact, many different varieties of cherry tree, such as the stunning yamazakura or mountain cherry, with its very pale pink petals, or the startling weeping cherry with its long trailing branches.

Knowledgeable Japanese get into seasonal discussions on whether the yaezakura is one of the best varieties; true, it has magnificent heavy, frilly flowers, but since the leaves bud at the same time as the flowers do they truly stand out? And what about the shidarezakura, the oshimazakura, the satozakura…

Nature packs up her paint-box

The grounds of the Mint Bureau in Osaka alone, incidentally, have a hundred types of cherry blossom, including some rarities such as the otemari and kodemari that are rarely seen elsewhere. In all, there are a thousand varieties in Japan. There’s a whole art and history to each tree, and every channel on Japanese television seems to devote hours to lovingly detailing every one, with many close-up shots of the blossoms.

Sadly, the cherry's moment of beauty is surprisingly short. The trees bloom for not much longer than a week and are seen in their full glory for only a couple of days. No wonder the hanami is both a time of intense celebration but also slight melancholia: the Japanese have realised that there’s nostalgia to all beauty and a transience to the best moments of life.

The parks fall silent, the cherry lipstick is put away for another year, TV returns to its normal programming: the silly season is over. Within a week the cherry blossoms have faded. Nature packs up her paint box and the pink retreats like a mirage, leaving only unforgettable impressions.

For more info…
• Visit http://gojapan.com to plan your blossom visit.
• Read more on the blossoms on http://en.wikipedia.org.