Tokyo’s cherry blossom canopy

Cherry trees had exploded with blossoms in Tokyo’s Ueno Park, and so had the crowds celebrating this marker of spring, as Joseph Schwartz and his wife, Nancy, of San Luis Obispo, found out on a trip this month to visit their son, an English teacher. “It’s a very different kind of crowd,” Joseph said. “There was a serenity. . . . They go to walk among the trees. People were sitting underneath them.” He used a Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z5.