Everyone wants both at once—the blossom and the mountain—and Lake Kawaguchi is generous enough to give them. Along the northern shore runs an avenue of cherry trees, and beyond them, across the water, stands Fuji, still capped with snow in April. The lake offers a second mountain, inverted, on its surface, so that on a calm morning you are looking at two Fujis and two rows of cherries, one set hanging from the sky and the other floating beneath it. Spring is slow to arrive here. At eight hundred meters, the season comes shyly, and the peak falls after Tokyo's blossom has already gone, so the place keeps a kind of appointment with those willing to travel a little further and wait a little longer. When the wind drops, the water turns to glass: the pink of the cherries, the white of the peak, the blue of the sky, all assembling a second time below the shoreline. It is a tourist place. No one pretends otherwise. And yet in the first quiet hour of the morning, before the buses, the view belongs to no one—which may be the only honest way to own it at all.