Steve McCarty 🇯🇵<p>Photo 1: Red and white plum blossoms in the huge Imperial Palace park in north-central Kyōto City.</p><p>2. A gate to the inner precincts of the Kyōto Imperial Palace where the Emperors used to live for around a thousand years.</p><p>3. One of the Shintō shrines in the palace grounds, with bamboo, camellias, and white plum blossoms. The Imperial family is an integral part of the indigenous Shintō religion, with the Emperor a kind of deity identified with the nation and its lifestyle rhythms traditionally, such as through rituals for a bountiful rice harvest.</p><p>4. Close-up of pink plum blossoms. In the transition from winter to spring, the weather is often rainy, cloudy, or hazy, and the darker varieties of plum blossoms do not stay fresh for long after flowering, so it is difficult to get a clear photo like this, especially with a mobile phone. I do edit the frame to get closer and larger.</p><p><a href="https://hcommons.social/tags/Japan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Japan</span></a> <a href="https://hcommons.social/tags/Kyoto" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Kyoto</span></a> <a href="https://hcommons.social/tags/palace" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>palace</span></a> <a href="https://hcommons.social/tags/Japanese" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Japanese</span></a> <a href="https://hcommons.social/tags/religion" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>religion</span></a> <a href="https://hcommons.social/tags/Shinto" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Shinto</span></a> <a href="https://hcommons.social/tags/travel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>travel</span></a> <a href="https://hcommons.social/tags/sightseeing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>sightseeing</span></a> <a href="https://hcommons.social/tags/hiking" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>hiking</span></a> <a href="https://hcommons.social/tags/nature" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>nature</span></a> <a href="https://hcommons.social/tags/photography" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>photography</span></a> <a href="https://hcommons.social/tags/photos" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>photos</span></a></p>