Alt Cherry

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

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.

Jonelle Patrick is the author of the Only In Tokyo mystery series, published by Penguin/Intermix.