JUST IN! So last Friday, we received an unexpectedly good news. Our entry for Savvy Tokyo’s Sakura Reel Contest won one of the Top 3 Grand Prize in their annual competition. Savvy Tokyo is a leading online lifestyle platform for women in and around Tokyo. This year, they embarked on a first-ever Instagram reels-oriented contest with the theme, “How You Hanami”. Here’s our winning entry:
We bumped into their contest ad on Instagram a week before the peak sakura bloom around Honshu. Good thing, this year’s blooming season was delayed by about a week. That gave us enough time and good weather to do our annual hanami (flower viewing) in one of Toyama’s foremost spring sight-seeing spots– the Spring Quartet.
The Spring Quartet is an annual spring festival featuring Toyama’s spring flowers and natural sceneries collectively known as the Spring Quartet: Cherry Blossoms, Tulips, Rapeseed/Canola flowers and the snow-capped Hida Mountains. Thousands of tourists from within and outside the prefecture flock to the town of Asahi, about an hour by train north of Toyama City. For its unique and sheer seasonal beauty, it’s one of our most favorite sakura spots in the country.
So on a warm Sunday afternoon, we drove to Asahi-machi, then transferred to a shuttle bus to the flower fields. Weekends and mid-afternoons are expectedly busy, so we have to be patient to get good snaps/footage of the flowers and the mountains amidst the sea of people. A whole afternoon should be enough for a leisure visit, but we thought staying longer is a must when possible. As always, this year did not disappoint as the flowers bloomed perfectly and the weather and the sky conspired in our favor this time.
As soon as we got to our place, we processed the videos and turned it into a memorable spring reel reflecting the theme’s new beginnings and channel our desire to share Japan’s natural beauty.
As to the prize, we got a JTB travel voucher, which is timely as we are planning our summer and autumn travels.
Arigatou gozaimasu to the savvy people at Savvy Tokyo!
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