The earliest spring in Japan arrives in a valley on the Izu Peninsula, nearly a month before the rest of the country. The Kawazu cherry is an early-blooming variety, its single blossoms a deeper pink than the familiar Somei-yoshino, and when it opens it stains the whole valley in color while much of Japan is still in winter.

The festival runs for roughly a month, from the beginning of February into early March, along some four kilometers of the Kawazu River. Eight hundred and fifty cherry trees line the banks, their branches reaching out over the water. Beneath them, the rapeseed flowers are in bloom too, so that the riverside holds two colors at once — the yellow of the nanohana and the pink of the sakura, the two earliest colors of the year set side by side.

After dark, sections near the Yakata Bridge are lit, and the night blossoms double themselves in the river's surface.

There is something particular about seeing cherry blossoms while it is still cold, while the rest of the country is weeks from its own bloom. It changes what the flowers mean. Here they are not the peak of spring but its announcement — the first evidence, in a still-wintry month, that the season is coming. People travel down to Izu simply to stand in that early warmth, under the earliest flowers in Japan, and be reassured that winter ends.